Introduction

In the wake of the England men’s football team’s defeat in the European Championships final in July 2021, three young Black players – Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka – received significant racist abuse on social media after failing to score in the penalty shoot-out. In a post a few days after the match, Saka wrote that he ‘knew instantly the kind of hate that I was about to receive’ (BBC News, 2021a). There were swift responses from England manager Gareth Southgate (‘racist abuse is “unforgivable”’; BBC Sport, 2021), Prime Minister Boris Johnson (‘those responsible should be banned from attending football matches’; BBC News, 2021b), sections of the media and members of the public. Eleven people who posted racist messages were arrested (BBC News, 2021c). However, another England player, Tyrone Mings, highlighted the hypocrisy in some reactions, claiming that the UK Home Secretary’s refusal to criticize fans, who earlier in the tournament booed England players ‘taking the knee’, had ‘stoked the fire’ of racism (BBC News, 2021d).

This vignette is an illustrative snapshot of the form, extent, experience and response to ‘hate’ in the UK (largely the geographical focus of this collection); together these constitute what we refer to as ‘landscapes of hate’.

First, this case shows that hate can be understood not only as discriminatory actions against an individual but also as directed at social groups and reinforced through divisive politics. Harmful attitudes, beliefs and practices oriented towards contingently demonized ‘others’ are not confined to the violent actions of a small number of extremists. Rather they are sanctioned and even encouraged by rhetoric and policy that produce the conditions necessary for hostile environments. Second, alongside other forms of discrimination, such forms of hate are a commonplace experience for many Black, Asian and other racialized people (as well as people of faith, disabled people and people from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer [LGBTQ+] communities), despite the surprise and shock commonly expressed by those unaffected. Third, hate is expected to lead to a criminal justice response, albeit limited in extent due to the challenge of identification of perpetrators (especially when online). Fourth, hate represents an apparent contradiction between portrayals of society as tolerant and inclusive, and evidence of increasing hostility and harassment against marginalized groups (including the rise in hate crimes reported to the police; Allen and Zayed, 2021). In the UK, as in many other national contexts, despite legislative and policy action, hate is ever more prominent in the lives of many communities.

This edited collection seeks to address this apparent impasse, by broadening the examination and discussion of hate from a commonly singular focus on hate crime (Hall, 2013; Chakraborti and Garland, 2015), and the exceptional and extreme acts often associated with it (Sherry, 2011; Roulstone and Mason-Bish, 2013). To do so, we place hate within the framework of social, cultural, and political landscapes of experiences, emotions, attitudes, actions, and responses, by individuals, communities, places, organizations, institutions and governments. We employ the notion of landscapes to broaden the perspective out from the immediate incident of hate – in the vignette discussed earlier the posting of racist social media messages – to the spaces, contexts and relations through which such incidents emerge, are experienced, and responded to (Hall, 2019). In so doing we look to further understand the embeddedness of hate in the fabric of society. Bukayo Saka knowing ‘instantly’ that he would receive racist abuse can be seen as personal experience of the enduring character of English racism, the uneven racialized burdens placed on a Black England football player, the partial acceptance of him as part of a national community, and the apparent inevitability of such treatment in a society where racism and other forms of discrimination are commonplace. In this sense, the language of ‘landscapes’ enables connections to be made between broader social and political contexts, and those spaces and situations through which forms of hate and responses to it, play out.

We also employ the terminology of landscapes to reflect the scope of this collection, which seeks to consolidate and extend the emerging geographical study and critique of hate (Flint, 2004; Listerborn, 2014; Clayton et al, 2016; Hopkins, 2016; Hall, 2019; Legg and Nottingham Citizens, 2021; Edwards and Maxwell, 2021). So long dominated by criminology (Perry, 2001; Gerstenfield, 2013; Hall, 2013) and, more recently, sociology (Roulstone and Mason-Bish, 2013), hate has been framed predominantly as incidents impacting specific individuals and groups and understood as requiring a criminal justice response. In contrast, we consider hate’s widespread, embedded nature, the ‘ordinariness’ of most perpetrators (Iganski, 2008), and the social, cultural and political contexts implicated in the construction of and/or collusion with landscapes of hate at a range of scales. Together these give form to situated yet related experiences of harm.

