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The pandemic forced the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to transition to online video mediation (OVM) in place of its existing in-person mediation (IPM) model. Using measurements from their 2000 evaluation of EEOC IPM, plus new measures related to the elements of OVM, the authors surveyed 2,387 EEOC mediation participants during the pandemic, obtaining responses from 1,234 (53%).

OVM performed as well or better on the four measures of procedural fairness, overall mediation fairness, satisfaction with the results, and willingness to use the process again. Sixty-seven percent of the parties favored OVM over IPM. Responses to a closed-end survey that provided for additional open-end responses indicate that OVM is seen by the parties as having a more convenient location, lower costs, and greater flexibility. The results establish that OVM provides greater access to justice due to safe space and to the willingness of additional employers to engage in OVM.

A growing number of human rights NGOs have placed international volunteers in conflict zones from Guatemala and Colombia to Palestine and Iraq. This study samples from contemporary high-risk transnational activists and highlights the variation in biographical steps taken toward the shared outcome of participation in human rights work (HRW). Data was collected through 6 weeks of participant observation in Israel-Palestine, 21 in-depth interviews, and 28 shorter focused interviews with human rights workers (N=49). Oversampling from the International Solidarity Movement reveals how the unique constraints and opportunities presented by a particular conflict zone and NGO culture impacts self-selection into HRW. Grounded theory and Boolean methodology aided in identifying four main pathways (the nonviolent activist, peace church, anarchist, and solidarity pathways) to HRW as well as biographical patterns and complexities that have been underemphasized in the existing literature. These include the salience of transformative events and attitude changes in the process of constructing a cosmopolitan identity and committing to high-risk transnational activism.

Children are often side-lined in both national and international provisions. Whilst the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development mentions children, it does so not as World citizens but rather as subjects; this replicates their position in most state constitutions. The chapter considers the use of Amartya Sen's justice theory to deliver the 2030 Agenda to children who offend. For Sen, justice requires the identification and removal of sociostructural barriers which limit the life chances and impede the ability of many children to pursue legitimate and meaningful goals. He prioritises choice for all, including children. This chapter uses these ideals to consider the delivery of justice whilst respecting human agency. It takes as its example Wales, where children are central to a sustainable future and embraced as citizens with full human and fundamental rights. In particular, the Welsh Government's emphasis on ‘universal’ entitlements places a moral and political imperative on agencies to promote the well-being of all children, including those in conflict with the law; it seeks to deliver well-being to all children. The Welsh example is suggested as a just solution that might be replicated elsewhere and so result in a true delivery of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

Child marriage, or marriage between two individuals when one or both are under the age of 18, is legal and practiced in 48 US states. Despite this, child marriage is commonly understood as only occurring in the Global South. Child marriage laws shed light on the paradoxical policies that most US states enforce regarding young people’s sexual agency. By legalizing sex between adults and minors within the institution of marriage, child marriage provides exception to statutory rape laws, which classify sex between minors and adults as sexual violence. In this chapter, I draw on feminist and queer theories to critically examine the racialized and gendered effects of these contradictory state policies. First, I analyze US age of consent laws’ reliance on an adult/child binary that constructs adults and minors as essentially and radically different. Second, I explore efforts to challenge the adult/child binary, looking at how frameworks for understanding sexual violence that are rooted in an adult/child binary can exacerbate young people’s vulnerability to sexual violence. Third, I discuss feminist efforts to theorize sexual violence outside of binary logics and their implications for research on child marriage. I conclude by discussing areas for future research on child marriage that attend to the racialized and gendered inequalities that undergird the state regulation of youth sexualities.

In this chapter we share research findings from our collaborative research project ‘PASAR: Participatory Arts and Social Action in Research’ (http://fass.open.ac.uk/research/projects/pasar), which combines participatory action research methods of participatory theatre and walking methods in order to understand the way in which racialized migrant women challenge their exclusion and subjugation in the context of the UK. The situation of migrant families in the UK is currently characterized by the ‘hostile environment’ policies. This policy ‘is a sprawling web of immigration controls embedded in the heart of our public services and communities. The Government requires employers, landlords, private sector workers, NHS staff and other public servants to check a person's immigration status before they can offer them a job, housing, healthcare or other support’ (Liberty, 2018, p. 5). The currently hegemonic political discourse, views migrants as outsiders to the nation and challenges their right to access welfare. Migrant families are cast as outsiders to citizenship, challenging the social and cultural cohesion of the nation. Indeed, UK immigration policies render it difficult for migrant families to secure their social and economic reproduction. Against this backdrop, the research explores how racialized migrant families develop their subjugated knowledges to claim belonging and participate in the society they live in. In this chapter, we share the key methodological findings, challenges and benefits of working with a PAR approach for co-producing transformatory knowledge with migrant families and advocacy organizations.

In line with the aims of this book, we reflect on the transformatory potential of research and knowledge for the common good through ‘alternative collaborative system of co-researchers and co-learners engaged in dialogue with civil society and social movements’ (Bacal, Introduction p. 1, see also Andersen and Frandsen, this volume).

This study investigates whether or not accounting and legal decision-makers at publicly traded US firms exhibit a professional affiliation bias with respect to their selection of business service providers. Executives at NYSE or NASDAQ firms who were affiliated with the accounting profession, the legal profession, or neither profession indicated their likelihood of using one of three randomly assigned types of firms (i.e., a CPA firm, a law firm, or a firm with both CPA and attorney partners) to provide five selected business services. The five business services represent the range of accounting and legal services that firms often outsource: audit, tax representation, mergers and acquisitions, trade regulation/interstate commerce, and litigation. We find that executive level decision-makers at publicly traded US firms do exhibit a professional affiliation bias in the selection of business service providers and that this professional affiliation bias is stronger in attorneys than in CPAs. The fact that all respondents were NYSE or NASDAQ executives, rather than students or another surrogate population, provides additional relevance and generalizability to our findings. Identifying this bias can help executives avoid suboptimal initial selection decisions and/or inaccurate performance evaluations of external business service providers.