Introduction

It is an honour to present this collection which brings together the perspectives of a range of contributors with different experiences and expertise. This includes contributors with experiences of the care system as children, experiences of the children's social care system as parents and carers, as practitioners, as campaigners and as academics with interests in children's services practice and policy. While the focus is children's services policy and practice in England, a number of the authors are based in, or bring substantive experience of, practice and policy in other UK countries, and several of the issues here resonate with dilemmas, challenges and debates about child welfare provision internationally.

Each of the chapters shines a light on particular aspects of children's services reform. The chapters adopt, to varying degrees, a critical lens on the MacAlister Review of Children's Social Care in England which the UK government announced in January 2021 and which concluded with its Final Report in May 2022 (MacAlister, 2022). While the thinking underpinning the chapters is united in advocating for how children's services policy and practices can and should be different, it is worth stating that the authors have a variety of perspectives on what such changes should be.

The announcement of the MacAlister Review was the catalyst for the development of this collection. Among those who have taken a critical stance to elements of the reform agenda in children's services since 2010 there was some concern at Josh MacAlister's appointment as chair of a notionally independent review (see, among others, Dickson, 2021; Hanley et al, 2021; Jones, 2021; Mansuri, 2021; Radoux, 2021). Mr MacAlister has been closely associated with aspects of the Department for Education's reform agenda since 2013, and has close connections to a number of individuals and organisations which have been influential within children's services policy development in this period (Jones, 2019; Interdependence of Independence, 2021). Such associations led to questions about the Review's ability to provide critical scrutiny of policy developments over the last decade (Hanley et al, 2021). Before MacAlister's appointment as chair there had been high hopes for the fresh thinking and insight an independent review could bring.

Introduction

Sexual harassment has become a high-profile issue in recent years across a range of cultural contexts, including through the global rise of the #MeToo movement and the Everyday Sexism project. The UK (and elsewhere) has seen regular media coverage of high-profile cases of sexual harassment and other forms of gender violence across many different sectors (organized sport; organized religion; social and child welfare services and the entertainment industry, to name just a few) (Anitha and Lewis, 2018, p 5), as well as the shocking rape and murder of Sarah Everard by an acting British Police Officer and murder of London schoolteacher Sabina Nessa in 2021. Meanwhile awareness about the prevalence of sexual harassment within spaces of higher education (including within geography programs specifically) has also risen (Batty et al, 2017; Mansfield et al, 2019), with research suggesting that up to three out of every five university students in the UK have been sexually harassed or assaulted at some point (Busby, 2018).

From the perspective of the ‘right to everyday life’ (Beebeejaun, 2017) and right to the city (Fenster, 2005), this state of affairs can only be viewed as an abject failure. Fear of sexual harassment can limit movement for women and other feminized and gender diverse subjects, and freedom from harassment is a basic human right and precondition to mental and physical health and well-being. In the UK, concern about this issue has now attracted the attention of policy makers at the highest levels, leading to a Parliamentary Inquiry in 2018 on sexual harassment in public places, and a briefing paper on sexual harassment in higher education from the House of Commons in 2018. All of this highlights the urgent need for both deeper understanding – and cultural change – on this issue.

This chapter provides a critical reading of contemporary scholarship on sexual harassment within and beyond geography in order to contextualize activisms combatting sexual harassment across different settings and spaces in the UK and beyond. With our expertise in understanding issues to do with gender, power, and space, I argue that feminist geographers have a potential role to play in this work. Sexual harassment connects to a number of key conceptual frames in contemporary human geography.

Introduction

The value for history, science, and culture of Shen Kua's iconic 11th-century text Meng Hsi Pi T’an 梦溪笔谈 (Brush Talks from Dream Brook) has been explored by modern researchers since the 20th century. As the earliest notebook encyclopaedia to be produced in ancient China, Meng Hsi Pi T’an caught the interest of mid-century science historians when philologist Hu Tao-Ching produced several acclaimed versions of the work, including a simplified version for lay readers (Hu, 1957; Wang and Zhao, 2011). Science history pioneers Joseph Needham and Wang Ling described Meng Hsi Pi T’an as ‘a landmark in the history of science in China’ and included English translations of parts of it in their own influential text Science and Civilisation in China (Needham and Ling, 1954, p 135; 1959). Shen has sometimes been labelled ‘China's greatest scientist’ (Holzman, 1958, p 260) and is relatively well known in China. However, the significance of his work is still underappreciated elsewhere in the world, and perhaps in China too (Zuo, 2010).