The contributors are drawn from across a range of disciplines, including geography, criminology, sociology and youth work. They explore hate through a range of lenses from the systemic (James and McBride), the institutional (Goerisch), the discursive (Browne and Nash; Butler-Warke), the criminal/legal (Vera-Gray and Fileborn), the material (Clayton et al; Daly and Smith), the atmospheric (Durey et al), the emotional (Wilkin), as well as thinking ‘beyond hate’ (Bowler and Razak; Hall). Contributors also consider dimensions of hate in relation to specific and intersectional communities including ‘race’ and religion (Bowler and Razak; Butler-Warke; Clayton et al; Goerisch), sexuality (Browne and Nash; Clayton et al), gender and transgender identities (Durey et al; Vera-Gray and Fileborn: James and McBride), Gypsy and Traveller identities (James and McBride), disability (Clayton et al; Hall; Daly and Smith; Wilkin) and social class (Butler-Warke). However, all contributions, in different ways, argue for the potential of thinking through hate as intrinsically spatial and part of the landscapes we inhabit.

Why is it important to think about hate now?

Hate and hate crime have received much scholarly attention in recent years, in parallel with an expanding suite of legislative and policy actions in the UK and internationally. We will address the concept of ‘hate’ in the following section, but here set out why this edited collection is a timely and distinctive addition to the academic study of hate.

There is undoubted evidence of an increased presence of hateful extremism, in relation to ‘race’, religion, sexuality, transgender and disability, in the UK and other countries (European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance, 2020; The Guardian, 2021; BBC News, 2022), including the rise in prominence and actions of far-right groups and extremists, and in the context of the so-called ‘culture wars’ (Duffy et al, 2019). This is deeply troubling and should be actively monitored and contested. However, arguably of greater significance and concern is what was experienced by the England football players (discussed earlier) and many others in minoritized groups; that is, widespread and predominantly non-physically violent abuse in a range of online and in-person contexts, to such an extent that it has become everyday, even ‘mundane’ (Chakraborti et al, 2014; Hall, 2019). There is, of course, a connection between these different forms of hate. Both can be placed on what Kelly (1988) has called, in relation to violence against women, a ‘continuum of violence’, which Hollomotz (2013: 53; see also Daly and Smith, Chapter 7) also uses to talk about violence against disabled people. Similarly, Hall (2013) makes the distinction between ‘hate’ as the increasingly dominant, catch-all term, and what he sees as the root causes of hate – prejudice or hostility – with ‘pure hate’ as it would commonly be understood (that is, as extreme abjection) as ‘just one small part of this spectrum’ (Hall, 2013: 9).

Extremist views arguably create both the context for, and the normalizing of, everyday discriminatory acts; and, conversely, these often seemingly ‘mundane’ acts provide the basis for, or condoning of, extremist views. We argue it is problematic to see forms of hate as solely committed by those with (openly) extremist views (Hardy, 2017). Rather, most hate crime offenders, or for that matter those subject to processes of radicalization (Luger, 2022), are ‘ordinary people’ showing hostility in the ‘everyday’ course of their lives (Iganski, 2008: 23, cited in Hall, 2019: 252). This everyday hate characterizes many of the contributions in this collection and shows that while they may appear ‘low-level’ in criminal justice terms, such acts can have profound impacts on the mental and physical health and wellbeing of victimized individuals and communities (for example, in this collection, Wilkin; James and McBride; Clayton et al; Goerisch; Daly and Smith; and Durey et al). This collection argues for an expansion of the hate discourse to recognize the extent and significance of these actions and the long-term and embedded discrimination, exclusion and abjection, that sustains them. Hate has become central in the discourse of discrimination and prejudice, but in the process has been largely individualized.

