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Food and digital culture are mutually implicated in contemporary processes of knowledge production and power contestation around the world. Our introduction and the papers in this special issue of the European Journal of Cultural Studies seek to draw out the distinctions, parallels and overlaps across food and the digital to offer critical insights into digital food culture's capacities, paradoxes and impacts on everyday life. We ask a series of questions fundamentally focused on issues of power that signal a critical concern for the (re)production and circulation of inequality within the food and digital nexus. For us and the authors here, Cultural Studies is particularly fertile ground from which to analyse digital food culture precisely because of the discipline's commitment to critiquing power and inequality and its subsequent capacity to illuminate everyday digital food politics and their social, cultural and ethical impacts. This article presents and highlights key questions—and introduces related concepts and theoretical debates—that drive this research agenda. In addition, we address the ways the issue's papers connect to digital food culture and power after COVID-19. We conclude with a summary of the articles in the issue and their contributions to digital food culture research and cultural studies more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article engages with biometric data gathering technologies as part of migration infrastructures for the monitoring and control of migration. It explores power and agency by paying attention to the complexity of readings, interpretations, and storytelling of illegalised migrants in the Moria and Kara Tepe camps, in the Island of Lesvos in Greece, as they received their bureaucratic legal papers and discussed developments in their 'cases'. Borrowing from feminist and feminist security studies scholarship, the article argues for an understanding of data gathering and sharing infrastructures as material. It suggests that the datafication of migrants' bodies constitutes a manifestation of power that 'enacts' the migrant body as a subject of power but also produces counter self-subjectifications. The article also suggests an understanding of subject agency as the 'capacity to act' within contexts of power. Such a position on the agency of illegalised migrants allows us to examine the emergence of solidarities and alliances and to understand and contextualise not only actions that seem to be questioning and rejecting power, but also those that accept it and internalise it as a strategy of survival and of bettering one's life chances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine the neoliberal transformation of civil society through Mitchel Foucault's insights concerning knowledge, power, and governmentality. The objective of this paper is to trace the evolving understandings of civil society and how they relate to governmental rationalities and technologies of power. The traditional notion of civil society as a distinct and autonomous sphere has shifted toward an intermediary associations approach under neoliberalism. I posit that the mobilization of non-governmental organizations and civil society organizations by states, international organizations, and donor agencies since the 1990s constitutes a form of governmental technology, influenced by neoliberal rationalities. This technology serves the neoliberal agenda of undermining the social state, promoting market creation, and encouraging non-partisanship. This argument suggests that the rise of civil society as intermediary associations coincides with the decline of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses a little-known event in the history of neoliberalism: a conference at Stanford University held in 1982 to reconsider Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property 50 years after its initial publication. This event is important as it is where key members of the neoliberal thought collective sought to define and defend the powers and freedoms of the corporation. First, this article outlines the political commitments of Berle and Means by considering the core arguments of The Modern Corporation and Private Property ; second, it addresses key papers from the event published subsequently in the Journal of Law and Economics ; and third, it analyses the neoliberal defence of the corporation that emerged from these papers, and reflects on the limitations of the work of Berle and Means for developing a response to their neoliberal critics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Silences around drone warfare and similar covert state practices have often been encountered as a hurdle that hinders us from understanding and interrogating government acts. Scholars as well as human rights actors have opposed silences in a struggle for greater transparency and have called on governments to speak. Through the case study of drone warfare, this paper analyses the productive role of silences and the political struggle to oppose it. Analysing 125 non-governmental organisation (NGO) reports, UN documents and policy papers, this article investigates how silences are encountered, interpreted and opposed by Western human rights actors. This shows that silence is not encountered as a discrete unit but as interdependent layers of denial, partial withholding of information, redactions, delays, lack of oversight and so on. Situated within unequal power relations, I show how the battle against the unsaid is itself based on what has (not) been heard in Western constructions of drone warfare and risks further enabling violent practices. Discussing ways of subverting the workings of silence, the paper not only contributes to academic literature on covert warfare and silence but also speaks to the practical dilemmas faced by non-state actors who are advocating for more transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The claim that transitions in international order are not only products of transitions in power, but also products of transitions in shared ideas is now relatively uncontroversial in the International Relations