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In this article, we explore the emotionally reflexive processes by which some women build maternal futures in the unsettling context of climate change, aiming to contribute to a better understanding of reproductive (and other) future building as aided by emotions. We analyse the online testimonies of an organisation that raises awareness about the interrelationship between climate change and reproductive decision making. The findings illustrate how women’s consideration of possible futures is relational, guided by their feelings and what they know or imagine to be the feelings of their families, the wider society and future generations. This is important for interrogating how climate change might unsettle dominant maternal and familial practices but extend understandings of connection. We position cohabitability as a possible foundation for reproductive decision making but find this possibility unfulfilled. Rather, maternal future building more commonly reinforces individualised and gendered responsibility for the planet’s future.
In this article, we analyse how mediated discourses of toxic friendships echo and reconstruct the category of the toxic friend. We ask: what kind of assumptions does the toxic friendship discourse draw on, and what forms of subjectivity and interpersonal relationships are encouraged? Employing a critical discourse analysis of digital texts, we argue that the discursive category of the toxic friend draws on a simplistic set of classificatory dichotomies distinguishing between the good and the toxic friend. We also suggest that the popular labelling of difficult friendships as ‘toxic’ reflects the contemporary diffusion of the notion of toxicity in contemporary public culture. We contend that this discourse reflects the discursive conflation between therapeutic culture and neoliberal wellness logic, with the figure of the toxic friend constructed in ways that support imperatives for self-care and self-governance. While much of the advice situates friendship as an important personal tie, there is very little encouragement to ‘work’ on these relationships. As such, these discourses offer a reductive, disposable approach to friendship ties that overlooks the complexities and lived experiences of friendship relations.
Choosing a partner has turned into swiping since the emergence of dating technologies. Today, individuals predominantly choose their partners via dating platforms by swiping their profiles with a quick thumb movement. The literature argues that mate preference is a static and disembodied disposition, where one’s intersectional background plays a role. Focusing on heterosexual individuals’ swiping practices in Turkey, this article aims to challenge this structural argument and suggests an affective approach to online dating. The concept of affect encourages more than a focus on the structures that influence mate choice. Emphasising the body’s capacity to act and be acted on, environments and thought-in-action, it draws attention to different orienting forces involved in swiping. As such focus requires a different methodology, this study uses the walkthrough and video re-enactment techniques to examine the mate selection practice. Based on interviews with 42 individuals who use Tinder and/or OkCupid, it shows how swiping is not only techno-socially shaped but also a bodily practice. Technological design, one’s mood and the sensation that arises through the encounter between the individual and the profile affect swiping decisions which can be both consistent and inconsistent with one’s techno-socially shaped criteria. By suggesting an affective perspective, this article makes both a theoretical and methodological contribution to the field.
With the emphasis on children’s responsibility for the care of ageing parents, this study examined how Chinese adult children’s support provided to parents was associated with filial piety, support from parents and parent-child contact frequency. With the 2006 Chinese General Social Survey, we used structural equation modelling with 1,452 adults with two living parents and tested the model for sons and daughters separately. For both groups, the results showed that (1) filial piety was positively associated with emotional support provided to parents; (2) support received from parents was positively related to instrumental and emotional support to parents; and (3) parent-child contact frequency was linked to instrumental support. For adult daughters, financial support was positively associated with the support received from parents and negatively related to parent-child contact frequency. This study suggests that the traditional norm of filial piety may be less influential than other factors for adult children’s support behaviour.
The global fight against the victimization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) youth has led to a prolific backlash. The LGBTQ+ “safe schools” movement has gotten violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity recognized as a problem by the United Nations (UN). However, this victory has resulted in the greater availability of anti-LGBTQ+ tropes for use as political fodder by bad-faith actors seeking to undermine progress toward the rights of LGBTQ+ youth, in particular, and democratic values, more generally. We are specifically concerned in this chapter with how opportunistic anti-LGBTQ+ state regimes clash with the UN vision for LGBTQ+-inclusive sustainable development, with resulting harm to LGBTQ+ youth. In this first section, we describe the safe schools movement, explain its connection to the UN’s commitment to education justice, and point to how countermovements around the globe endeavor to quash the hard-won achievements of LGBTQ+ rights movements by targeting sexual and gender minority youth. Following the lead of sexual and gender minority youth who have begun to demand safety and dignity around the world, the global safe schools movement is an informal network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) active on nearly every continent. It is concerned with the prevalence and effects of bias-based violence and discrimination against primary and secondary school students who do not conform to socially dominant or expected sexuality and gender norms. The transnational movement is united by two shared goals: to document LGBTQ+ youth experiences through research; and to promote affirming school climates through advocacy.
School segregation—the uneven distribution of students across schools, based on their socioeconomic status (SES), sex, race/ethnicity, or other ascribed characteristics—has important implications for educational inequality, social cohesion, and intergenerational mobility (Bonal and Bellei, 2019). While this topic has drawn special attention in the US, due, in part, to the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education Supreme Court case, between-school segregation is a concern to policymakers and researchers worldwide. School segregation by race dominates much of the research on this topic in the US, but studies of school segregation by SES predominate internationally. This chapter summarizes what we know about betweenschool segregation by SES, describing the strongest international evidence we have, drawing attention to the consequences of segregation and the benefits of integration, and concluding with a discussion of solutions. Residential segregation, migration movements, economic inequalities, and even education policies themselves have shaped a growing process of school segregation between the world’s most disadvantaged students and the wealthiest. School composition matters, and it impacts students’ short- and long-term academic and social-emotional outcomes. Student performance is more strongly related to SES than to other school compositional characteristics, such as gender, immigrant status, or race/ethnicity. Indeed, research indicates that disadvantaged students who attend schools with more affluent peers see a range of positive effects, including increased achievement, motivation, and resiliency (Van Ewijk and Sleegers, 2010; Agasisti et al, 2021). A school’s average SES is highly predictive of its academic climate and instructional quality, both factors associated with educational outcomes.