The collection is timely too in terms of the socio-cultural and political context, in the UK and elsewhere. A rise in populist, authoritarian and in some cases fascist parties, the so-called ‘culture wars’, deeply entrenched discrimination identified by the Black Lives Matter movement, ‘Trumpism’, and the misogynist ‘Incel’ movement, are all aspects of, arguably, a fragmentation of the socially liberal consensus of the mid-1990s (Beckett, 2018). The ‘reawakening of hate’ is targeted towards many minoritized groups and women (Sternberg, 2020). Actions include austerity-promoted labelling of disabled people as ‘parasite[s]’ and ‘spongers’ (Burch, 2018; Power and Bartlett, 2018); the creation of a ‘hostile environment’ by the UK government for those already settled and those wishing to settle in the UK (Webber, 2019); the 2016 UK Brexit referendum to leave the European Union; the recent UK ‘Sewell Report’ that, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, stated that ‘geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion have more significant impact on life chances [of BAME communities] than the existence of racism’ (Committee on Race and Ethnic Disparities, 2021: 8); and resistance to legislation on ‘hate speech’ in relation to sexuality, for example, in Ireland (as examined by Browne and Nash, Chapter 10). Throughout this period, the number of hate crimes reported in the UK, and in other countries, has increased steadily (Home Office, 2020; The Guardian, 2021), with a surge just after the Brexit referendum (NPCC, 2016). As many incidents are not reported (see Hall, Chapter 12), it is widely acknowledged that hate is an everyday experience for many individuals and communities.

Austerity has, arguably, in large part underpinned the emergent landscapes of hate in the last decade in the UK, generating a discourse of and a legitimacy for discriminatory attitudes against disabled people, migrants and others who receive (limited) support and protections from the state (Burch, 2018; Healy, 2020). Long-standing discriminatory attitudes, deeply embedded within the UK’s social, political and material landscapes, have (re)emerged and flourished. Austerity has also reduced or completely ended funding to community and national voluntary organizations that provide support, presence and community mediation for those groups most affected by both socio-economic pressures and potential hostile attitudes and actions (Clayton et al, 2016). Many disabled people, people with mental health conditions, those experiencing drug problems and families in crisis, are now both labelled as a problem and increasingly exposed to hateful actions. At the same time as austerity budgets have impacted on the fabric of civil society, governments have progressed rapidly with hate crime legislation and policy, including broadening the initial identification of ‘race’ as a ‘protected characteristic’ to include more groups, and reinforcing the criminal justice system and the police as the appropriate response (Home Office, 2016). The dominance of the law and criminal justice across the landscapes of hate is arguably problematic as, while it signals intent, it also directs attention to the extremes, and away from both those in positions of relative power and the hostile views and actions of ‘ordinary’ people (Iganski, 2008: 23; see also Vera-Gray and Fileborn, Chapter 3).

To return briefly to the vignette that began the chapter, the extensive online abuse of the three football players is without question ‘unforgivable’ (to quote the England team manager), but the reaction to it is arguably also problematic, with no real expectation that online abuse of players will end; and no real interrogation of or reflection on – by politicians, the media, fan’s groups or society more widely – the personal and collective responsibility for such racist acts. The time has come for a different interpretation of hate, and, in turn, new ways of responding to its outcomes. This collection seeks to contribute to this critical moment in the story of hate.

We are acutely aware that the collection is confined mainly to UK contexts (exceptions are the chapters by Browne and Nash, Chapter 10; and Goerisch, Chapter 9). However, even with this caveat, the collection provides a rallying cry for the field of hate crime and hate studies to further open up to geographical interrogation, and to reframe hate as a collective societal, rather than an individual criminogenic, problem. We offer the collection as a provocation to others to critically engage with the key arguments made and to reflect on the usefulness of these arguments across different national contexts.

Bringing into view the culpability of the broader landscapes in which hate is experienced enables a social and structural set of solutions to be considered (see Hall, Chapter 12). In addition, many of the contributors consider the ways in which those who are victimized are engaged in preventing, negotiating, agitating and confronting, as well as being fearful within and harmed through, landscapes of hate. The construction of those who are victimized as agentic also provides a perspective that can suggest innovative ways of addressing hate, such as in Goerisch’s chapter (Chapter 9) where Hmong students at a US university take over an underused set of rooms to create their own safe space. And in Butler-Warke’s chapter (Chapter 4), where a community housing group campaign and deliver an independent and community-led redevelopment project in Liverpool’s Toxteth area. Also, in Bowler and Razak’s chapter (Chapter 11), where young people are provided with safe spaces to enable them to ‘speak out and see beyond’ racism in their local communities. It is this refusal to be stigmatized and the subsequent inhabiting of transformative identities (see Donovan et al, 2019) that provides hope for change.

