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In this article Professor Perry argues that Plessy v. Ferguson and the de jure segregation it heralded has overdetermined the discourse on Jim Crow. She demonstrates through a historical analysis of activist movements, popular literature, and case law that private law, specifically property and contract, were significant aspects of Jim Crow law and culture. The failure to understand the significance of private law has limited the breadth of juridical analyses of how to respond to racial divisions and injustices. Perry therefore contends that a paradigmatic shift is necessary in scholarly analyses of the Jim Crow era, to include private law, and moreover that this shift will enrich our understandings of both historic and current inequalities.

The archives gathered in this collection engage in the current COVID-19 moment. They do so in order to attempt to understand it, to think and feel with others and to create a collectivity that, beyond the slogan “we are in this together”, seriously contemplates the implications of what it means to be given an opportunity to alter the course of history, to begin to learn to live and educate otherwise.

This paper is collectively written by twelve academics in March 2020, a few weeks into the first closing down of common spaces in 2020, Victoria, Australia. Writing through and against “social isolation”, the twelve quarantine archives in this paper are all at once questions, methods, data, analysis, implications and limitations of these pandemic times and their afterlives.

These quarantine archives reveal a profound sense of dislocation, relatability and concern. Several of the findings in this piece succeed at failing to explain in generalising terms these un-new upending times and, in the process, raise more questions and propose un-named methodologies.

If there is anything this paper could claim as original, it would be its present ability to respond to the current times as a historical moment of intensity. At times when “isolation”, “self” and “contained” are the common terms of reference, the “collective”, “connected” and “socially engaged” nature of this paper defies those very terms. Finally, the socially transformative desire archived in each of the pieces is a form of future history-making that resists the straight order with which history is often written and made.

The purpose of this paper is to test if activism by civil society organisations (CSOs hereafter) in successfully mobilising resistance to the Government of Ghana “collateralization” of gold resources and other mineral royalties in 2020 (dubbed the “Agyapa deal”) espouse tenets of Foucault’s (2009) “governmentality” and “counter conduct” dispositions.

This paper draws on Dean’s (1999) discussion of government analytics to highlight how CSO activism can simultaneously challenge government practice and share in it. This paper uses an evidence-based and interpretive qualitative content analysis approach. This paper relied on secondary data sources from 1 January 2020 to 21 August 2021. Data collection involved an extensive review of secondary materials concerning the Agyapa deal, relying on the author's local knowledge to identify the likely sources of information.

This paper exposes how the counteractions of CSOs, underpinned by the desire for so-called “good governance”, invariably extend governmentality and other neo-liberal ideals. In this case, CSOs' actions espoused the ideals of marketisation, extended governable spaces, engrained subjectivation and treated citizens as incapable of formulating and advancing their desires without overt help. Secondly, it provides evidence that massive deployment of accountability and other calculable practices, however wilful, complement efforts at shaping public opinion.

CSO counter-conduct is merely symbolic rather than substantive. Substantive counter-conduct requires the citizenry to actively lead the problematisation process, holding CSOs accountable for acting on their behalf. The current trajectory where CSO accountability is primarily to their international financiers, predominantly neo-liberal advocates, raises questions about “in whose interest they seek another form of governance?” Practically, the splinter of interests that may emanate from citizenry directly led counter-conduct can affect garnering the critical mass needed to force a policy change. That said, however, there is a case for citizenry “making themselves” rather than “being made” within the governmentality process.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first application of the Foucauldian and Dean framework to a data set from Ghana.

Black feminist scholars describe resistance as Black women’s efforts to push back against ideologies and stereotypes that objectify them as the other. The contested sites are often neighborhoods, schools, the media, corporations, and government agencies. W. E. B. DuBois and Audre Lorde both spoke about a dual consciousness among Black women, and the larger Black population, that included the power of self-definition. This particular study centers the lived experiences of African American women living in Englewood, a neighborhood with high levels of violence in Chicago. Using data from 93 in-depth interviews, this study illustrates Black mothers’ efforts to resist ideologies and stereotypes about their mothering, beauty, socioeconomic status, etc. This study also centers their voices and lived experiences to capture the power they express by engaging in self-definition. Self-definition includes descriptions of themselves, their current situations and the changes they would like to see in their neighborhoods and the larger U.S. society. This chapter ends by discussing the implications of the findings in relation to two programs developed to help these mothers work toward neighborhood change called DREAM (Developing Responses to Poverty through Education And Meaning), and De.SH(ie) (Designing Spaces of Hope (interiors and exteriors)), a collaborative which seeks to remedy the paradoxical existence of spaces of hope and spaces of despair through an innovative approach that melds Architecture, African American Studies, Sociology, and beyond.