In particular, Meng Hsi Pi T’an has generally been overlooked as a historical example of science communication. Even within China, only rarely have researchers characterised it as a popular science text or in other ways that might bring it under science communication's purview (for example Zeng and Guo, 2013). Zhang (2013, pp 366–7) is the notable exception: she argues that the book makes contributions to ‘democratizing scientific knowledge’, ‘preserving grassroots science’, and ‘communicating science and technology to the lay public’, considering it part of ‘technical communication's enduring tradition’. In line with Zhang's view and the evidence she presents, this chapter makes the case for Shen Kua and his Meng Hsi Pi T’an to be incorporated into histories of science communication.

The significance of global histories of science Communication

Published histories of science communication tend to focus on the West, particularly Britain and France, in the past 300 years (Orthia, 2020). This tends to be the case whether those histories are produced in Western or non-Western countries. They generally do not include communication cultures older than the so-called Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries or cultures beyond Western Europe and its settler colonies, except when discussing the spread of Western science within them.

In January 2021, a group of human rights defenders in Buenaventura received death threats and harassment by armed men who followed them as they went to and from their homes and workplaces. While typical of the threats faced by community leaders across Colombia since the 2016 peace agreement, in Buenaventura this also reflected the continuation of local struggles over the San Antonio Estuary. A project to dredge the estuary, led by the Instituto Nacional de Vías (National Roads Institute) and a consortium of private interests, had generated intense opposition from local residents. Although the public and private investors proposing the plan argued that dredging would allow for the expansion of commercial shipping operations, they had failed to persuade community leaders to drop their legal action to prevent the work. One representative of the local administration who was in support of the dredging called his opponents “enemies of the development of Buenaventura”.

For those community leaders, however, opposition to the dredging was not only environmental: they also cited reliable evidence that the estuary was an acuafosa, or watery grave, containing the remains of hundreds of victims of forced disappearance (Avila and Parada, 2021). The dredging project, they argued, threatened families’ hopes of ever recovering the remains of their loved ones; a serious abuse of the rights of victims’ relatives. They demanded a detailed investigation of the area and, in February 2021, a request for protection of the Estuary was submitted to the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (Special Jurisdiction for Peace; JEP), who ordered the suspension of the dredging project. In April of that year, the Pact for the Search of the Disappeared in Buenaventura was signed, a commitment from the Public Prosecutor's Office's Disappeared Persons Unit and the Mayor's office to conduct the first ever search for the disappeared in a maritime zone. At the time of writing, that search is about to begin.

This incident perfectly encapsulates many of the issues that residents and social leaders in Buenaventura face: powerful commercial and economic interests pursuing forms of development that conflict with the wishes of local communities, an ongoing struggle to deal with the legacies of the city's turbulent history of violence and continuing threats of violence against those who try to defend the interests of the community and address the city's problems.

With the outbreak of the Eurozone crisis in 2009, Germany came back centre stage in European politics, and continued to play a central role in the 2010s, for example through its initially leading role in the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015–16. Overall, therefore, the 2010s clearly saw the increased political weight of Berlin in Europe, sparking debates about what kind of power Germany had become. Several of those debates were explicitly framed around the notion of ‘reluctance’: for example, Paterson (2011) famously argued that Germany was a ‘reluctant hegemon’ in Europe, and The Economist took over this notion on one of its covers in 2013, calling for a more active engagement of Germany in Europe, arguing that ‘Germany's current footdragging poses larger dangers’ (The Economist, 2013).