Climate change is disproportionately affecting Pacific nations, in part, due to their fragile island environments. This change indirectly threatens Pacific languages, with a mass migration of populations occurring and climaterelated language policy still in its infant stage. This work aims to outline the problems and prospects for policy development in this area, with an aim to solving the associated problem of language loss through migration.
The consequences of climate change are vast for small islands and atolls. However, a common misconception is that migration out of a region for climate change only occurs when low-lying areas become uninhabitable due to rising sea levels. This phenomenon is indeed a significant danger; for example, it is conceivable that atolls like Tokelau and Tuvalu, whose highest points are, respectively, only 5 m and 4.6 m above sea level, are in immediate danger of being overcome by the sea. Due to the large circumference of the atolls and their overall low elevation, even a fraction of sea-level rise will disproportionately decrease the land available for habitation. However, while a genuine threat, the “sinking” of these atolls is perhaps a lesser overall concern. There are much broader effects of climate change that influence and motivate the migration of indigenous people away from their homelands. Higher average global temperatures cause increases in climate variability, meaning rainfall patterns, temperature, and cyclones become more variable and less predictable. With a significant weather event, the fresh water on a small island or atoll can be contaminated, destroying its natural water source for days.
In a global pandemic, a critical challenge is ensuring widespread access to vaccines to achieve needed levels of population immunity. With the first vaccine rollout in early 2021, 15 COVID-19 vaccines are currently in use worldwide, with Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech doses being the most prevalent. By August 2021, of the 5.5 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses administered globally, 80 per cent had gone to high- or upper-middle-income countries. Only 0.2 per cent had been delivered to low-income countries. In high-income nations, one in four people had been vaccinated, a ratio that plummets to one in 500 in poorer countries.
Despite international efforts to address vaccine access, most notably, through the creation of COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX), a global vaccine-sharing program, low- and middle-income countries are struggling to procure vaccines in a market cornered by rich nations, who are willing to pay premiums to hoard vaccines while slow-walking financial pledges that COVAX needed to purchase vaccines from manufacturers.
Vaccine inequity is not only a moral problem, but also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating. It affects the entire global community, fueling the rise of new, vaccine-resistant variants and dragging down the economies of rich and poor nations—and vaccinated and unvaccinated populations—alike. Data from the US National Bureau of Economic Research show that due to the interconnectedness of the global economy, COVID-19 outcomes for the entire global economy are highly dependent on poorer countries’ populations getting vaccinated. Richer economies will still bear 49 per cent of the global costs of the pandemic, even if their own populations are entirely inoculated.
Fatphobia—that is, the fear, hatred, and loathing of fat bodies—is pervasive worldwide. Studies show that fat people experience discrimination in employment, education, media, interpersonal relationships, politics, and especially healthcare. Fatphobia starts young and runs deep; fatphobic attitudes have been recorded in children as young as three and become more pronounced with age. Cross-cultural studies confirm that socialization to fatphobia is not limited to North American populations. Data from the Project Implicit study, including over 300,000 respondents from 71 nations, demonstrate consistent pro-thin, anti-fat biases. A recent examination of longitudinal trends in prejudicial attitudes toward a range of stigmatized groups found that between 2007 and 2016, both explicit fatphobic attitudes (for example, acknowledging a preference for thin people over fat people) and implicit fatphobic attitudes (for example, associating negative words and phrases with images of fat people) either remained stable or increased, while stigma toward many other oppressed groups showed a downward trajectory.
Despite these findings, fatphobia is rarely seen as an important social justice issue and global social problem. This is because, unlike other marginalized identities, we are taught to see being fat as a “choice,” specifically, a bad choice. In many countries, fat bodies are viewed exclusively through medical and public health discourses that label fat bodies as diseased and therefore in need of prevention, intervention, and cure, regardless of the risks involved. This creates an environment in which fat people are blamed for their own oppression and makes it socially acceptable to censure, intimidate, harass, and discriminate against fat people because of their weight.
Until the 1970s, violence against women (VAW) was framed as a private issue and remained conspicuously absent from the public sphere and policy debates. Today, owing to decades of protest by women’s movements in different parts of the world, VAW—and gender-based violence (GBV) directed against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex and other non-heteronormative (LGBTQI+) individuals—is widely recognized as a serious human rights violation and a health problem that disproportionately affects women.
Patriarchy, which subjects women and girls to violence because of their sex, is the root cause of VAW and GBV. As the 1993 UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW) put it: [VAW] is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women … [VAW] is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men.
Feminists have always challenged the private–public dichotomy, which serves to depoliticize the unequal power relations within the home, where VAW often takes place. The terms used, as discussed by Ertürk (2016), to refer to the problem are instructive of the shifts in how VAW has been framed. The First World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975 made reference to “unity of the family and prevention of intra-family conflicts.” Five years later, at the Copenhagen Conference, a resolution on “battered women and the family” was adopted, and the concluding document made reference to “domestic violence.”
