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This paper analyses the working practices of several feminist creative and cultural enterprises in London (which I term 'feminist CCIs'). In particular, it shows how pandemic precarity has driven feminist CCIs towards more entrepreneurial, self-promotional, and self-branding practices in order to sustain their work. Drawing on both digital ethnographic material and interviews with 12 workers in feminist CCIs conducted online between 2020 and 2022, the article provides insights into the landscape and contemporary realities of arts and cultural funding within these fields. It considers how decades of austerity measures and cuts have forced some feminist CCIs to operate independently outside of the UK public sector funding models. Survival tactics include adopting corporate funding models, subscription and membership schemes, platformisation and digitalisation. Focusing on funding, money and subjectivity, it unpacks the contradictions these imperatives bring to feminist politics: tensions about which some feminist CCI workers themselves are aware of and critical of. In the process, this paper considers how activism, feminism, entrepreneurialism, and precarity are fused together and negotiated in this form of 'freelance feminism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a conspicuous growth in the height and extent of luxury urban development in the 21st century. This has been accompanied by important critical analyses exploring how this upward construction has created new vertical social divides and landscapes of power. This article argues, however, that there are spatial and methodological limitations to the way luxury urban skies have tended to be framed and pursued. Through a focus on the decisions taken in producing the 2017 meditative film Vertical Horizons by Tom Wolseley, the paper offers an expanded agenda for engagements with elite vertical development. This film juxtaposes views of London and Western Europe's tallest skyscraper, the Shard, from different vantage points, with contrasting narratives about the building. Vertical Horizons seeks to use its focus on the Shard to open up more imaginative experiments with high-rise landscapes, and better recognition of the potential complicities in responses to the gleaming façades of contemporary urbanisation. The paper posits that more multi-sited, creative and reflective approaches, such as those pursued in Vertical Horizons, are required in efforts at levelling with the social and symbolic power of urban vertical luxification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how residential high-rise developments in London deteriorate the living conditions for existing residents and set a legal precedent for distributing harm unevenly across the population. The paper unpacks the contentious decision-making process in one of several local planning applications in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets that ended in a spur of high-profile public planning inquiries between 2017 and 2019. The Enterprise House inquiry shows how, among other things, a loss of daylight, sunlight and outlook, and an increased sense of enclosure, affect already marginalised residents in neighbouring buildings disproportionately, elevating light to a legal category for assessing harm and addressing social injustice in the vertical city. The paper adopts a forensic approach to interrogate four instances during the public inquiry, in which numerical evidence of material harm resulting from a loss in daylight, sunlight and outlook was made to appear and disappear. The translation of scientific evidence into legal evidence is performed through the act of claiming 'truthful' representations of 'real life experiences' of light in digital visualisations. By revealing how material harm resulting from vertical development is normalised and thus naturalised in the planning inquiry, the paper demonstrates how 'light' violence is exercised in vertical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the cultural significance of replacement bus services during three London Tube strikes in 2018. Strikes cause delays to journeys, and are often anticipated, framed, and reported as nuisances. Empirically informed by participant observation, the paper discusses how social interaction among passengers, triggered by a heritage bus journey, could redefine a disrupted commuter trip as a collective heritage journey, via its unusual materialities and sensations. Passengers notice the different material configuration of heritage buses, leading to the creation of an affective atmosphere, which then spreads among passengers as if by affective contagion. The resulting initiation of a temporary guide–audience relationship in this unexpected space enabled different forms of intercultural dialogue and knowledge exchange, which transformed an ordinary everyday experience into something extraordinary, in which heightened awareness of the bus environment and an increase in social interaction somewhat resembled a guided tour of the city combined with commuter transport. While the economic injustices at the heart of Tube strikes should not be neglected, I propose that the use of heritage buses as replacement transport contributes to the formation of affective atmosphere via the increase in social interactions triggered by their material configuration, and consequently to the sharing of everyday history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 40 years ago, the first training group of the Institute of Group Analysis Heidelberg started their training with Ilse Seglow in London. However, the beginning of the training was overshadowed by a conflict, since the group did not know that the training should take place entirely in London. This paper tries to explore this conflict in the light of unconscious dynamics underlying the foundation of the institute. Ilse Seglow, a German exiled Jew and ex-communist, was the 'spiritus rector' of the institute and the facilitator of the first training group. Group processes are described, showing how the group as well as Ilse dealt with this situation, commemorating one of the charismatic, controversial and politically inspired, but mostly forgotten personalities of the group analytic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This analysis is about practical living bioethics and how law, ethics and sociology understand and respect children's consent to, or refusal of, elective heart surgery. Analysis of underlying theories and influences will contrast legalistic bioethics with living bioethics. In-depth philosophical analysis compares social science traditions of positivism, interpretivism, critical theory and functionalism and applies them to bioethics and childhood, to examine how living bioethics