The notion of reluctance was often used with reference to Germany's unwillingness to engage militarily (Maull, 2000a: 57; Breuer, 2006: 211; Dyson, 2011: 244). Moreover, several authors depicted the German government as indecisive and erratic in its foreign policy, highlighting that, particularly during the Eurozone crisis, ‘Leadership from Berlin has been hesitant’ and plagued by a ‘capacity-expectations gap’ (Bulmer, 2014: 1245). Quite the opposite of these assessments, a range of other observers maintained that Germany was not ‘reluctant’ at all. The more apologetic ones argued that German policies actually reflected a careful approach to policy making (Münkler, 2015: 162), and that Germany had a long tradition of quiet, lowkey leadership and engagement in European affairs and global governance (see, for example, Mützenich, 2015: 276–7). Critical observers argued instead that Germany was only ostensibly hesitant since it consistently pursued its policy of austerity throughout the Eurozone crisis, imposing its will on the rest of Europe (Beck, 2012). This assessment reflected a more general criticism of German policies coming from Anglo-Saxon economists and Southern European publics and politicians (Spiegel Online International, 2015), and a widespread uneasiness about a revival of German power and assertiveness related to fears of a re-emergence of the ‘German question’ in geo-economic and geo-political terms (Kundnani, 2014; Hellmann, 2016; Fix, 2018).

Similar discussions about indecisiveness and muddling through in German foreign policy characterized the months after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (Dempsey, 2022a; The Economist, 2022).

Introduction

This chapter seeks to elaborate the challenges that science communication has faced, and continues to face, in Mexico from the perspective of the legacy of colonialism, specifically the condition that decolonial theorists have called ‘coloniality of knowledge’ (Castro-Gómez, 2000; Quijano, 2000a). These challenges are situated in three complementary dimensions: first, in epistemic coloniality; secondly, in institutional frameworks; and thirdly, in the realms of scientific knowledge and social epistemology. The central premise is that the coloniality of knowledge has determined what kind of knowledge is considered valid and legitimate and therefore worthy of being transmitted and disseminated in institutionalised contexts in the country in the period since its independence in the 19th century to the present day, and that this has implications for the public communication of science. The outline also draws on the premises of the framework of epistemic injustice to examine the role that science communication plays in reproducing practices passed down from the coloniality of knowledge. The chapter concludes by signposting critical recommendations and transformative pathways for a radical reorientation of science communication in Mexico through foregrounding social issues as the point of departure and then explicitly incorporating them into the dialogue, vision, knowledge, and voices of those actors whose knowledge has been historically and systematically excluded.

Modern European science arrived in Mexico as part of a system of knowledge that was considered valid, legitimate, and superior to other ways of knowing. Science communication emerged as a practice passed down from European nations, one that naturalised the validity of scientific knowledge and dismissed the knowledge developed by the original inhabitants as well as their frames of reference and interpretative resources. The argument here is not whether Mexican scientists and communicators have engaged in these practices deliberately; rather, they have been immersed in a system of thinking that validates this hierarchy of knowledge. The intention in this chapter is not to raise doubts about the relevance of scientific knowledge but to question the processes of epistemic imposition and violence, the lack of dialogue, and the delegitimisation of other forms of knowledge, and to challenge what these processes produce as social reality. In brief, the implications these processes have for the way knowledge is generated and worldviews are fashioned in the national sociohistorical context. These worldviews constitute and configure conditions that put certain social groups at a disadvantage in situations of social conflict.

Introduction

Since the City of Detroit came out of bankruptcy on December 11, 2014, a major question of many Black parents living in the city—where their children must attend schools—is whether their children, who are attending racially segregated schools, are receiving an equal education to white students living in Wayne County (outside of the city), Macomb County, and Oakland County. The objective of this chapter is to answer this question using the most appropriate data and methods. Much data were obtained from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University (Reardon et al, 2022). The researcher there used public school test scores in grades 3–8 from 2008–9 through 2017–18 to create the first comprehensive database on educational opportunity in the US. For this chapter, the data used from the Stanford project database focus on overall average district test scores for Black, white, and Hispanic students. Student scores are compared to the national average test scores.

Calculating the national average test scores

The Educational Opportunity Project first calculated the mean test score in each school, district, county, metropolitan statistical area, commuting zone, and State for all students and by student subgroups (gender, race/ethnicity, and economic disadvantage). Low test scores indicated low educational opportunity and high test scores indicated high educational opportunity. The Educational Opportunity Project data also revealed learning rates, which explore how much students learn each year, to see how the nation's schools are contributing to educational opportunity and trends in test scores. In turn, these scores revealed how much average test scores are changing each year and provided an insight into where educational opportunities are improving or declining. The following section indicates overall average test scores, test scores for Black, white, and Hispanic students for a racial comparison, and poor and nonpoor students for a class comparison for Detroit and selected suburban school districts. I begin with the Detroit public schools community district.