literature. Yet persistent gaps remain in understanding how ideas are shared, and which states play a role in sharing an international order's ideas. This paper demonstrates that ideas are shared through social, interactive processes, which involve both superordinate states and subordinate ones. Nevertheless, as a result of their unequal power, subordinate state agency is typically expressed when subordinate states operate in conjunction with superordinate ones, a finding that poses empirical challenges for studying subordinate states' ideas and their order-shaping role. To resolve this challenge, the paper explores how a pair of superordinate and subordinate states – the United States and the Republic of China – operated in conjunction with one another to shape the transition to a post-WWII order at Bretton Woods. It examines cases of idea convergence and divergence between the United States and China; carefully disentangles the conscious and unconscious drivers of idea convergence; and highlights three distinct mechanisms – amplifying, grafting and resistance by appropriation – through which subordinate states shape a changing order's shared ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many consider academic research an important means to address societal inequality of marginalized groups, such as refugees. However, transformative research arguably requires critically engaged practices that consider and transform dominant exclusive structures permeating both society and knowledge production. This paper discusses challenges and opportunities of such research practices, especially given power and (neoliberal) politics around knowledge production within Dutch academic and refugee research structures. Based on 14 researchers' narratives, the results reveal how critically engaged refugee research is challenged by its marginalized position, academic pressures and culture as well as the recently emerged 'refugee research business'. However, the paper also uncovers various ways in which researchers manoeuvre within challenging and facilitating structures by operating outside or in the margins of academic structures, making use of facilitating spaces and strategically employing dominant discourses. Finally, researchers arguably transform academic structures by challenging dominant research paradigms and transforming the institution of academics itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power has always been an element of the program evaluation field, however, it has traditionally been attributed a negative connotation. With that in mind, power is seen as a force possessed to some extent by different stakeholders that can be imposed over others, and by which certain views, ideas, and decisions can be adopted. Given that program evaluation has a political character in which power is always present, we seek to explore a different notion of this concept. In this paper, we intend to take advantage of Michel Foucault's ideas to explore power in the program evaluation field. We illustrate the introduction of these concepts in collaborative evaluations and in doing so, we also explore power as well as power-knowledge relations, adopting a transformative perspective on power. The introduction of these concepts in collaborative evaluation is useful in illustrating how they can be used in non-collaborative evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant research on data journalism in Africa has focused on newsroom factors and the predilections of individual journalists as determinants of the uptake of data journalism on the continent. This article diverts from this literature by examining the slow uptake of data journalism in sub- Saharan Africa through the prisms of non-newsroom factors. Drawing on in-depth interviews with prominent investigative journalists sampled from several African countries, we argue that to understand the slow uptake of data journalism on the continent; there is a need to critique the role of data politics, which encompasses state, market and existing media ecosystems across the continent. Therefore, it is necessary to move beyond newsroom-centric factors that have dominated the contemporary understanding of data journalism practices. A broader, non-newsroom conceptualisation beyond individual journalistic predilections and newsroom resources provides productive clarity on data journalism's slow uptake on the continent. These arguments are made through the conceptual prisms of materiality, performativity and reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines work in cultural and human geography that theorises temporality in terms of events. Moving from humanist phenomenology, to non-representational and assemblage theories and current geographies of encounter, it suggests these accounts of events tend to analyse the past and future through the lens of the present. Building upon these literatures and the work of Tristan Garcia, the paper argues for an expanded notion of the event, where past and future events can be considered as both distinct from, and linked to, the present moment. Here, time comes to be defined as the ordering and stacking of events, where events are understood as sites of comprehension, in which entities are differentiated. The paper suggests this position is useful in order to trace temporal causality across and between entities and events. Tracing the causality of entities and their ordering and stacking across events enables a closer analysis of what the paper terms the temporal power of non-human things. To illustrate this argument, examples from an ESRC project on digital gaming and in-game purchasing are analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how working-class activists challenged and overcame political fear narratives during the anti-water charges campaign in Ireland (2014–2016), with specific focus on the ‘sinister’ narrative, an attempt by the government and its supporters to frame working-class protestors as violent, irrational and extremist. Rather than subscribing to the position that political fear is ubiquitous or the reflection of a general societal malaise, this paper follows Jeffries’ argument that