scholarly journals Power revealed: masking police officers in the public sphere

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pollyanna Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Online News ◽  
The Public ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Civil Suit ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Official Sources

Demonstrations which spill over into conflict have always required the police to distinguish between members of the public exercising their right to protest and members of the public engaging in criminal activity, i.e. between ‘good protesters’ and ‘bad protesters’. Journalists who depended heavily upon official sources when constructing news narratives have historically reproduced these distinctions and, as a result, images of violent protesters have frequently been used to delegitimize their claims. However a number of high profile investigations into the policing of protest in the UK mean that police officers are also being subjected to distinctions made by inquiry panels between ‘good police officers’ and ‘bad police officers’. Thus a new trope is emerging in popular print and online news narratives in which the actions of the police rather than protesters are becoming the object of the public’s attention. These dynamics are explored with reference to the ways in which confrontations between protesters and police were pictured in the aftermath of Ian Tomlinson’s death. The article focuses in particular on the way in which images highlighting acts of concealment became a significant strand in online and offline news narrative as they developed in the years between Tomlinson’s death in 2009 and the civil suit brought against PC Harwood in 2012. The author argues that images of police officers in militarized helmets and without identity tags become synonymous with the opacity that initially characterized the police force’s response to the death of Tomlinson. She concludes by suggesting that this lack of transparency contrasted with the extended visibility offered by mobile phone footage of the demonstration and contributed to the police’s inability to frame G20 protesters as violent agitators.

Editorial: Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley Klaff
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Research Note ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Exciting Development

I am pleased to publish an open-access online preprint of two articles and a research note that will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism 3, no. 2 (Fall 2020). This preprint is a new and exciting development for the Journal. It has been made possible by the generous donations from sponsors, including BICOM's co-chairman, David Cohen, whose support for the work of the Journal allows for timely scholarly analysis to be put into the public sphere.

The Geographies of Prevent: The Transformation of the Muslim Home into a Pre-Crime Space

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shereen Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Frontline Staff ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Uk

AbstractThe Prevent Duty is part of the UK’s counter-extremism strategy, which aims to prevent individuals from becoming involved in ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’. As a pre-crime measure, the duty is now enforced in public institutions in the UK, from schools to healthcare provisions, and relies on frontline staff to monitor and report on ‘signs’ of extremism and radicalisation. The discussion around Prevent has focused on its implementation and impacts in the public sphere, notably in schools. However, this article aims to disrupt the imagined boundaries of the Prevent Duty and demonstrate how, as a result of this policy, the home—primarily the Muslim home—is treated as a pre-crime space, thus broadening the reach of counter-extremism measures into the private sphere.

Trials and Tribulations

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-97
Author(s):  
Stephen Lovell
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
The Public ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The People ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
People Movement ◽  
The City

This chapter tells the story of public speaking in Russia from the imposition of greater restrictions on the public sphere in 1867 through to the eve of Alexander II’s assassination in 1881. It shows that in this period the focus of the Russian public switched from the zemstvo to the courtroom, where a number of high-profile trials took place (and were reported, sometimes in stenographic detail, in the press). The chapter examines the careers and profiles of some of Russia’s leading courtroom orators. It also explores the activities of the Russian socialists (populists), in particular the ‘Going to the People’ movement of 1873–4 and later propaganda efforts in the city and the courtroom. It ends by considering the intensification of public discourse at the end of the 1870s: the Russo-Turkish War saw a surge of patriotic mobilization, but at the same time the populist adoption of terrorism seized public attention.

scholarly journals From Silence to Primary Definer: The Emergence of an Intelligence Lobby in the Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-430
Author(s):  
Paul Lashmar
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
The Public ◽  
Intelligence Services ◽  
Intelligence Agencies ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Cold War

Until the end of the Cold War the UK intelligence services were not officially acknowledged, and their personnel were banned from entering the public sphere. From 1989 the UK government began to put the intelligence services on a legal footing and to release the identity of the heads of the intelligence agencies. Since then, public engagement by the intelligence agencies has gathered pace. What this article hypothesises is that there is now, in the UK, an effective intelligence lobby of former insiders who engage in the public sphere – using on the record briefings – to counter criticism of the intelligence community and to promote a narrative and vision of what UK intelligence should do, how it is supported and how oversight is conducted. Content analysis and framing models of non-broadcast coverage of intelligence debates, focusing on the 36 months after the Snowden revelations, confirm an active and rolling lobby of current and former intelligence officials. The paper concludes that the extent of the lobby’s interventions in the public sphere is a matter for debate and possible concern.