Critiquing ‘hate’

‘Hate’ has become the discourse of harassment, violent abjection, and discrimination, over the past 20 years in the UK, US and elsewhere. However, importantly, in this chapter, and in some of the others that follow, the notion of hate as a way to interpret the actions, experiences, emotions and responses, of people affected, and to shape ways forward, is increasingly subject to examination and critique (see James and McBride, Chapter 2; and Daly and Smith, Chapter 7). Haslam and Murphy (2020) argue that hate has multiple meanings, with the public and those affected often having quite different understandings and usages of the term (see also Chakraborti, 2010).

Hate in relation to discrimination and harassment, and the legislation to tackle it, has its origins in the era of the US civil rights movement of the 1960s, and the associated violence against African Americans (Hall, 2013). Hate was invoked to identify the actions and consequences of white supremacist groups, and to (eventually) force the enactment of policies and legislation to counter it. The legislation that accompanied these civil actions adopted ‘hate’ and from then on the term has become embedded in public and policy discourse (Hall, 2013; see also Jacobs and Potter, 1998; and Chakraborti and Garland, 2015). Significantly, legislation in the UK has never explicitly used the term ‘hate’ (only very recently adopted in Scotland (Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021). However, government policy, police forces, third sector organizations, media, and many people and communities affected by harassment, have readily taken on the term ‘hate’, seeing in it the potential to catch people’s attention, to encapsulate in a simple term the many actions experienced, and to attach a label that conveys how fundamentally wrong and damaging these actions are. Hate is also often distinguished from discrimination and exclusion; these are commonly seen as social and structural, while hate carries a distinctive affective and visceral force, which may for some better capture what they and their communities experience. Indeed, rather than a focus on whether (or not) hate is a motivating factor of perpetrators, many have argued for the often traumatic experiences of victims (see Bowler and Razak, Chapter 11, in relation to racialized minority groups; and Wilkin, Chapter 8, regarding disabled people) to be central in the conceptualization of hate (crime) (Iganski, 2008; Hardy and Chakraborti, 2020), with several authors having published victim-centred accounts of, for example, transphobic (Colliver, 2021) and disablist (Sherry, 2010) hate.

What distinguishes hate is the broader targeting and impact on groups and communities, and the fear this generates. To fully understand hate, therefore, demands more than a focus on individual victims’ experiences, crucial though these are. The groups, communities, locations and contexts of those individuals affected, are as much part of the picture of what hate is (see Clayton et al, Chapter 6); indeed, shifting the focus away from the individual can relieve the pressure on those directly affected. For example, Daly and Smith (Chapter 7) argue for the use of the term ‘disablist’ rather than ‘disability’ to describe hate directed at disabled people, to both capture what they term the ‘pervasive low-level fear’ (p 119) many experience and to recognize the ‘underlying structural inequalities and embedded disablist attitudes’ (p 123) that is a context generative of hateful actions and fear. Developing such an argument is crucial as the tide of current, dominant thinking is flowing in the opposite direction; for example, the UK Sewell Report’s (Committee on Race and Ethnic Disparities, 2021) ‘downplayed structural racism’ (The Guardian, 2022), placing the emphasis instead on ‘individual instances’ (Committee on Race and Ethnic Disparities, 2021: 9) motivated by racist attitudes. There is a need, and perhaps an opportunity, now to reclaim the term ‘hate’ as both an inter-subjective lived experience and as a structural, spatial and situated process.

