Introduction

Before and during bankruptcy, Black and Hispanic business owners were extremely underrepresented compared to their populations in the City of Detroit. This chapter examines both Black-owned and Hispanicowned businesses.

Black-owned businesses nationwide: previous studies

As far back as 2007, I conducted research on Black business development in Michigan (Darden, 2007). Past research revealed that Black-owned firms in Detroit and other cities in Michigan were suffering from limited market size, as was the case in the US as a whole. In other words, most Black-owned businesses relied on Black consumers to remain in business. Other researchers came to the same conclusion (Fairlie and Robb, 2007a).

According to Bates (1993), such racially restrictive markets were due to racial residential segregation and discrimination. He noted that white merchants continued to open stores in Black neighborhoods, but Black merchants were historically excluded from white neighborhoods. The typical Black business was characterized as a small business concentrated in predominately Black neighborhoods. The socioeconomic characteristics of the Black neighborhoods were very low. Throughout the early period, before the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s and based on data going up to 2002, Blackowned businesses continued to experience limited access to capital, which influenced the size, location, and type of such businesses. This lack of capital also influenced the type of Black-owned business. Research revealed that firms in construction, manufacturing, and wholesale trade usually required a larger amount of capital than small personal service businesses and retail establishments (Ong, 1981). As a result, fewer Blacks are represented in these types of firms (Darden, 2007).

Research also suggests that the limited access of Blacks to capital is related to the higher loan denial rates Black business owners have experienced even after controlling for differences in creditworthiness (Cavalluzzo et al, 2002). It has also revealed that Black business owners were required to pay higher interest rates or put down more collateral than white business owners (Fairlie and Robb, 2007a). The limited access to capital forced Blacks into types of businesses with higher turnover rates, such as small retail (Reynolds and White, 1997; Robb and Fairlie, 2007b). Bates (1997) noted that fewer Black-owned businesses compared to white-owned businesses obtained a larger supply of capital to open manufacturing and wholesale businesses, which have lower turnover rates. Also, a lower supply of human capital influences failure rates and reduces the amount of profits (Darden, 2007).

Bankruptcy ended in Detroit on December 11, 2014. This book begins its assessment of the major questions that policy makers, city residents, and the private sector want answered: have there been measurable changes in the city in certain critical areas that impact the quality life of the city's residents? Is there measurable evidence that the residents are experiencing a higher quality of life? This book is my third investigation of these questions. The first book, Detroit: Race and Uneven Development (1987), with co authors Richard Hill (sociology), June Thomas (urban planning), and Richard Thomas (American history), included a detailed investigation that revealed that racial differences in the quality of life in Detroit presented a deep problem for many Blacks in the city that was getting worse over time. Moreover, the problems of the city could not be addressed without examining the Detroit Metropolitan region as a whole. After the investigation we concluded that “racial polarization between Detroit and its suburbs will increase along with the class gap between the poor in the central city and affluent in the suburbs. Detroit's financial problems are likely to worsen and the city's political influence in the region will continue to decline” (Darden et al, 1987: 254). We further concluded that “most who leave Detroit will continue to be white and affluent, but a sizable number of middle class Blacks will also migrate to the suburbs. The geographical line between Blacks and whites will still be rigidly drawn. Those remaining in the central city will be mostly Black and mostly poor” (Darden et al, 1987: 255). The book was published more than 25 years before Detroit's bankruptcy. We investigated the City of Detroit from different perspectives and came to a consensus that the rigid race and class divides were the driving forces that helped to explain the continued problems of Detroit following the Second World War. We argued that the problems of Metropolitan Detroit, such as economic decentralization, chronic racial and class residential segregation, and regional political fragmentation, were predicable trends that had gradually escalated throughout the post-Second World War period. We presented policy recommendations for Detroit’s problems that focused on how to handle the rigid divide by race, class, and place of residence.

Introduction

As popular, public-facing institutions that are often perceived to be authoritative and trustworthy, science museums play an important role in public science education (National Research Council [NRC], 2009; Falk et al, 2012; National Science Foundation [NSF], 2012; Falk and Dierking, 2018; American Alliance of Museums [AAM], 2021). Through engaging with visitors and local communities, science museums contribute to longterm impacts on the public's scientific literacy and understanding (Falk and Needham, 2011) and provide resources for schools and teachers to support students’ learning and motivation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) (NRC, 2009).