Detroit public schools community district

Overall average test scores: –2.68

Black students: –2.76; white students: –2.51; Hispanic students: –2.31; poor students: –2.78; nonpoor students: –1.98

Educational opportunity overview

Based on the data that compare all districts in the US, the Educational Opportunity Project concluded that the Detroit school district is a district where test scores are lower than the US average and test scores have been declining over time.

Introduction

This chapter examines the state of science communication in Nigeria and offers perspectives on the development of an inclusive, homegrown science communication agenda. Critical points in the development of the science, technology, and innovation (STI) agenda in Nigeria and, indeed, Africa, correspond to the occurrence of major shifts in history. In pre-colonial times, each society had its own ways of disseminating its ideas of science, which ensured that scientific practices were handed down from one generation to another. In the colonial period, science education was like every other form of education that was nascent at the time: it had as one of its goals the creation of a Western-educated class of people who could function within the colonial system. The wave of pan-Africanism that swept through the continent in the period leading to independence and the period immediately after it inspired a new wave of Afrocentric policies that seemed set to put science and, by extension, science communication, on a transformative path unencumbered by the age-long tendency to refract African scientific endeavour through European lenses.

Over time, however, the challenges of delivering on these laudable visions of an African-led science education, knowledge production, and science communication agenda in former colonies such as Nigeria have become glaring in the face of the legacy and sustained hegemony of dominant Eurocentric systems of knowledge production, validation, and communication (see Alatas, 2006; Asante, 2011; Aman, 2018; R’boul, 2021). This chapter provides an overview of past and present developments on the Nigerian science communication scene against the background of these longstanding challenges. Further, the chapter highlights opportunities for deepening inclusion and relevance towards the goal of building a transformative national science communication agenda for the future.

Rhetoric versus reality: science communication in Nigeria's STI policy and National Innovation System

The first thing a casual observer might notice about the popular narrative around science communication in Nigeria is that it is framed as being indispensable to achieving the goal of national development. By many local accounts, the advancement of science and the public's embrace of its achievements are all-important for unlocking the potential for broad-based innovation and wealth that lie dormant and largely untapped – a far cry from the unidirectional focus on oil that the country has exhibited since 1960.

Article No. 23 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment’ and that ‘Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work’. It adds that ‘Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection’. The last clause of Article 23 stresses the ‘right to form and join trade unions for the protection of his interests’.

Introduction

The concept of human rights has its origins in the centuries-old concepts of ‘Natural Law’ and ‘Natural Rights’. The concept of Natural Law defines inalienable rights that we have independently of any country's laws, beliefs, culture or custom. We have Natural Rights by dint of our own individual humanity. The concept of Natural Law was originally articulated by Aristotle, further developed in Roman times and enriched during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment eras.

The concept of ‘Natural Justice’ has also contributed to the current concept of ‘human rights’. Briefly, it says that we all have the right to be treated fairly and equitably. We are also all equal before the law. According to Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274), the notion of Natural Justice first appeared in the writings of Socrates and Plato. Like the concept of Natural Law, the concept of Natural Justice too was further developed during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment eras.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is itself a legal instrument, with the status of a ‘soft’ international law. We should note that the 1948 declaration remains a work in progress, and its goals are yet to be fully realised.

As for the concept of democracy, at its core it embodies the principle that, as individuals, we are owed the right to a say on decisions that have a major impact on our wellbeing. The principle of democracy has also been linked to the rights that working people are entitled to, more than a century ago. In the late 19th century it underpinned the demand to have the right to bargain collectively via trade unions.