The work of Ahmed (2001: 347–8) critiques the dominance of psychological understandings, conceiving of hate not as residing in, but as distributed across, bodies, ‘circulat[ing] between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement’ in what she refers to as ‘an affective economy’. In doing so, she argues, we can ‘consider how [hate/emotions] work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social’ and by extension the spatial (Ahmed, 2001: 349). Rescaling hate or abjection from the individual to the social and locational context is further examined by Tyler (2013: 23), who places abjection, what she calls ‘disgust reactions’, within the broader social contexts or ‘prevailing belief systems’. As such, abjection is ‘always contingent and relational, revealing less about the disgusted individual, or the thing deemed disgusting, than about the culture in which disgust is experienced and performed’ (Tyler, 2013: 23). Disabled people, who experience significant and rising levels of hate, have long been seen as objects of disgust or ‘scapegoats’ (Shakespeare, 1994: 298): ‘It is not just that disabled people are different, expensive, inconvenient, or odd: it is that they represent a threat’ (see also Donovan et al, 2019, for a parallel account of how gay male and lesbian sexuality have been constructed as threatening to children, family life, norms of morality and, subsequently, society). Sociologists have then explained acts of hate as responses to broader senses of threat or ‘strain’ (Hall, 2013). Importantly, Hall (2013) cites Perry (2003) in her assertion that such responses to socio-cultural and economic strain are not confined to people in marginal or non-powerful positions. We build on Perry’s (2001: 1) account of hate as ‘embedded in the structural and cultural context … a socially situated, dynamic process, involving context and actors, structure and agency’, by emphasizing the complexity and multi-scalar nature of acts of hate. James and McBride (Chapter 2), for example, connect characteristics of neoliberal capitalism – what they see as increasing discrimination and exclusion – to the ‘systemic violence’ experienced by marginalized groups, specifically Gypsies, Travellers and transgender (trans) communities. The distinctive landscape interpretation of hate presented here examines closely the spaces (from micro to local and national, in-person and online) and the relationships (between potential victims and perpetrators of hate), within which hate is experienced, produced and responded to.

Criminal justice/legal dimensions of hate

Criminal justice has become a central strand of the hate discourse, hence the now almost automatic appending of ‘crime’ to references to hate. A legislative, police and court response to hate-related harassment and violence is the major tool of public policy towards hate (see Hall, Chapter 12). Hate crime and associated legislation was first explicitly referred to in the US in the 1990s (with the passing of the Hate Crime Statistics Act 1990), although its origins, as discussed previously, were in the 1960s civil rights movement (Hall, 2013). The language of hate was adopted in the UK soon after, in the wake of the murder of the Black teenager Stephen Lawrence by a group of young white men in London in April 1993, for no other reason other than that Stephen was Black. Evidence of racisms and racist violence in UK society became recognized in the 1970s and 1980s (Hall, 2013), and many Black people had been murdered before, but the violent and overtly racist killing of Stephen Lawrence struck a powerful chord. Further, the inadequate and incompetent response of the police to the murder, evidenced in the landmark Macpherson inquiry (1999), was concluded to be a product of ‘institutional racism’ in the Metropolitan Police force. In this ‘watershed moment’ (Hall, 2013: 34), hate crime was placed on the political agenda and in the discourses of violent discrimination.

In the years that followed, there were a number of other high-profile murders, attacks and deaths which, given the profile of the Lawrence murder and the Macpherson inquiry, were identified and interpreted through the lens of hate – including the so-called ‘Nail Bomber’ David Copeland who targeted LGBTQ+ and Black and Asian communities in London (Donovan and Hester, 2011); the murder of Sophie Lancaster in 2007, linked to her ‘alternative gothic appearance’ (Garland, 2010: 159); and the deaths of Fiona Pilkington and her disabled daughter, Francecca Hardwick, in 2007, after years of harassment (The Guardian, 2009). In the UK, existing legislation addressing discrimination, including the Race Relations Act 1965, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, was built upon with subsequent laws to address crimes motivated by prejudice. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, respectively, recognized racially and religiously aggravated harassment or physical violence, with both laws introducing ‘enhanced sentencing’ for these offences (Law Commission, 2021: 14). Significantly, the term ‘hate’ is not used in any of this ‘hate crime’ legislation, recognition perhaps of its implication of extremism and violence, when the legislation can also be applied to actions further along the continuum, including hostility and verbal abuse.