At the same time, girls, African Americans, Latinx, and Indigenous students of all genders are often marginalised in formal STEM educational settings starting from an early age, are chronically underrepresented in STEM career pathways, and have been consistently shut out of high-quality STEM education and opportunities (Committee on Underrepresented Groups, 2011; McGee, 2020). This is a critical issue because, as has been evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, science literacy and thinking skills are essential to the quality of our decision-making. As science museums, it is our mission to ensure that all children and students have equal access and opportunity to engage with STEM tools and methods to be active participants who create their own world and future and to contribute to the future of STEM professions.

Recently, researchers, educators, leaders, and policy makers in informal science education have raised their voices, demanding inclusiveness, diversity, and equity in the broad ecosystem of STEM education (Dawson, 2014; Feinstein and Meshoulam, 2014; AAM, 2021; Ba et al, 2021; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM], 2021).

In the previous chapter, I set out the principal limitations of technological determinism to explain the evolution of warfare in Europe from the early modern period onwards. This chapter aims to explain why technology became a critical variable within the war–state relationship and how it impacted the character of war. In addressing this question, it is also essential to explain why the military became increasingly enamoured with the allure of technology and how they sought to harness it. In constructing this audit, it is helpful to think of technology's direct and indirect effects and why and how it shaped the war–state relationship. Similarly, it is also essential to map out how these changes altered the character of conflict. The rise of modern war is significant because it allowed states to wage war on an unprecedented scale and duration, exemplified in the two world wars of the 20th century. To this end, this chapter is divided into three discrete sections. The first section addresses the question of why technology became fashionable in the military realm. The second looks at the drive for technology in war and how this affected the war–state relationship. The final section concentrates on how this increased focus on the technical means of waging war determined the character of modern war as explored via the impact of technology on strategy, operations and tactics.

I hope to demonstrate that technological innovation's importance had a profound impact on the war–state relationship during the period under scrutiny. However, its rise was facilitated by various factors, including the intensity of competition within Europe's regional security complex in the last third of the 19th century. In addition, internal organizational change within European armies in terms of their order of battle, modus operandi, and command and control, which preceded this revolution, also facilitated the incorporation of new technological enablers. Finally, I believe the principle of being able to mobilize the entire male population in a society to wage war was firmly established in the largely preindustrial era. The Napoleonic Wars demonstrate this point as first France, and then other nations rallied the population for war.

Consequently, this action cannot be credited to the industrial revolution, even if you extend the origins of this episode back to the 16th century as has been claimed (Toffler and Toffler, 1993).

In August 2022, Colombians elected, for the first time, a left-leaning government. Led by former guerrilla activist Gustavo Petro and his Vice President Francia Márquez, an Afro-Colombian woman and well-known advocate for human rights and environmental justice, the shift in governmental discourse was immediately striking. President Petro used his inauguration speech to promise that he would deliver Paz total (total peace), which would involve entering into talks with a wide range of armed groups to tackle the violence that has continued – indeed, in some areas has increased – in the years since the peace agreement between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia; FARC) was signed in 2016. Essential to total peace would be not only those new negotiations, but also fully implementing the terms of the 2016 agreement itself. Former President Iván Duque's (2018–22) failure to do so had caused widespread disillusionment with the peace process, and had also spurred splinter groups from the FARC to continue in arms.

Hopes for a stable and lasting peace in Colombia will depend in part on Petro's success in persuading the wide range of guerrilla, paramilitary and criminal groups still active in the country to cease the violence and lay down their weapons. But Petro was clear that total peace would also need to be a project for the whole of society:

This book is interested in how, in the years before and since the 2016 peace agreement, communities have been using dialogue as a way of participating in the building of peace, often in relatively unpromising circumstances. Seeking to understand the dynamics of community-level dialogues that aim to deal with the legacies of earlier violence and overcome ongoing conflicts, the book takes a ‘bottom-up’ look at the building of peace.