scholarly journals Pious Practice and Secular Constraints

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-121
Author(s):  
Alaya Forte
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Research Study ◽  
Added Value ◽  
The Public ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Aristotelian Ethics ◽  
Saba Mahmood ◽  
The Public Sphere

A research study grounded in both anthropology and ethnography, the aim ofJeanette S. Jouili’s Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the IslamicRevival in Europe is threefold: (1) to explore how women cultivate Islamicsubjectivities in secular European contexts that stigmatize and politicizesuch religious practices; (2) reveal the practical and discursive techniques theyhave devised to deal with the difficulties that emerge from engaging in piouspractices; and, finally, (3) attempts to show how living as a religious minorityin a secular-majority society can reshape traditional Islamic discourse and providean alternative to the dominant language of autonomy, individual rights,and equality. Since the early 2000s, Jouili has come into contact with a widerange of practicing Muslimahs attending courses in various Islamic centersof learning, specifically in Paris and the region around Cologne. These centersare distinctive for their willingness to explore a multiplicity of doctrinal lineagesand attempt to transcend cultural and ethnic traditions.In the case of this most recent publication, there is the added value of amuch-needed overview of pious women who have been active in Islamic revivalcircles in Europe, together with perceptive insights into their daily lives.This book, therefore, contributes to a high-profile body of work by Talal Asad(1993, 2003), Saba Mahmood (2005), and Charles Hirschkind (2006) aroundethics and ethical self-cultivation, which explores contextual power relationsat play in the construction of religious discourses and practices, as well as ArmandoSalvatore’s work on the public sphere (2007). Jouili’s findings shedlight on the incompleteness and unlinearity of these Islamic moral codes, aswell as demonstrate how “[t]he individual’s work on herself [is] significantlyand long-lastingly complicated by prior habits and by the availability of othersets of moral codes” (p. 15).Drawing on Aristotelian ethics, with its insistence on practice rather thanreason, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Jouili investigates how theembodied/practical ethical process molds an Islamic modernity within a secularEuropean context (chapter 1). The subsequent chapters provide an indepthstudy of these practices, which are aimed at strengthening through theinternalization of an “authenticated” knowledge of Islam learned within formalsettings (chapter 2) and the specific techniques of self-cultivation, specifically118 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:2Book ...

Empire and Eugenics

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-454
Author(s):  
Ezra Horbury ◽  
Christine “Xine” Yao
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Gender Recognition ◽  
The Public ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Trans Studies ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Uk

Abstract This essay offers an overview of trans studies in the United Kingdom in the current climate of transphobia in both academia and the public sphere. This report outlines how trans-exclusionary radical feminist scholars have co-opted the language of victimization and academic freedom following proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act in 2018. The production of ignorance about trans issues and trans studies is a deliberate project abetted by the UK media even on the left. In response, the authors organized an interdisciplinary trans symposium to affirm trans lives and trans studies for students, scholars, and the wider community. The authors reflect on the successes and failures of the event in light of their institution's past as the origin of eugenics founded by Frances Galton and the broader scope of the legacies of the British empire.

scholarly journals Anti-nuclear Movements: Failed Projects or Heralds of a Direct Action Milieu?

2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Welsh
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Capacity Building ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Qualitative Approach ◽  
Building Capacity ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Uk

This paper adopts a qualitative approach to argue that direct action social movements originating within the environmental and anti-nuclear milieu of the 1970s can be characterised by a process of capacity building. Capacity building adopts Melucci's argument that social movements are ‘networks of networks’. The notion of capacity building is elaborated in terms of the mobilisation potential of movement actors and the diffusion of movement repertoires within the public sphere more generally. Empirically the paper draws on fieldwork covering 1970s / 1980s movement cross-overs in the UK and the conclusions are informed by recent ESRC sponsored work (R 000 22 3486) on the global ‘anti-capitalist’ movement.

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