As hate crime legislation became embedded as the discourse of how to interpret and respond to harassment and violence, other groups who historically had similar experiences were included – often through campaigns – in the legislation (the groups included became known as ‘protected characteristics’). The Criminal Justice Act 2003, for example, referred to disability and sexual orientation as potential ‘aggravating factors’ when deciding on sentencing; the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Immigration Act 2012 extended this to transgender identity in 2012 (Law Commission, 2021: 14). Hate crime legislation has three aspects to it that are unique when compared with other crimes. First, hate incidents encompass any act believed to be motivated by hate regardless of whether the act is, in itself, a crime. The public is encouraged by the police and public campaigns to report any incident they believe is motivated by hate. Through reporting it is hoped that such incidents will be stopped from occurring in future (see Hall, Chapter 12). Second, for the purposes of reporting, the definition of hate lies with the person reporting – who may or may not be the person victimized – if they believe the incident was motivated by hate. Third, a hate incident and/or crime might be deemed to take place even if the person victimized does not belong to any of the protected characteristics but is perceived to do so by the perpetrator(s). Such conditions for the legislation have meant that there is some confusion about the terms ‘hate crime’ and ‘hate incident’, the usefulness of reporting and the complexities involved in establishing a motive of hate.¹

As discussed earlier, the first piece of UK legislation to specifically refer to hate was introduced in Scotland in 2021: The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act. The Act (in response to a review of hate legislation by Lord Bracadale; Scottish Government, 2021) brings together existing legislation related to protected characteristics – disability, ‘race’, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity – and adds age, for the first time in the UK. Significantly, gender was discussed as a potential additional protected characteristic but ultimately was not included (a working group was established to further consider the issue; BBC News, 2021e). The debate over including gender as a protected characteristic is insightful for the broader discussion of the adoption and employment of the term ‘hate’. In March 2021, the UK government, in response to the murder of Sarah Everard in London, stated that police forces should record violence motivated by a person’s sex or gender (BBC, 2021f).² The identification of violence against women as a hate crime, equivalent to ‘race’ or disability, has been viewed by many as a necessary extension of laws to protect women from violence, and also, as an evaluation of the Nottinghamshire Police misogyny crime pilot concluded, to start ‘shifting attitudes’ (BBC News, 2018; Mullany and Trickett, 2018). However, the evaluation found a still significant level of verbal and physical harassment, and violence, at the end of the pilot period in which misogynist hate crime could be reported, suggesting the potential limited impacts of such a policy on attitudinal change. Vera-Gray and Fileborn (Chapter 3) argue that ‘shifting attitudes is much more related to public awareness campaigns about what misogyny is and why it is incompatible with a fair and just society, than about including it as a form of hate crime’ (p 50). There are also those who have experienced hate behaviours, but do not recognize them as being motivated by hate. For example, while for some disabled people the term hate powerfully captures the affective experience of being targeted, many others do not recognize the harassment they experience as hate or related to hostility to their disability. Instead, they see a range of factors involved, including intersectional aspects of their identity, social contexts and relationships (Hall, 2019). The language of hate, to whom it might be applied and for what ends, are all very much part of ongoing debates within the field of hate studies.

Landscapes of hate

Landscape, then, draws our attention not only to the material world around us and our relationships with it, in a deeply uneven and unequal social world, but also to the ways in which those worlds are seen, read and used. We therefore refer to landscapes of hate (in the plural) as simultaneously different ways of seeing, identifying and employing hate as embedded within spaces of everyday life – and to offer insights into the complex and circulating ‘assemblage’ of people, places, attitudes, ideologies, structures, materialities and emotions, that constitute how hate is produced, felt and responded to. Everyday landscapes are sensed through emotions of fear and safety (see Durey et al, Chapter 5), imagined through processes of historical policy-led stigmatization (see Butler-Warke, Chapter 4) and materialize through tangible and meaning-laden physical spaces of urban life (see Clayton et al, Chapter 6; and Wilkin, Chapter 8) in ways that can reproduce but also challenge harmful societal divisions. These elements may be familiar features of lived and represented landscapes or may be more hidden and need to be exposed through careful scholarly work.

