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This paper exposes, analyses, and challenges the revanchism (Smith, 1996) exhibited by ruling elites in austerity Britain. After recapitulating the concept of revanchism in its original form, and discussing some critiques and extensions, it scrutinizes the emergence of revanchist political economy in Britain, with particular reference to the UK housing crisis. In order to explain how revanchism has become so ingrained in British society, the paper analyses the production of ignorance via the activation of class and place stigma, where free market think tanks play a crucial role in deflecting attention away from the causes of housing crisis. It is argued that the production of ignorance carves an economic and political path for gentrification on a scale never before seen in the United Kingdom, where speculation, rentier capitalist extraction, and the global circulation of capital in urban land markets is resulting in staggering fortunes for those expropriating socially created use values.

The purpose of this chapter is to critically examine the extensive calls for enhanced evidence within the sport-for-development field. The chapter questions whether these are appropriate and realistic.

The chapter utilizes current literature to deconstruct the assumptions that increased evidence will legitimize the field of sport-for-development, improve practice and enhance future policy. The authors’ own experiences, working as external evaluators, are also drawn upon to critique the value of current “evidence.”

The chapter illustrates how current calls for evidence are somewhat misguided and are unlikely to fully realize the intended consequence of validating sport-for-development or improving future practice. Utilizing personal reflections, the impact that Global North/Global South power imbalances have on data is discussed, suggesting that this will rarely lead to data that provide a detailed understanding of work in practice.

The chapter builds on the work of other authors illustrating the importance of disconnecting research from evidence and monitoring and evaluation in the sport-for-development field.

The chapter utilizes previous literature but also provides a rarely available personal perspective on the issue of evidence that continues to permeate the rationale behind undertaking research within sport-for-development.

As a network analyst, I am fascinated by social interactions. The ways in which people connect with one another and exercise power and authority by deploying different forms of capital. This piece returns to the underlying and changing kinship network structure of the village of Ambridge over time, explores the role of ‘kin-keeping’ as deployed by the matriarchs Peggy and Jill. I am most interested in the ways in which gender as performed by the women of the village intersects with abundance or lack of other forms of capital, and how far inequalities persist and why. It is clear that there is an intergenerational power dynamic at play in the spreading or hoarding of the various dimensions of power layered together and how forms of capital intersect for protection or precarity. Social and cultural capital at birth in the village is defining in terms of both ‘serious’ life outcomes as well as how more minor infractions and foibles are viewed. Further, I return to discuss how my various network-based predictions have fared over time. The Headlam Hypothesis and the fate of Ed Grundy – King of Ambridge are revisited and their durability explored.

Post-apartheid Africa and post-Soviet Georgia implemented a variety of education reforms since the 1990s. Many of these reforms exhibit recognizable similarities despite the significant contextual differences between the two countries. This paper examined the school decentralization process framed by the world culture theory and compared how the enactment of reforms was influenced by country contexts. It focused on the development of regional administrative units and school governance in these two countries to illustrate how specific reforms may have structural similarities but be functionally different. The scope and depth of the functions of new educational structures also play an important role in understanding how they respond to local needs.