political fear is mediated, contested and contradicted. While political fear operates most effectively when targeting expectations for normal living, it is these same expectations that offer fertile ground for opposing fear threats. Drawing on interviews from activists, this paper shows how the ‘normal living’ becomes a key context in which ‘deviance framing’ around class and gender can be reappropriated/reframed by activists, particularly through the deployment of counter spectacles and through the reframing of what constitutes legitimate emotional responses to government-initiated fear threats. Finally, while political fear can have an individualising effect, this paper demonstrates how subjective and individual acts of transgression are mediated through a collective and community lens as the crucial element in overcoming political fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defends the use of non-cooperative game theory for analysing questions of governance. To do so it posits a way of extending the resource account of social power from cooperative games to noncooperative games in a way that side steps a range of criticism. This involves identifying tipping points in the reputations of certain agents for paying and punishing those in their thrall. These tipping points are what give threats and offers their credibility in the absence of enforcement mechanisms and stabilise the distribution of social resources in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of recent influential papers, Anthony Bottoms and Justice Tankebe make the case for a 'dialogic model' of police legitimacy, wherein legitimacy is envisaged as emergent in a process through which the police, as power-holders, make claims to authority which are, in turn, responded to by audiences. Our aim in this article is to analyse this model. We argue that while it has the potential to direct legitimacy research along paths hitherto poorly explored, there is a need for conceptual refinement and development in three key respects. First, through recognition of micro- and meso-levels of legitimation. Second, acknowledgement that police claims-making is contingent on the authorization and endorsement of other actors. Third, a fuller consideration of the qualified role of dialogue—i.e. communication between police and policed—in public audiences' legitimacy assessments. In the spirit of critical engagement and conceptual exploration, this article develops these three insights to propose a modified version of the dialogic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A scan of social research about rural New Zealand from the 1980s reveals power divisions which have muted the voices of 'others'. Listening to these voices could transform how we manage the economy, sustain the environment and promote social well-being in future. Rural sociological attention in New Zealand has focused on the people and communities associated with land and resource-based assets, with little attention to the rural majority not engaged in primary production. Indigenous voices are also missing. As Jessica Hutchings argues, decisions on economic development, the environment and social services continue to uphold colonial hegemony as the dominant worldview in Aotearoa New Zealand. By being open to the perspectives of people normally ignored and particularly engaging with indigenous approaches, application of capital and power in development can be rethought and structural inequalities addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As efforts are being made to quickly adopt zero carbon technologies and replace fossil fuel powered trains, the design requirements are explored using train dynamics simulations to establish energy needs. The test case was a freight train of 3030 gross tonnes consisting of two locomotives and thirty wagons operating on a relatively flat coastal rail route. Then, assuming rapid deployment of existing and near market technologies, speculative locomotive designs are proposed for both battery only and hydrogen-battery systems. Batteries were assumed as rack mounted systems and hydrogen assumed at 250 bar gaseous. The results showed that full recovery of dynamic braking required only a very small amount of storage to capture and allow re-use, requiring a battery of only 6% of the trip total of recovered energy. The haulage task was found to require traction energy of 10.7 MWh per locomotive but reduced to a net requirement of 7.6 MWh per locomotive with recovery of dynamic braking energy. The large mass of batteries needed for the operating trip, however, limits the practical operating range. The results showed that, although hydrogen storage and equipment occupy considerable space and the containment systems have large mass, the space and mass requirements for a hydrogen system in this case study could be as low as half that required for batteries, while higher pressure or cryogenic approaches to hydrogen storage will allow the scaling for longer range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender difference graphs and tables typically present data representing males first, ahead of data representing females. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association in 2010 advised authors against this "bias" when reporting gender differences. An experiment examined how this preference is related to embodied cognition, and two content analytic studies examined its persistence despite the American Psychological Association's (APA) advice against it. In Study 1, 256 students drew bar graphs of gender differences and power differences. Participants spontaneously arrayed men first and higher power groups first most often, even when graph axes were placed to cue the opposite order. These results suggest that males-first order preferences follow from embodied biases to position agentic groups left and higher up in graphs and tables. Two content analyses systematically sampled psychology articles in four journals over a decade (Study 2) or 70 journals in a recent year (Study 3) to examine the impact of the APA manual's advice on authors. The males-first preference remains prevalent in psychology publications, has reversed