In this collection, we adopt the term ‘landscapes’ to critically reflect on the concept of hate and to move beyond criminological and victimology perspectives on the incidence of hate and the experiences of victims (though see chapters by Wilkin, Chapter 8; Daly and Smith, Chapter 7; Durey et al, Chapter 5; James and McBride, Chapter 2; Bowler and Razak, Chapter 11; and Goerisch, Chapter 9, whose work centres the experiences of those victimized by hate). There has been little consideration of the immediate and broader contexts and spaces within which incidents and experiences of hate occur, and the role that these contexts and spaces play in the production and experience of these incidents. The contexts include the prevailing discriminatory social attitudes of the time related to government policy and deeper-seated assumptions about the right of presence and behavioural norms, for example, related to ‘race’, disability and sexuality. There has always been a powerful spatial aspect to these attitudes – about people, groups and behaviours deemed to being ‘out of place’ and often in fear in particular socio-spatial environments (for example, Valentine, 1989; Pain, 1997) – and many of the (explanations for) hateful responses have had a spatial aspect, including the defence of territory (Perry, 2001; Hall, 2013). The spatial has always been present, but never fully and properly engaged with, in hate studies, as an active agent in the production and experience of hate.

The concept of landscapes allows us to carefully consider space in relation to hate, not only as the context within which negative social attitudes and actions occur, but also as constitutive of these social attitudes and relations. It also allows us to think about the ways in which processes, practices and experiences of hate are reproduced through particular spatial configurations and are also always situated within wide-reaching imaginaries, relations and networks. Milligan and Wiles (2010: 736) use the notion of landscapes to describe the complex geography of care to ‘teas[e] out the interplay between those socio-economic, structural, and temporal processes that shape the experiences and practices of care at various spatial sites and scales, from the personal and private through to public settings, and from local to regional and national levels, and beyond’. Hence, landscapes are not simply backdrops, but are ‘both product and productive of social and political-institutional arrangements’ and in sum refer to ‘the complex embodied and organizational spatialities that emerge from and through the relationships of [care]’ (Milligan and Wiles, 2010: 740).

Flint (2004) and Iganski (2008) provide two contrasting perspectives on the landscapes of (‘race’) hate, both addressing the central role of space in the production, expression and experience of hostility. Flint (2004) focuses his examination on the maintenance of ‘white privilege’ in the US through explicit and overt acts of hate committed by those adopting or associated with far-right ideologies in their ‘defence of territory’, from harassment and even murder, to exclusionary housing policies. In his book’s introduction, Flint (2004: 2) ‘does not deny the damage inflicted by everyday intolerance and discrimination’, but his (and many of the contributors to his collection) focus is on those he describes as ‘defenders of whiteness’ and the manner in which their ideologies and actions ‘facilitate … the norms of our society’. Iganski (2008) focuses on the ‘everyday intolerance’ noted previously, examining the places and environments within which people, and in particular those from different ethnic minority groups, encounter each other in streets and neighbourhoods. In a study of London, UK, Iganski (2008) demonstrates that it is the nature and dynamics of these encounters – who, how many, when and where – that shape the likelihood and incidence of hate. It is not inevitable – despite the evidence from hate crime reporting of ‘hotspots’ or clusters – that hate will occur, just that certain combinations of people, place, time and contexts (material and representational) create the potential for acts of hostility (see Hall, 2019: 254).

Landscapes is a valuable concept too because of its acknowledgment of the inherent and ongoing transformation of the representational and material elements, as landscapes are reshaped, remade and reinterpreted by those who occupy them. Mitchell’s (2003) coda in the quote cited earlier refers to ‘struggle’. Much of the hate (crime) literature centres on the harassment and violence experienced, with little on how individuals and communities respond to and ‘struggle’ over these incidents and the wider contexts that shape them. Hall and Bates (2019) refer to both hate and ‘belonging’ in the title of their article, examining how people with learning disabilities, in response to their experiences of fear and uncertainty in spaces of the city, navigate and negotiate their way through and around streets and public spaces to build alternative, positive landscapes of belonging (see also Clayton et al, Chapter 6). There is hope that hate is not inevitable – it may be expected, it may be embedded, but it does not mean it cannot be effectively challenged, navigated or prevented. Daly and Smith (Chapter 7) identify hate as an issue of rights: ‘It is about freedoms and the ability to take up space’ (p 131). Struggles over landscapes – contesting, re-imagining and re-materializing spaces, identities and representations – are very much part of this assertion of rights in the context of hate. It is a refusal to be written out of and/or be rendered invisible in landscapes, even when it can feel that those landscapes were never constructed with them in mind as equal citizens.

