Global Surpluses of Extraction and Slow Climate Violence: A Sociological Framework

This review article examines the concept of slow violence in relation to the current climate collapse. It outlines the extractive relationship between states in the Global North and Global South, and explores how this relationship creates and sustains disproportionate climate violence for the Global South. It critiques proposed adaptation and mitigation solutions for the Global South that emphasize market-led proposals and a return on investments that mostly benefit the Global North. It argues that these proposals fail to critically engage with the root causes of vulnerability to climate change and Greenhouse Gas emissions that cause climate change. The review uses World Systems Theory to analyze the power differentials between South and North, and concepts such as the “Color Line,” “Necropolitics,” and “Slow Violence” to underline the post-colonial character of this relationship. These provide historical context to the current hegemonic role of the Global North in carbon emission negotiations and responses. In doing so, the article highlights the need to think about climate change, and solutions to climate change, as a driver of slow violence and surplus climate violence by the Global North against the Global South.     

Players and arenas: strategic interactionism in social movements studies

This ‘Authors Meet Critics’ symposium focuses on two books edited by Jan Willem Duyvendak and James M. Jasper, Players and Arenas: The Interactive Dynamics of Protest and Breaking Down the State: Protestors Engaged. Both books make bold attempts to develop and apply a strategic interactionist perspective in social movement studies by focusing on the interplay of micro and macro processes and decision-making in a range of protest movements. Critical interventions from Aidan McGarry, Robert J. Davidson and Guya Accornero raise a number of questions relating to the core arguments of the books, the key findings and the conceptual advances. Duyvendak and Jasper then address these challenges by drawing attention more acutely to the role of agency in social movements and highlighting significant critiques of the current state of the art in social movement scholarship.     

Great Expectations: The Growing Divide between Students and Social Work Educators

This article examines and reflects upon initial findings from a longitudinal study evaluating the experiences and views of students on professional social work programmes across four higher education institutes in the North West of England, on the BA and the MA routes. The paper focuses on one aspect of this study; the students' experience of assessment. In particular it examines how students experienced the process of learning, assessment, support and feedback, which was found to be in part shaped by previous educational experiences. The range of assessment methods previously experienced by students was diverse, some of which were more helpful than others in preparing them for their professional training. Lack of foundation subject knowledge presented a challenge to students on both courses, in particular for MA students who were being assessed at ‘M’ level. Unmet expectations of both the amount and type of support created anxiety, frustration and even anger for some. The ‘search for certainty’ led to anxiety amongst many first year students who believed that academics could facilitate the assessment process by providing ‘the answer’. This exploration of assessment reveals, we believe, a growing divide in the expectations of social work students and their educators.     

The Roma Voice in the European Union: Between National Belonging and Transnational Identity

This article examines the response of Roma activists to the Italian Roma crisis in 2007 and 2008. The Roma community has become targets of discriminatory policies in Italy, such as forced evictions and ethnic profiling by the authorities, which construct Roma as distinct from the Italian nation. Roma activists increasingly circumvent national political structures and instead regard the European Union (EU) as an ally in redressing discriminatory policies in member states. In the absence of a kin state to lobby and advocate on their behalf, Roma activists, working in the transnational political context, articulate their voice and demands to the institutions of the EU. In doing so, they construct a transnational identity which on the one hand reifies Roma to a homogeneous group, whilst on the other hand contributes to the idea that Roma are not a constitutive component of the dominant nation. This article uses the Italian Roma crisis as a particular episode in which transnational Roma activists responded to a nationally based crisis and explores the impact of this on issues of national belonging.     

Using Service‐Customer Matrices in Strategic Analysis of Nonprofits

This article demonstrates the value of service‐customer matrices (SCMs) for managers performing strategic analysis of nonprofit organizations (NPOs). Some of the benefits of using SCMs are understanding the portfolio of businesses; clarifying what sponsors and clients value; identifying rivals, key attributes, and revenues on a service‐customer segment basis; and understanding and formulating positioning strategy.     

'Anything you can do, tu can do better': tu and vous as substitutes for indefinite on in French

Research on Montreal French (Laberge and Sankoff 1979; Thibault 1991) has shown a spectacular rise in the use of indefinite tu (or vous ) in recent decades, at the expense of the standard form on . Although grammars of French have traditionally passed over indefinite tu / vous in silence, Ashby's study of Tours French (1992) confirmed that the phenomenon exists in metropolitan French also. The historical time-depth of indefinite tu/ vous has apparently not been explored previously, though Posner (1997) has suggested that indefinite tu is a modern feature, found especially in Canada. A survey of indefinite tu / vous in earlier periods and in a range of varieties forms the first part of this paper. Secondly, drawing on a corpus of French spoken in Picardy, northern France, the paper investigates the extent to which this use of the 2nd person pronouns: (i) helps to avoid ambiguity; (ii) co-occurs with another grammatical variable. Unlike the surveys of Montreal and Tours, the Picardy corpus includes a large majority of informants who used tu to address the interviewer, and this too is explored as a potential influence on speakers' use of 2nd person pronouns with indefinite reference.     

‘She was like a mother and a father to me’: searching for the ideal mentor for youth in care

Recent studies of youth in out‐of‐home placements have indicated that a successful mentoring relationship in care is associated with better emotional, educational and behavioural outcomes in adulthood. The goal of this exploratory qualitative study is to describe the profile of a staff member who is able to establish a meaningful relationship with youth in care through the perspectives of 20 young adults aged 21–26 who left care in Israel. Findings revealed that the staff member who formed meaningful relationships with youth was the staff member who was available to the youth and familiar with their personal backgrounds, who was able to see them as positive and trustworthy and to provide guidance and support from a non‐judgmental approach. One of the study's conclusions is that staff members who were able to transform their connection with the youth into mentoring relationships were those who were able to make the youth feel as if they were the staff member's own children, and as a result feel cared for deeply and loved. The discussion addresses the barriers in forming a mentoring relationship with a formal professional and the ways to utilize these mentoring relationship components more effectively within the care system.     

Beyond the iconic protest images: the performance of ‘everyday life’ on social media during Gezi Park

ABSTRACT

Using the Gezi Park protests as a case study this article considers the performative component of protest movements including how and why protestors actively produce protest activity ‘on the ground’ and how this is expressed through visual images. It looks beyond iconic images which appear as emblematic of the protest and instead shifts our focus to consider the more ‘everyday’ or mundane activities which occur during a protest occupation, and explores how social media allows these images to have expressive and communicative dimensions. In this respect, protests can be performed through humdrum activities and this signifies a political voice which is communicated visually. The research is based on visual analysis of Twitter data and reveals methodological innovation in understanding how protestors communicate.