in Psychology of Women Quarterly (Study 2), and became polarized by author gender in social psychology (Study 3). These findings suggest that embodied cognition affects the visual representation of gender differences in psychology and is variably moderated by recent injunctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the 'double indeterminacy of labour power', a key conceptual development in labour process theory, to examine mobility power in Saudi Arabia. State control over the mobility of migrant workers is crucial to the labour process and the wider political-economy of Saudi Arabia. However, little is known about mobility–effort bargaining and the specific forms of mobility power in the Saudi context. This article argues that not only is mobility–effort bargaining at the core of capital–labour relations in Saudi Arabia, but that mobility and effort are variably controlled by different sponsors/agents of control. Importantly, the control exercised by the state, capital and other sponsors over migrants' mobility is not absolute. Developing mobility power further, the article details the multiplicity of mobilities and labour contracts to delineate a 'sponsored labour regime', and highlights the underexplored role of the state, and other agents of control, in conceptualising mobility–effort bargaining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Military power is central to diplomacy and much of international relations, yet common quantitative measures have limited surface validity. This limitation stems from focusing on latent power and only indirectly incorporating major weapon systems. I contend that weapons are central to military power and present a new measure of country military power based primarily on armaments. The measure includes major naval, air and land weapons as well as nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capability. I examine the surface, content and context validity of the measure and compare it to existing measures. I show that this measure of material military power (MMP) has more surface and context validity than alternative measures. I find that MMP better predicts war outcomes, better accounts for militarized threats, and performs well as a control variable for country power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the concept of a 'financial elite' has become prominent within politics and the social sciences, it is not clear what value it holds for the analysis of inequalities of income, wealth and power under financial capitalism. Who are the financial elite, and what distinguishes them from other economically powerful groups? We delineate 'distributive', 'categorical' and 'relational' approaches to financial elites, arguing that various unresolved tensions have hampered clarification of the differentia specifica of the concept, and blunted its normative significance. We develop a new concept of financial elites that combines insights from elite studies and financialisation studies. We argue that the financial elite possess not only high incomes, but income primarily derived from 'rentier' channels, as endowed by the institutional structures of financialisation. Financial elites demonstrate the capacity not only to capitalise on these new accumulation channels, but to shape the institutional and regulatory landscapes in which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global platforms have radically changed institutional dynamics within the media industry. In this study, we explore how national media organisations manoeuvre in an increasingly uneven playing field. Combining theoretical perspectives from platform studies and the media policy field approach, we analyse how asymmetrical platform power impacts industry-policy relations in a small-nation context. We find that national players collectively frame the power of global platforms as a potential threat to the media sector and to democracy. In this framing, all the players – regardless of size or market position – define themselves as 'small' to signal a common threat and mission across the industry. Being 'small' however does not entail the same for all players, which results in different action logics. We also find that industry players use collective framing to protect existing support schemes and to legitimate the call for new ones, while they seek international collaboration to impact regulation of global platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike xenoglossia (xenolalia), which involves speaking a language one has neither learned nor could have acquired naturally, glossolalia (ecstatic speech) is the uttering of 'incomprehensible' stretch of utterances while in a state of trance. Using transcripts of recorded glossolalic utterances and of interviews collected over a 3-month period as our data source and working within the frameworks of language and power, and language and liberty we demonstrate that there is a strong link between glossolalic performance and the concepts of power and liberty. Thus, we establish that one's ability to use glossolalia and another's ability to interpret them are constituents of power. Also demonstrated is the use of specific linguistic (phonetic, syntactic, and pragmatic) resources to seek liberty for self or deny others liberty. We show further that individuals' institutional obligation of regulating turns and determining turn duration of glossolalic interactions constitutes power and has relevance for liberty contestation, gain or loss. Finally, we prove that the performance of power and its interpretation are tools for exhibiting liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How employer associations deploy their power resources to frame and pursue members' interests in the making of public policy is of marked importance in many economies. This is strikingly so in Australia where employer associations have, over a 30-year period, shaped a critically important industrial relations policy space – climate change. In exploring this issue, in this article the authors combine studies from industrial relations and political science to show that, despite suggestions of employer association decline, these organisations