Introduction

Work has a major impact on our life. It not only takes up a large part of our wakeful hours, but the literature suggests that it also has a major role in shaping our emotional and physical wellbeing. Since jobs are not all alike, their impact on different individuals varies a great deal. It is a daily grind for the many who find themselves employed in tedious jobs that make limited use of their potential as resourceful, thinking human beings, capable of problem solving and initiative-taking. On the other hand, there is a significant number of other workers for whom work is a source of personal fulfilment and pride. Still, even when the tasks are very tedious, gainful employment can increase one's sense of self-reliance and social belonging. Barry Schwartz's 2015 book, Why We Work, opens our eyes to the deeply rewarding aspects of even the lowliest of jobs, provided they allow scope for genuine human interaction. Even Studs Terkel, who documented the tedious nature of many jobs, noted that while the attainment of the means to get the things that money can buy is essential, it is clearly not the only function of paid work. As he observed, workers ‘have a meaning to their work well over and beyond the reward of the paycheque’ (Terkel, 1974: xi). But, although gainful employment per se makes a positive contribution to one's overall mental wellbeing, this positive potential contribution can be partially or wholly undone in workplaces that generate high levels of stress.

The non-monetary value of paid work is also evident in the plight of the unemployed. Social psychology, sociology and cultural studies scholarship, along with medical studies of mental health, provide evidence of the negative consequences of unemployment on people's emotional and physical health. The literature indicates that this applies equally to all people, regardless of wage levels and across diverse demographics. In addition to the academic research carried out by sociologists, psychologists and industrial relations academics, we also have first-person accounts gathered by writers who had interviewed the unemployed.

Those interviews show that the impact of joblessness is often deeply emotional, going beyond the toll inflicted by material deprivation. This has been seen even in countries where unemployment benefits are set at generous levels, as in Scandinavia.

The 2016 Colombian peace agreement was lauded internationally as innovative, multi-layered and comprehensive. It went far beyond a simple commitment to lay down arms, incorporating further provisions on how to deal with various thorny legacies of the conflict, and also new challenges that would arise in response to its implementation. These included issues such as reparations for victims and the reintegration of demobilized FARC combatants, including guarantees for their political participation. Most ambitiously, the agreement sought to provide for the future economic growth of the predominantly rural areas that had been most heavily impacted by the conflict, often among the poorest in the country. In doing so, it incorporated much of the learning from previous peace processes (both those perceived as successful and those less so) that took place around the world in the post-Cold War era, while building upon multiple peacebuilding experiences and traditions developed in Colombia itself over the preceding decades. This unquestionably ambitious project of a participatory peace and geographically targeted development was, nevertheless, criticized widely from within Colombia. In the areas that were ostensibly intended to benefit from it, various social actors pointed to an implementation process that failed to address asymmetric power relations and, above all, the economic injustices that fuelled the armed conflict in the first place.

The discussion in this chapter situates the emergence of new forms of community-led participatory peacebuilding in relation to shortcomings in the peace process. Specifically, the chapter's goal is to contextualize the origins of the diálogos socio-territoriales (DSTs) discussed in Chapter Two and explored empirically in Chapters Three and Four. Particularly notable in the Colombian peace process was the government's use of social dialogue as a form of state-sponsored participatory peacebuilding, which in turn built upon previous civil society-led experiments with peace. The ambitious peace programme aspired to produce peaceful and prosperous futures for conflict-affected areas while involving the entirety of Colombian society in the process. However, it was also rather top-down in its initial composition, and various state–society interactions occurred during both the negotiation and implementation phases, which saw its very constitution and purpose becoming a site of conflict and contestation.

Introduction

Adoption is contentious. That is not new but in today's social media cauldron, it is an area of social work and social policy that will generate instant heat. This chapter has been written as the MacAlister Review of Children's Social Care in England delivered its Final Report. For this author, it was somewhat of a surprise to find that in the end the Review was almost silent on adoption, particularly when it has been a central plank and ‘gold standard’ for successive recent governments in England. Adoption UK (2022), in their response to the Final Report of the MacAlister Review, were certainly disappointed:

It is very difficult to work out a reason for the Review's adoption minimalism. Adoption, as this chapter will argue, is complex. Perhaps, as many argued when the Terms of Reference were set out, the scale of the Review was too great for the timeframe and the expertise utilised. Some of the recommendations on Family Network Plans (MacAlister Review Final Report, p 103), delegated authority (p 135) and lifelong guardianship (p 156), plus an overall emphasis on children remaining with families and kinship care, feel like a move away from adoption. It may be a genuine desire to push the benefits of adoption upstream. Or, when faced with the cost of properly resourcing adoption support, it may be another ‘Big Society’ move that leans on kinship and special guardianship to provide a ‘get out of funding free’ card for government, harvesting the goodness and finances of citizens.