may be encouraged or discouraged. Illustrative examples are drawn from research interviews and observations in two London paediatric cardiac units. This paper is one of a series on how the multidisciplinary cardiac team members all contribute to the complex mosaic of care when preparing and supporting families' informed consent to surgery. Results: The living bioethics of justice, care and respect for children and their consent depends on theories and practices, contexts and relationships. These can all be undermined by unseen influences: the history of adult-centric ethics; developmental psychology theories; legal and financial pressures that require consent to be defined as an adult contract; management systems and daily routines in healthcare that can intimidate families and staff; social inequalities. Mainstream theories in the clinical ethics literature markedly differ from the living bioethics in clinical practices. Conclusion: We aim to contribute to raising standards of respectful paediatric bioethics and to showing the relevance of virtue and feminist ethics, childhood studies and children's rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion paper considers how seldom recognised theories influence clinical ethics committees. A companion paper examined four major theories in social science: positivism, interpretivism, critical theory and functionalism, which can encourage legalistic ethics theories or practical living bioethics, which aims for theory–practice congruence. This paper develops the legalistic or living bioethics themes by relating the four theories to clinical ethics committee members' reported aims and practices and approaches towards efficiency, power, intimidation, justice, equality and children's interests and rights. Different approaches to framing ethical questions are also considered. Being aware of the four theories' influence can help when seeking to understand and possibly change clinical ethics committee routines. The paper is not a research report but is informed by a recent study in two London paediatric cardiac units. Forty-five practitioners and related experts were interviewed, including eight members of ethics committees, about the work of informing, preparing and supporting families during the extended process of consent to children's elective heart surgery. The mosaic of multidisciplinary teamwork is reported in a series of papers about each profession, including this one on bioethics and law and clinical ethics committees' influence on clinical practice. The qualitative social research was funded by the British Heart Foundation, in order that more may be known about the perioperative views and needs of all concerned. Questions included how disputes can be avoided, how high ethical standards and respectful cooperation between staff and families can be encouraged, and how minors' consent or refusal may be respected, with the support of clinical ethics committees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on urban water infrastructures has seldom reached across the Global North-South divide owing to their apparent developmental incommensurability. Yet, the universalising tendencies of urban theory has meant that cities of the Global South are often deemed to have 'fragmented' infrastructures or incomplete circulations in implicit comparison to the northern infrastructural ideal. So, in order to truly 'world' the study of infrastructures and cities, it is important to go beyond these dominant paradigms and attend to how infrastructures actually work and what socio-technical implications they have in cities of the Global South and North. Building on these provocations, this paper places the water infrastructures of two 'most different cities'– Chennai, India and London, UK – alongside each other in 'experimental comparison', where the aim is not to arrive at paradigmatic urban theory but to highlight heterogeneity and excavate themes for further critical thinking on each case. This paper will delineate the dialogic and reflexive method of research and analysis adopted, tracing how it led to the practice of 'minor theory', which focuses on processes that do not find expression in dominant universalising analyses. Here, minor theory is mobilised towards challenging dominant or major constructs about each city and across cities, while amplifying urban multiplicities and enabling a deeper engagement with infrastructure making in the Global South and North, thus expanding urban studies' toolbox of critical thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents 'shared projects' and the 'symbiotic' relations they engender to capture accounts of state and society actors collaborating to turn individual constraints into collective opportunities for pursuing urban experiments which are institutionally-shaped but also institution-shaping. The concepts are developed through a sequential and recursive comparison – that is, a 'comparative conversation'– between a case of urban village upgrading in Shenzhen and Community Land Trust Development in London. The paper uses a pragmatist approach to capitalist transformation as a starting point for comparison between these supposedly 'incomparable' cases. I build both heterogeneous and generalisable accounts of the pathways and progressive potential of collaborations on shared projects by recursively composing analytical proximities across the cases and their contexts of state entrepreneurialism and austerity localism. Theoretically, this paper contributes to scholarship which focuses on the contingency and complexity inherent in urban transformation. State and society actors are seen as potential collaborators working pragmatically to solve systemic problems without necessarily targeting wholesale systemic change. Methodologically, it contributes to ongoing attempts to demonstrate the positive relationship between experimental comparisons and conceptual innovation through staging a 'comparative conversation'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history of the French press that was based in London during the Second World War, focusing on its contribution to political debates of and about French exile, its relationship to the British government and its role in shaping inter-Allied relations. The article begins by outlining the development of British policy towards the foreign press based in London before examining three publications: the left-leaning daily France, the Gaullist weekly La Marseillaise and the monthly cultural and political periodical La France libre. By drawing on the contents of these papers alongside a variety of French, British and American archival material, the article shows that while the French press in London had a limited readership, it exercised significant influence among political elites either