exert influence over policymaking in both 'noisy' and 'quiet' ways. These forms of influence can be understood as linked to specific sources of power – structural, associational, institutional, societal – as employer associations define and pursue members' interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black-oriented magazines have been a staple of Black communities for decades. Essence magazine, in particular, places a strong emphasis on targeting and empowering the Black woman. Essence often covers health issues in their publications alongside other popular issues being discussed in Black communities. Given the prevalence of health articles in Essence, I conducted a content analysis to assess how the magazine discusses the relationships between health, power, and race. The findings suggest that Essence magazine leverages its cultural and popular position to engage in discussions about health issues with its readers in culturally relevant ways that engage and empower Black women. At the same time, given Essence's global platform, the magazine walks a tightrope between being an 'easy-read' popular magazine and an outlet that discusses pressing health-related issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the organization of Chinese grassroots social management during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a range of local cases researched through policy documents, media coverage and interviews, we scrutinize the appropriation of emergency measures and the utilization of grid-style social management since the outbreak of COVID-19. Grid-style social management – a new grassroots administrative division aiming to mobilize neighbourhood control and services – is a core element in China's pursuit of economic growth without sacrificing political stability. Conceptualizing grids as confined spaces of power, we show how the Chinese party-state is able to flexibly redeploy diverse forms of power depending on the particular purpose of social management. During non-crisis times, grid-style social management primarily uses security power, casting a net over the population that remains open for population elements to contribute their share to the national economy. Once a crisis has been called, sovereign power swiftly closes the net to prevent further circulation while disciplinary power works towards a speedy return to a pre-crisis routine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of essays, conferences, and lectures over the period 1959–73, Michel Foucault directly engaged the writings of Nietzsche. This article demonstrates the five different modalities of Foucault's use of Nietzsche's writings: namely, critical, epistemological, linguistic, alethurgic, and political. Each of these modalities is tied to a particular intellectual turning point in Foucault's philosophical investigations and can be located chronologically in five important texts from that period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heterosexual women have intersecting identities that are privileged (i.e., sexuality) and marginalized (i.e., gender), suggesting a complicated site to examine power in the process of dating where meaning has become taken-for-granted over time. In this study, we utilized relational dialectics theory's (RDT's) corresponding method, contrapuntal analysis, to examine a group that holds fluctuating societal power in the context of heterosexuality and dating. Findings from the responses of women (n = 104) revealed two discourses that competed to illuminate the meaning of heterosexual dating from the perspective of women: the dominant Discourse that Dating is Romantic and Necessary (DDRN) and the marginal Discourse that Dating is Restrictive and Unrealistic (DDRU). These discourses interplayed through contractive practices (i.e., disqualification and naturalization), diachronic separation, synchronic interplay (i.e., entertaining, countering, and negating), and dialogic transformation (i.e., discursive hybridization and aesthetic moment), illuminating a discursive struggle that both reified and resisted the DDRN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The connection between time and power has been studied extensively. A common strategy through which street-level bureaucrats exert power and dominance over their clients consists of imposing protracted waiting and maintaining uncertainty regarding the outcomes of waiting. In this study, I argue that another facet of power in organizations is related to the temporal typification of cases. By exploring the triage work in two emergency departments (EDs), I show that nurses and clerks identify patterns in the temporal distribution of visits and attach clinical and moral meanings to them. The temporal typifications are sense-making devices through which triage workers orient to patients. They form a stock of tacit experiential knowledge that delineates specific expectations about the legitimacy of cases and the worth of patients. These expectations impact the unfolding and structure of triage admission interviews and contribute to the prioritization of cases. The study brings into conversation the sociological literature on time and power with the study of the moral evaluation of patients to examine temporal typifications as an organizational resource in healthcare settings. It contributes to a better understanding of triage workers' experiential knowledge and the practical accomplishment of moral evaluation in EDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals and communities increasingly depend on, and fill their lives with, machine cultures, in the form of both interfaces and infrastructures. This global push for machine cultures has given rise to an increasing demand for data and engendered a proliferation of public, private and public-private dataset repositories. While datasets form a foundational element of machine cultures, they rarely come into focus as objects of critical study. But in recent years a critical discursive formation on datasets has begun to emerge, which disturbs the idea of datasets as operational instruments of digital knowledge production and seek to instead 'bring people back