We therefore look to acknowledge both those aspects of everyday life that are defined by hate (in its immediate embodied, material, structural and institutional forms), and the potential to resist, work against and go beyond hate (however temporary or permanent this may be). James and McBride (2022 and Chapter 2) argue for a positive shift in emphasis to consider what people subjected to hostility need to thrive, which they identify as ‘a positive discourse of recognition’ that centres on people’s need for ‘respect, esteem and love in order to flourish’ (James and McBride, 2022: 104). Many of the authors in this collection demonstrate the complexities and perhaps impossibilities of isolating out hate and hostility from other aspects, experiences and emotions of everyday life that are in various ways exclusionary, yet are also the basis for solidarity and progress (see Bowler and Razak, Chapter 11). Fear, hostility, and violence speak not only to an acceptance of the complexities of social harm, and the continuum of experiences of violence, but also the co-existence with other affective states and experiences, including ‘love’ (James and McBride, 2022); and, for example, the fun and excitement of being at university, despite ‘atmospheres’ that convey a contingent sense of danger (Durey et al, Chapter 5).

We become accustomed to the everyday contexts we live in and know, and arguably we therefore get used to the hate that is manifest, either not seeing it or not being surprised when it emerges. The notion of landscape encourages us to examine more closely the stretched fabrics – social, political, cultural, institutional – of the spaces we inhabit, how they shape the lives of individuals and communities, and what can be done to not simply suppress or push hate back but properly recognize the wider and deeper violent contexts and relations it is embedded in and the circumstances and moments within which it emerges.

Organization of the collection

Importantly, the book is not organized as many texts on hate crime are, in sections examining the different ‘protected characteristics’; indeed, as Hopkins draws out in the Afterword (Chapter 13), we acknowledge the intersectionalities of everyday experiences of hate. Instead, the chapters address different aspects of landscapes of hate. The first three chapters examine and critique the concept of ‘hate’ (James and McBride; Vera-Gray and Fileborn; Butler-Warke), including a critical hate studies approach, the potential extension of hate crime legislation to cover misogyny and the representational sense of hate as applied to a specific place. The following five chapters (Durey et al; Clayton et al; Daly and Smith; Wilkin; Goerisch) explore experiences of hate in a range of contexts and everyday spaces, including university campuses, public transport, leisure spaces, places of religious worship and neighbourhoods. The final three chapters (Browne and Nash; Bowler and Razak; Hall) consider different responses to hate, from attempts to challenge its meaning and usage, to emphasizing agency over victimization and to rethinking hate crime policy and practice. While the genesis of the book was a session at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference 2018, the authors are not all geographers, a reflection of a broader emerging appreciation of the potential of applying a spatial lens to the study of hate.

The perspectives and foci of the authors are diverse. It should be noted that not all authors wholly align with or explicitly emphasize the perspective we outline in this introductory chapter. However they all, in different ways, connect with a geographically sensitive take on hate that speaks in different ways to a set of themes: first, the spatial and structural conditions (at a range of scales) under which and through which hate is experienced, which is broader than the interpersonal; second, the limitations of the criminal justice system as a response to the complexity and contextualized nature of hate; third, an appreciation of the diversity of experiences of hate and the spectrum of harm from extreme physically violent acts to everyday hostility; fourth, and relatedly, the fact that there is a continuum both of harm and motivations for hate requires a continuum of responses from criminal justice to community and individual interventions; and fifth, many of the chapters emphasize agency, or at least a recognition of how those victimized actively deal with and respond to or navigate hate. Importantly, all of the authors go further than describing experiences of hate – all are searching for answers. For example, the chapters in the final part of the collection speak to this need to respond and to do better, in ways which look beyond the criminal justice system, and harness the needs and will of those communities subjected to hate and wider spectrums of harm and violence.

Conclusion

We hope this is a timely and thought-provoking collection, gathering authors from different disciplines, covering diverse aspects of this critical topic, and together tracing the spaces and relations of, and responses to, landscapes of hate. We are grateful for all of the authors’ contributions, and hope this collection drives forward debate and change to critique and address hate, within the UK and beyond.