Introduction

In this chapter we locate Josh MacAlister's calls for a ‘reset’ of the children's social care system (Crew, 2022; MacAlister, 2022) within the policy reform agenda of the last 25 years in England. We situate the Review's welcome emphasis on better supporting birth family care within a broader analytical framework. Drawing on insights from the chapters in the collection, this chapter identifies the potential for the MacAlister Review to be used as a vehicle for moving children's services policy reform in contradictory directions via a ‘double shuffle’. This would entail an apparent shift towards a greater family support orientation within the child welfare system which is undercut by neoliberal-influenced state defunding of children's services and/or greater deregulation and privatisation of the delivery of children's services provision. The chapter concludes by arguing for the importance of dissent within future policy development in children's services. We start by introducing two concepts that anchor the analytic framework we employ – Fox Harding's classic analysis of values positions in child welfare, and Stuart Hall's (2005) notion of the ‘double shuffle’ in policy development.

Lorraine Fox Harding produced an enduring typology of four different values positions within discussions of child welfare, family life and the role of the state within each (1991, 2014 [1997]):

• 1. Laissez-faire and patriarchy (‘laissez-faire’ position hereon): that the state should stay out of family life as much as possible and intervene only when it is clearly necessary to prevent harm.

• 2. State paternalism and child protection (‘child protection’ position hereon): that the state should prioritise the protection and prevention of harm to children within the family home.

• 3. Children's rights and child liberation (‘children's rights’ hereon): that the state should promote the participation of children about their own care as much as possible, seeing them as beings in their own right apart from adults.

• 4. Defence of the birth family and family rights (‘family rights’ hereon): that the state should respect families’ rights to care for children and support them to do so as much as possible, recognising the socio-economic influences on poor parenting.

Introduction

The chapters in this book have shown that science communication and public engagement practices, initiatives, and research take place in highly different contexts, scenarios, and settings around the globe. Yet, much of the discourse, practice, and research in the field is still predominantly about and conducted in the Global North. Together, these chapters have elaborated on what a truly globally representative, multidimensional, and inclusive dialogue on the state of the field of science communication and public engagement would entail. They have also highlighted the challenges, opportunities, and strengths in the scenarios, contexts, and settings that are underrepresented, excluded, and marginalised from the science communication ‘mainstream’, both in the Global North and the Global South.

These globally inclusive discourses are highly pertinent given systemic global inequalities and the differential science education and science communication systems in many parts of the globe. We need a broader framework for science communication that will transcend the Global North–South divide to explain the challenges in different contexts and proffer transformative solutions globally. This interconnected network enhanced by the mutual learning it facilitates across this Global North–South divide would further advance the transformation of science communication, rather than the limited ‘globalised’ framework predicated on Eurocentric dominance that has become normalised across the field. In this context, the imperatives of sociocultural and language plurality and diversity in the practices of science communication also come to the fore. In their interrogation of the presumed universality of science, African scholars Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh state that

This profound assertion can similarly be attributed to science communication as well.

There is still a long way to go before we can even begin to realise a critical level playing field of a truly globally inclusive craft and footprint of science communication – meaning science communication practices, methodologies, and reference points that are radically framed and informed by the very diverse indigeneity and cultural heritage of their localised populations and contexts.

A note on my positionality

This research is part of my independent work. In 2015 I defended my PhD thesis in the field of human geography and became the first human geographer to focus on the field of geographies of sexualities in Czechia. Although I have not been the first to attempt to introduce feminist thought into Czech(oslovak) geographical thinking (Blažek and Rochovská, 2006; Matejsková, 2007) these approaches have, so far, remained far from accepted by the ‘mainstream’ geographers and have a long way to go before they become established within local geographical academia. Issues related to sexual and gender minorities are, so far, mostly regarded as peripheral within Czech (Osman and Pospíšilová, 2019) as well as other Central and Eastern European geographical academia which resists feminist and queer scholarly approaches (Timár and Fekete, 2010). I have discussed this lasting disciplinary resistance toward feminist and queer thought in detail elsewhere (Pitoňák, 2019; Pitoňák and Klingorová, 2019).