in'. The present article identifies these preliminary explorations as 'critical dataset studies' and draws on critical archival studies to articulate the ethico-political surfaced by these studies. Specifically it argues that critical dataset studies shows the need for an expanded ethical and conceptual approach to datasets that not only relies on linear notions of deletion and accountability but also on iterative frameworks of remains and response-ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network concepts are omnipresent in contemporary diagnoses (network society), management practices (network governance), social science methods (network analysis) and theories (network theory). Instigating a critical analysis of network concepts, this article explores the sources and relevance of networks in Foucault's social theory. I argue that via Foucault we can trace network concepts back to cybernetics, a research programme that initiated a shift from 'being' to 'doing' and developed a new theory of regulation based on connectivity and codes, communication and circulation. This insight contributes to two debates: Firstly, it highlights a neglected influence on Foucault's theory that travelled from cybernetics via structuralism and Canguilhem into his concept of power. Secondly, it suggests that network society and governance are neither a product of neoliberalism nor of technological artefacts, such as the Internet. They rather resulted from a distinct tradition of cybernetically inspired theories and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a function of their race, gender, class, and other social categories, long-standing privileges in social hierarchies have been afforded to some groups of people to the detriment of others. Recently, scholars have made considerable headway studying the social gains made by disadvantaged groups, including a better understanding of how relatively advantaged groups (e.g., White people; men) often pushback against and resist shifts in group-based power or prestige. The present body of work curates social psychological perspectives on the sense of privilege lost, the belief that one's dominant group is losing ground to other groups. Here, we outline several dominant themes emerging from scholars in this field, including a better understanding of the psychological nature of group-based threat reactions, and for whom such demographic/power changes are deemed troubling, thus triggering pushback. We make recommendations for shaping future research on the perceived loss of group status and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An industrial strategy emerges from possibilities for structural change, that depend on material constraints and opportunities afforded by economic structure, the distribution of power in society and the institutional arrangements organized at the political level. Building on a structural political economy perspective, this article develops a structure–power–institutions conceptual framework to describe how economic structure, the distribution of power, and institutions interact through a 'circular process,' which is useful for analysing the historical transformation of industrial strategy. In this framework, an industrial strategy refers to the institutional arrangements through which the government manages emerging conflicts or agreements between different powers and influences structural change. As an illustrative case study, the structure–power–institutions framework is applied to analyse the historical transformation of US industrial strategy from the era of Alexander Hamilton to that of Donald Trump. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores in empirical detail the air-bound expectations, imaginations and practices arising from the acquisition of a new police drone in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel. The study shows how drones are transforming the ways in which the aerial realm is lived as a context, object and perspective of policing. This tripartite structure is taken as a prism through which to advance novel understandings of the simultaneously elemental and affective, sensory, cognitive and practical dimensions of the aerial volumes within, on and through which drones act. The study of the ways in which these differing dimensions are bound together in how the police think about drones and what they do with them enables the development of an 'aerial geopolitics of security' that, from a security viewpoint, approaches interactions between power and space in a three-dimensional and cross-ontological way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a Foucauldian perspective, we explicate the systems of power which shape the lives of women in or at risk of 'food poverty'. We develop a theoretical framework of power for analyses of contemporary food poverty, which we apply to data from focus groups with women on low incomes in two cities in the north of England. Our data underlines the repressive power of the state as well as the broader chronicity of state surveillance. We argue that, while disciplinary and pastoral power may characterise the majority of food banks, alternative logics of mutual aid are evident within some food aid providers. We underline the power of governmental discourse in constituting gendered subjectivities and find that the most potent form of coercion is derived from self-regulation. The article closes by exploring possibilities for praxis via discursive resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theological reckoning with our contemporary post-truth context must be cognizant of the ways in which adherence to biblical inerrancy fostered the rise of partisan epistemology. It is essential as well to grapple with the question of whether postliberal theologies, by way of a very different theory of truth, also promote the epistemic insulation of Christian faith communities. We need to understand how groups threatened with the erosion of social influence are tempted to indulge in partisan epistemology. It is equally critical to grasp how unjust power exploits such tendencies in girding its loins with epistemological supremacy. Jesus, facing in Pilate a