side of the Atlantic during the war and helped shape the terms of French debates over the meaning of Gaullism well into the post-Second World War period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary, I examine the role of institutional investors in affordable housing production in England, reflecting and expanding on the papers in this special issue on the governance of residential investment. Drawing on my research on the politics of municipal debt and local authority housebuilding in London, I provide a snapshot of the key regulatory changes that have enabled insurance companies, pension funds, and other institutional investors to extract profits from social and affordable housing. I also explore the politics and relations of power that underpin this transformed environment through a discussion of investors' lobbying activities, and through an analysis of 'income strip deals', long-term leasing agreements between investors and local authorities that have gained popularity in recent years. In line with the authors in this issue, I argue that to grasp the recent wave of institutional investment in public housing, we need to pay attention to the narrative framings through which the promise of patient capital is enacted and legitimised, and to the range of regulatory actions mobilised to support and maintain the flow of value to rentiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the work of large groups in the training of group psychotherapists and is organized in two parts for sequential publication. We review the literature on the history and evolution of large groups in general, concentrating on those devoted to the large group in training, starting from the very first, Skynner's, from which we take our title. The core of the paper explores the learning experience provided by the Large Training Group (LTG) serving students on the Diploma and Qualifying Courses at the Institute of Group Analysis, London (IGA). We describe the LTG from the standpoint of its staff and participating students over a period of some eight years; discuss the role of the staff sub-group in the evolution and co-creation of a particular discourse and we give special attention to the question of leadership and the role of the convener. Each of its two parts contains a vignette that is discussed in the light of the literature reviewed; and each contains a summarizing table, the first devoted to our principles of practice and the second to the primary purposes of the LTG and our staffing responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is an autobiographical account of the critical role that race and racism came to play in the writing of the book Taking the Group Seriously (1998) over 20 years ago. I will start out by telling you something about my history and early life experiences which eventually took me to the IGA in London to train as a group analyst. I will describe how and why I started to become increasingly preoccupied with the themes of race and racism which eventually led me to doing a PhD on the subject. As I delved deeper into the study I was faced with a number of theoretical and experiential difficulties. The engagement with these difficulties led to the critique of the world view that prevailed (and I would say, continues to prevail) in mainstream psychoanalysis and group analysis. I will use some of my experiences at the IGA from that time to make links with dynamics within the institution today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the politicised history of Public Conveniences in England since the 19th century, this paper traces the socio-political motives for their provision and for their gradual withdrawal in recent decades. It discusses the effects these developments have had on public mobility, and the socio-political complexity these infrastructures pose to city-making agendas. In particular, the essay highlights the notions of stigma associated with these spaces in relation to gender, body-politics and control, which led to a lack of political interest in their provision and a pattern of closures that began in the Thatcher era and has continued through later times of economic austerity. To unfold these arguments, the essay examines a series of initiatives put forward to reclaim for public use a derelict toilet in the centre of London: from the concept of an interactive site-specific intervention to raise awareness of its closure, to a campaign for its listing as an Asset of Community Value, to contest its privatisation. This case study is used to address the spatial stigma that public toilets carry as a contested locus of public sanitation and, furthermore, to highlight important questions surrounding their provision in the context of contemporary citizen-driven urban agendas. To articulate this argument, the case study exemplifies how critical spatial practices can operate as a form of pedagogical urban praxis for awareness-raising and citizen engagement, advancing a Lefebvrian 'right to the city' against hegemonic neoliberal agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Flash houses', a distinctive type of public house associated with criminal activity, are a shadowy and little-studied aspect of early 19th-century London. This article situates flash houses within a wide perspective, arguing that the discourses on flash houses were part of concerns about the threat of the urban environment to the moral character of its inhabitants. The article draws on an original synthesis of a range of sources that refer to flash houses, including contemporary literature, newspapers, court documents, and government papers. It demonstrates that flash houses were part of both popular intrigue about the perceived 'criminal underworld' and official concerns about the collusion between police officers and suspected offenders, since police officers allegedly frequented flash houses to gather criminal information. A detailed examination of this term reveals anxieties about the state of the metropolis, poverty, and criminality that were central to the early 19th-century consciousness. However, the discussion of flash houses in this context also demonstrates a powerful connection in contemporary minds between the physical spaces of the city and the risks that they posed to inhabitants' morals. While associations between the physical environment and morality have been drawn throughout history, flash houses represent a paradigmatic moment in this dialogue. This is because different moral concerns coalesced around the discourse on flash houses: anxieties about the criminal underworld, the potential for moral degradation of young people who frequented these spaces, and the corruption of police officers through contact with known or suspected offenders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]