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In this article we explore the ways in which specialist recruitment practices for the PR industry influence the pursuit of diversity in the profession. Drawing on interviews from an exploratory study of specialist PR recruitment in the UK, we combine Abbott’s theory of boundary-making between professional fields with existing research on the exclusionary dynamics of recruitment in professions, to explain how PR recruitment consolidates the focus on client and candidate ‘fit,’ and is likely to work in favour of preserving the dominance of middle-class, white and gendered identities in the profession. In this context, diversity is perceived as a risk rather than an opportunity and becomes a casualty of professional logic.

M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom, by Steven F. Hayward (Encounter Books, 400 pp., $33.99) Who wrote the Sharon Statement, the conservative movement's most enduring statement of principle? [...]

In this article, we explore the tensions and blurred boundaries between dominance and resistance in promotional contexts by critically examining the notion of ‘visibility’, a commonly used yet largely unproblematised concept within the field of promotion. More specifically, we argue that contemporary promotional industries sustain and perpetuate a post-panoptical ‘regime of visibility’ underpinned by three modalities: (1) visibility as recognition, which associates being watched with empowerment while downplaying it as surveillance; (2) visibility as transient, which stresses visibility as a scarce resource that requires continuous work; and (3) and visibility as an end-goal, that is, as an end in itself rather than means to achieve something else. Acknowledging the existence of this regime opens up avenues for a productive analysis of the coexistence and mutual constitution of dominance and resistance within promotion in the digitalised communication environment, beyond debates about ‘authenticity’ or ‘woke washing’. We note that promotional industries structure visibility as a desirable and even inevitable requirement for both reinforcing and reconfiguring social arrangements. Consequently, they foster a mirage that celebrates the actions of individuals without actually producing meaningful change, while obscuring invisibility as an equally valid strategy of resistance.

IN the early 1950s, liberal intellectuals shaped the American Zeitgeist, while conservatives, to quote Yale professor Willmoore Kendall, manned 'tiny outposts' over a broad front, rarely communicating with one another. [...]

A key focus of intersectional research is to engage with the power dynamics resulting from the sameness/difference paradox that Crenshaw (1991) originally identified in Black women’s legal status. This article extends intersectional research in public relations by investigating how the tensions of responding to this paradox unfold in professional life. I combine Carastathis’ (2017) use of intersectionality as a provisional concept that can prompt different thinking about taken-for-granted realities, and Jorbá and Rodó-Zárate’s (2019) formulation of intersectional categories as fluid structural and agentic properties of a particular situation, to understand how sameness/difference is strategically negotiated by public relations practitioners of colour, the tensions that arise during these negotiations, and the impact of such negotiations on their own professional standing, as well as on the unmarked, normative white, male and middle-class identities that characterize the ‘post-race’ professional spaces in which they work. I conclude that, without genuine recognition of the daily compromises and sacrifices that practitioners of colour have to make in order to foster perceptions of ‘sameness’ and keep ‘difference’ at bay, the professional field’s blindness to its white, male and middle-class archetypes will persist – and will continue to blight the careers of those for whom the comfort of belonging remains elusive.

The screening of covalent or ‘reactive’ fragment libraries against proteins is becoming an integral approach in hit identification, enabling the development of targeted covalent inhibitors and tools. To date, reactive fragment screening has been limited to targeting cysteine residues, thus restricting applicability across the proteome. Carboxylate residues present a unique opportunity to expand the accessible residues due to high proteome occurrence (∼12%). Herein, we present the development of a carboxylate-targeting reactive fragment screening platform utilising 2-aryl-5-carboxytetrazole (ACT) as the photoreactive functionality. The utility of ACT photoreactive fragments (ACT-PhABits) was evaluated by screening a 546-membered library with a small panel of purified proteins. Hits identified for BCL6 and KRASG12Dwere characterised by LC-MS/MS studies, revealing the selectivity of the ACT group. Finally, a photosensitised approach to ACT activation was developed, obviating the need for high energy UV-B light.