Purpose – This chapter will explore how Jean Quan was elected as Oakland’s first Asian American and woman mayor and the numerous challenges to lead the city’s governing coalition. Quan sought to build a diverse coalition to run the city. She has devoted her efforts to those in greatest need as she navigates the multiracial and multidynamic politics, and build her administration as progressive, inclusive, and universal.Design – This research uses voting records, U.S. Census data, media accounts, and interviews with local participants to study the research questions for this chapter; how and why did Jean Quan get elected as Mayor, and what has been her approach to leading the city’s governing coalition?Findings – This chapter’s preliminary findings after 18 months in office are that Mayor Quan has stabilized her governing coalition and has gotten back on track to begin to achieve her campaign goals.Research limitations and future research – The major limitation of this chapter’s research is Mayor Quan has been in office only 18 months, which is a short time to study Quan’s governing coalition and whether she will sustain this coalition in the coming years. Future research is needed to study how Quan compares to recent Oakland mayors and to other Asian American local elected leaders of large cities.Impact of research – This research builds upon previous research on Asian Pacific Islander elected officials at the local level and adds to the growing body of research on minority mayors and local elected officials.Value of research – As the United States grows increasingly diverse those who govern its cities have also become more diverse in the 21st century. This research makes an important contribution to the study of a fast growing population APIs and their elected leaders.

The early childhood education classroom space is intrinsic to developing localized youth culture. Through a four-month-long qualitative research project in a space that focused on meeting the most rudimentary child needs due to staffing and fund restrictions, young children’s creativity through the arts was stunted. In a classroom setting focused on structure and strict routine at the forefront, children’s creative expression was observed through independent action and creative twists on order, instead of through activities deliberately designed to nurture creativity and expression. Since the children at the site did not seem to regularly participate in any kind of art making, or unstructured creative expression, my focus instead became the fundamentals of creativity and how young children in the classroom demonstrated choice making and agency. The objective of this study was how to understand the space from a child-centered approach to better project how to include art making, creative education, and creative expression within early childhood education sites that do not currently employ it in their curriculum. This chapter aims to situate how young children created a culture of creative expression within the boundaries of a structured early education classroom when top-down teacher interaction was at a minimum, and open-ended, non-directive materials were provided.

In this chapter, we dismantle the current educational rhetoric that pervasively characterizes Black children as being at-risk, deficient, or underachievers. Instead, we replace this deficit-oriented rhetoric with one that encapsulates the cultural and educational excellence that inspires Black children to reach their potential. First, we provide an overview of the current educational landscape for Black children and articulate by whom and how Black children are being educated. Next, we then define educational success and excellence within the context of an African-centric perspective of holistic development and wellness. Then, we highlight programs, schools, and approaches that have been successful in educating Black children. Finally, we identify key principles and guidelines in educating Black children that will have educational, research, and policy implications.

Organizations in today's changing environment face significant challenges, requiring continual innovation. Understanding oneself from the employee's perspective is paramount, especially in organizations and businesses, transforming all levels, accommodating new work paradigms and adapting to the post-pandemic business world. The authors examine the employees' critical dimensions, self-concept and resilience through self-reported studies to ascertain the impact on their performance in the organization. Self-concept, a multidimensional knowledge structure, implies the individual's description and examination, including psychological characteristics, attributes and skills. On the other hand, resilience is adapting appropriately to adversity, challenges and stressful situations and emerging unscathed. Resilience additionally leads to profound personal growth and acceptance of reality. It also endows the individual's sense of identity over time. It provides insights into work behavior and outcomes and fosters a positive psychological perspective to improve performance. Job performance is an observable individual performance that adds value and enables organizational goal achievement. To sum job performance is an achievement-related behavior. The research study examines the relationship between employee self-concept, resilience and performance elements (task, contextual and counterproductive work behavior).

Cross-sectional data were collected from 224 employees from the retail sector to test the hypotheses among self-concept, employee performance elements and resilience. SPSS 21.0 was used, and the authors conducted reliability, correlation and regression analysis using statistical tools to analyze the mediating effect.

Self-concept and employee performance elements have significant relationships. The mediating effect of resilience on the relationship between self-concept and counterproductive work behavior and self-concept and contextual performance is significant. In contrast, resilience does not impact the relationship between self-concept and task performance.

The authors examined a framework of untested variables, namely self-concept and the different factors of performance (task, contextual and counterproductive behavior). The authors investigated the mediating effect of resilience in the model, which was not previously explored.