Many researchers who focus on this field in the region of Central and Eastern Europe often lack institutional support and continue with their work as independent researchers or seek scholarly opportunities abroad. Some of us work in other disciplines or earn their living by working in different jobs. For me, this chapter is a result of my independent and lasting interest in contributing to the field of geographies of sexualities, informed by queer and feminist perspectives. To be able to focus on this task, I have worked in my free time, sacrificed time that I could otherwise spend with my life-partner, my family, or friends. Sometimes I had to take a vacation to be able to write or reschedule my paid-work activities and other research project duties. Oftentimes I had pondered introspectively about my lasting motivations and questioned my involvement. Yet, I remain hopeful that this work will contribute to the large field of sexuality and gender studies in geography. In a way I feel that scholarly work in this area relates to some sort of responsibility and fits into a web of both formal and informal scholarly interactions that simultaneously receive support and give it to others.

Activism is part of feminist geography's foundational mission. As Melissa Wright has noted, a commitment to activism weaves through the subdiscipline, constituting a unifying theme and approach to practice (Wright, 2008). As the authors of this volume have shown, this orientation continues to open new dialogues between academics, practitioners, and activists across different cultural contexts, and topical foci in ways that advance both scholarly work and real-world efforts to fight injustice and re-make the world as a fairer, more equitable and more accepting place. While GeoBrujas’ open discussion on the entwined projects of theory and method production in feminist collective spaces toward addressing problems of dispossession and violence, Zaragocin traces out how feminist geography has become part of larger critical praxis in Latin American focusing on decolonialization.

Fluri's chapter reflects on the difficulties of navigating between the production of knowledge and the prodigious task of disseminating knowledge that counters prevailing political discourses in the context of Afghanistan, connecting with Eaves’ chapter, which describes Black women's everyday resistance in the United States South over two centuries of movement work. Boyer's chapter mapped the background to understanding efforts to fight back against sexual harassment and other forms of gender violence in the UK, while Fannin's work highlighted the ruthlessness of the state in implementing anti-immigrant policies through the restriction of services to pregnant people, also highlighting the power and potential of maternal activism in the form of witnessing and accompaniment of pregnant people to help them get the services they need in hostile environments.

Through his detailed study of the unfolding of the LGBTQI+ rights movement through the 20th and 21st centuries in Czechia, Pitoňák's work reveals the complexities and challenges in this struggle. Finally, Browne and Nash's work challenges feminist geographers and others working for LGBTQI+ rights to ‘reach across the aisle’ to engage in radical listening with hetero-activists challenging the dialogue-ending tendencies intensified by social media and cancel-culture.

Looking back, the period from when this project began to when it finished was one beset by many challenges. The project got underway more or less at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Introduction

Effective public engagement and science communication are some of the cornerstones of translating and applying science into real-world applications. Whether it is in terms of communicating the efficacy of vaccines or the role of protected areas in biodiversity conservation efforts, it is a critical yet often neglected component of those involved in the field of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). ‘Science and engineering lack a culture of explanation’ (Meredith, 2010, p 6), and this is further compounded when additional factors are considered. Scientists often ascribe to the myth of universal applicability of their research and fail to consider historical and sociocultural complexities (Meredith, 2010; Mbembe, 2016). They appear ‘arrogant and aloof when talking about their subject, especially when discussing with disenfranchised communities’ (Olson, 2009), while those communities have relevant knowledge and perspectives for science and could often benefit from integrating peer-reviewed scientific results to guide policy decisions. Orthia (2020) argues that ‘science communicators must take steps to radically reform their understandings of [science communication] so that people from diverse cultures, nations and traditions can genuinely own it as theirs’.

Science communication and public engagement in the ABCSSS islands

The six Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, Saba, Sint Eustatius, and Sint Maarten are part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The islands are collectively referred to as the ABCSSS islands. In the ABCSSS islands, contemporary science communication initiatives of STEM research mainly engage White, highly educated, Dutch-or English-speaking audiences. This echoes similar findings in Europe (Dawson, 2014) and can be traced directly to who funds, designs, leads, executes, communicates, and benefits from scientific research and its results. In the ABCSSS islands, many science communication activities are carried out according to the ‘deficit’ model, which assumes a lack of knowledge in the target audience that can be remedied by unilateral, top-down communication of research goals, processes, methodologies, and results (Horst et al, 2017; Burns, 2018). While some important exceptions are highlighted in this chapter, STEM initiatives that prioritise public engagement that is participatory, reciprocal, and community-based throughout the research process are less common (Palmer and Schibeci, 2014; Horst et al, 2017; Sankatsing Nava and Hofman, 2018). In contrast, many locally led social science and humanities projects in the Caribbean are deeply grounded in and informed by communitybased research and engagement (Allen, 2018; CaribResearch Research Agenda, 2022).