post-truth dominator, models an alternative, namely, disruptive engagement that resists epistemic injustice and opens new space for the construction of unbounded communities of trust and shared understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses colonialities of power, knowledge, being, gender, language, nature, Anglophones, and victimhood as constitutive elements of a national/global Cameroonian coloniality in Nyamnjoh's Married but Available. I contend that the sustainability of Cameroon's future depends on struggles against colonialities as constitutive elements of a national/global coloniality that hangs over Cameroon's political development like the Sword of Damocles. Borrowing critical perspectives from Quijano, Grosfoguel, Maldonado-Torres, and Blaut, I assert that the emergence of colonialities of Anglophones by Francophones and Anglophones of Northwest origin by those from the Southwest have balkanized Cameroon and weakened its attempts at countering global coloniality. I conclude that for Cameroonians to nurture a sustainable political future, they need to adopt/adapt unremittingly anti-Eurocentric and anti-Francophone-centric decolonial struggles/strategies. Thus, the cosmic vision of either Francophones or Anglophones should not be taken as national Cameroonian rationality because that would amount to imposing provincialism as universalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Silence is traditionally understood as a power deficit; yet, it creates spaces in which power works unobtrusively. In this article, I report the findings of a qualitative study examining silence in school relationships. Based on nine conceptual discussions and 33 interviews with teachers and students in a secondary school in the UK, I assert that uses of silence in relationships between students and teachers revolve around two conceptions of power: a stronghold of respect and a refuge for dignity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States exist in an anarchic international system in which survival is the necessary precursor to fulfilling all of their citizens' other interests. Yet states' inhabitants – and the policymakers they empower – also hold social ideas about other ends that the state should value and how it should pursue them: the 'role' they expect their state to 'play' in international politics. Furthermore, such role-performative impulses can motivate external behaviours inimical to security-maximization – and thus to the state survival necessary for future interest-fulfilment. This article therefore investigates the tensions between roleplay and realpolitik in grand strategy. It does so through interrogation of four mutual incompatibilities in role-performative and realpolitikal understandings of 'Great Powerness', a core – but conceptually contested – international-systemic ordering unit, thereby demonstrating their necessary logical distinctiveness. The argument is illustrated with brief case studies on the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. Identification of such security-imperilling role motives thus buttresses neoclassical realist theory; specifically, as an account of strategic deviation from the security-maximizing realist baseline. Such conclusions carry important implications for both scholarship and statecraft, meanwhile. For once we recognize that roleplay and realpolitik are necessarily distinct incentive structures, role motives' advocates can no longer claim that discharging such performative social preferences necessarily bolsters survival prospects too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joe Blann's (2011) comic 'Things We had' is a complex and nuanced multimodal realisation of a tense interaction between a couple, rendered through the subtle interplay of narration, panel composition and dialogue. The tug of war and blame game the couple engage in are rife with instances of impoliteness. Drawing on Culpeper's (2011a, 2015b) impoliteness framework and an integrative pragmatics approach, this article examines the sophisticated multimodal realisation of impoliteness and power dynamics, with a particular focus on the subtle forms of implicational impoliteness and intricate impoliteness patterning used in the fictional interaction. In doing so, it analyses the interplay between impoliteness and power dynamics in the exchange, highlighting the importance of impoliteness analysis in revealing the fluid relational power dynamics underlying the couple's interaction. This is accompanied by an analysis of the key affective and interactional role of impoliteness in driving the exchange between the couple. Impoliteness, along with the evaluative negative affect it involves, is shown to be instrumental in the couple's struggle for interactional power in the course of the interaction, and also more broadly, in their negotiation of relational power within the relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the later Foucault, as for the early Foucault, the dream represents a privileged disclosure of the ethics of the self, and the relation to truth. What, then, is the function of the dream in the ethics of the self? This article brings together Foucault's early work on the dream and his late work on the care of the self to answer this question. Foucault's archeologies and genealogies of power and discourse show how the modern disciplinary, bio-political, neo-liberal individual is constituted simultaneously as self-sovereign and as subject to governmental management. The dream awakens when the self-sovereign subject of modern power goes to sleep. The dream, then, problematizes and displaces the sovereign subject and opens the door to disruptive forms of experience, counter to modern power's demand that we be always awake, productive, and in control of our thoughts and feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the transcript of a speech I gave at an Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) event on the 28th November 2020 about intersectionality and groups analysis. This was momentous for group analysis because it was the first IGA event to focus on black feminist intersectionality. Noteworthy, because it is