These were the warning words of the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, in a radio interview on 13 February 2022 (Deutschlandfunk, 2022), a few days ahead of Russia's attack against Ukraine. This would not be the last time that a representative of the Ukrainian government asked Germany to do more to support Ukraine. In the following weeks and months, as the unthinkable – a fully-fledged war of aggression in Europe – was unfolding, Germany adopted a series of policies that disconcerted its international partners with their lack of coherence, frequent delays and lack of responsiveness. In the weeks immediately preceding the Russian attack of 24 February 2022, the German government was debating the delivery of 5,000 helmets to the Ukrainian army (FAZ, 2022), much to the bewilderment of its international partners (Dempsey, 2022b), which were providing substantial military aid. Germany, by contrast, long refused the delivery of weapons or other equipment, citing political and legal constraints on the provision of military equipment to conflict zones (BMWK, nd). Moreover, the German government was extremely slow in agreeing to the extension of sanctions. For example, when it came to the exclusion of Russia from the Swift payment system, the German government reacted late to mounting international pressure, being the last country in the European Union (EU) to agree to such a step (Zeit Online, 2022). Similarly, it only agreed to suspend the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project a few days before the start of the Russian invasion (Ischinger, 2022). An observer described Germany's approach as follows:

Introduction

Paid work affects our wellbeing in more than one way. Meaningful work, which makes use of our capabilities as creative and resourceful human beings who like the opportunity to rise to a challenge, enhances our wellbeing far beyond the contribution of our paycheque. But, as psychologists and medical scholars inform us, at the same time tedious jobs that demand relentless repetition of simple tasks, and oppressive workplace power structures, end up undermining both our emotional and physical wellbeing. The intellectual framework of the sub-discipline of labour economics does not attend to these less tangible yet significant aspects of paid work. Its attention remains largely focused on the attributes that set the labour market apart from other markets. Still, though limited in scope as far as the meaning of paid work is concerned, labour economics has made quite a few salient analytical contributions.

Labour economists have thrown light on many of the factors that inhibit the capacity of employees to move across workplaces, particularly from one occupational market to another. They also shed light on factors that inhibit movement across geographical areas, particularly when this entails relocation of a whole household. The profession has also paid serious attention to gender, race and ethnicity-based discrimination. As well, labour economists have interrogated the uneven bargaining power between workers and employers and highlighted quite positive overall economic impact of trade unions within the market economy. This having been said, it is also true that trade unions shouldn't all be given ‘carte blanche’, because as the well-known labour economist George E. Johnson noted, in the US the spectrum of various trade unions ranges from ‘gangster unions … [to] social uplift unions which pursue policies which promote the general welfare of the working class as opposed to the narrow interest of their members’ (Johnson, 1985). This chapter narrates the story of the historical evolution of the intellectual perspective that economics nowadays has on the meaning of, and the role played by, paid work in our lives.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith (1723– 1790) who is widely acknowledged as the father of economics, certainly stressed the virtues of free market competition. But he did not lose sight of the downside of a laissez faire market system.

The debate

This book explores the relationship between technology, war and the state from the early modern period to the present and seeks to understand how technological change will impact the war–state relationship in the future. The idea for the book began when I was asked to deliver a course on the relationship between new technologies and their impact on strategy and operations at the UK's Defence Academy. This renewed interest in technology reflected the UK military's concern that a spectrum of emerging capabilities was starting to impact defence, and they were keen to understand how best to address the challenge of what they thought might be a potential military revolution. My initial position was one of profound scepticism, and I believed that technology would do no more than result in a superficial change in how the UK might engage in a future war. Indeed, the course I devised was essentially a warning from history about what happens when political leaders and their military organizations become seduced by the promises made regarding technology in war. To this end, a range of case studies, from Hitler's insane pursuit of wonder weapons in the Second World War to the emasculation of the United States’ conceived revolution in military affairs in Afghanistan and Iraq, demonstrated why technology is no substitute for an understanding of the geographical and political context of war (Kaplan, 2012). However, my research on the subject challenged the assumptions that shaped this course. More importantly, it also seemed to test the conventional view that prevails in broader academic debates on the relative importance of technology as a driver of change in the domain of war. The fundamental purpose of this book is to ask if we have arrived at a point where current patterns of technological change require a reassessment of the relationship between technology, war and politics, expressed here in the form of the state.

A cursory examination of the literature on this subject of war and technology reveals what can be described as an orthodox school and a revisionist school. The traditional view of technology asserts it has played a positive role in human history, and its impact on the conduct of war resulted in the emergence of a modern military system which fits into the broader aspiration of contemporary society. This school consists of three subsets.