so rare, the large group was convened by two black women, qualified members of the IGA—a deliberate intervention in keeping with my questioning of the relationship between group analysis and power, privilege, and position. This event took place during the Covid-19 pandemic via an online platform called 'Zoom'. Whilst holding the event online had implications for the embodied visceral experience of the audience, it enabled an international attendance, including members of Group Analysis India. Invitation to the event: 'Why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis' Using black feminist intersectionality, this workshop explores two interconnected issues: • Group analysis is about integration of parts, but how do we do this across difference in power, privilege, and position? • Can group analysis allow outsider ideas in? This question goes to the heart of who/ what we include in group analytic practice—what about black feminism? If there 'cannot possibly be one single version of the truth so we need to hear as many different versions of it as we can' (Blackwell, 2003: 462), we need to include as many different situated standpoints as possible. Here is where and why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis. On equality, diversity and inclusion, intersectionality says that the 'problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including black [people] within an already established analytical structure' (Crenshaw, 1989: 140). Can group analysis allow the outsider idea of intersectionality in? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the thinking and processes involved in initiating the National Diversity Working Group: Power, Privilege and Position (PPP) at the Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) in the UK. It argues that while group analysis is in theory distinguished by a commitment to engaging in power differences and wider socio-political issues, this theory has not hitherto been deeply reflected in practice in the institutional culture of the IGA, reflecting a disconnect between theory and practice. This article suggests that in practice there has been lived experience of a culture of various institutional prejudices. In this context there was an increasingly urgent need to take action to address the intransigent culture around power and difference at the IGA. The PPP was needed as a response to the entrenched anti-group processes at work in maintaining institutional prejudices. Positive responses to addressing institutional racism have created opportunities for organizational change. The article explores how the PPP working group's responses to addressing institutional racism worked to support organizational change and how this work has been instituted throughout the wider community. The article emphasizes how in response to the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM), issues concerning race have recently become focal in the PPP's life and therefore form the focus of the article. Drawing on Brown's notion of the 'Monitor of Justice' it argues that in setting up the PPP there was a harnessing of hitherto marginalized but pro-social group norms in the IGA culture in the face of anti-social institutional prejudice. In this context the article contains a detailed reflection of the lived experience of a black group analyst taking on a key leadership role in the organization by becoming the Chair of the PPP. It describes how under this leadership, working collaboratively with colleagues, PPP has become a highly innovative and creative centrifugal force in the IGA within two years. It tracks the process of culture change and how creating a safe space for experiences of marginalization within organizations can lead to wider system changes that increase inclusivity. When institutions can remain open and not become defensive about these experiences, this can lead to the wider culture being able to integrate these important experiences and adapt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reviews the fine ethnographic analyses in this special issue and argues that they become more coherent if power is understood as a sociotechnological network. This further implies that anthropologists' conclusions about how power is exercised must be modest, both historically situated and politically targeted, if the discipline wishes to contribute meaningfully to holding the powerful to account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction suggests that anthropology often assumes that the people anthropologists work with are relatively powerless. Due to this default, anthropologists tend to design their research and theorizing to reflect a relatively powerless other. We suggest that the accumulated scholarship on studying up, that is, studying those who structure the lives of many others, offers more accurate ways to theorize power and its exercise as partial and situated, as well as more plural and productive ways to imagine anthropological practice and ethics. We also suggest that this line of thinking gives us some ground to speak to the larger direction of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue sets out to explore the Theatrics of Transnational Criminal Justice. 'Why', we ask, 'do transnational criminal justice actors perform themselves as they do?' 'Why are their representations frequently, if not different from, then often quite dramatized versions of the average reality of their practices?' 'What does such dramatization tell us about not only the symbolism but also the structure and state of transnational criminal justice?' And, more generally, 'what do such performances of transnational criminal justice reveal about the nature of penal power in a global day and age?' In probing such questions, the special issue draws together a number of accomplished ethnographers who have been exploring the performative nature of transnational criminal justice issues around the world, considering both international bodies such as Frontex, Europol, UNODC, the ICC as well as the many national actors involved in the prevention, policing and prosecution of border-crossing issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]