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Feminist criminologists are well acquainted with how their research on sexual harms and gendered forms of victimisation may serve as powerful levers for punitive agendas. In recent years, culturalist interpretations of sexual violence have become key themes in debates on migration and integration in liberal welfare democracies, such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden. In this, complex issues of gender, ethnicity and power are involved, and the balancing of these, both analytically and ethically, poses a challenge to feminists in their attempts to contribute to social change. This chapter will, based on examples from debates in Sweden, present and discuss how argumentation about sexual freedom and integrity is enlisted in attempts to reinforce borders and ideas about dangerous Others, and outline how a fruitful meeting between criminology and feminism can advance the scholarship on sexual violence.

This chapter considers the value of visual analyses for studying social movements through a study of pro-life uses of images of the fetus in the Australian abortion debate. In doing so, it points to important connections between the study of emotions in politics and visual approaches to social movement studies. It also contributes new primary material on the politics of reproduction through its study of the Australian pro-life movement, on which little has been written. Through discursive analysis of visual materials and practices embedded in three case studies, I demonstrate the range of strategies being used; their selection was informed by a wider survey of available records of pro-life uses of images of the fetus over the past four decades. Emotion is a powerful element of politics, and images of the fetus challenge the emotions, and hence the humanity, of the viewer. I identify three major themes represented in pro-life images of the fetus: the wonder of life; the human form and human frailty of the fetus; and the barbarity of modern society. The meanings of these images are built on our parallel understandings of both sight and emotion as immediate and unmediated. Moreover, the ambiguities and dualities of images of the fetus make their themes more, rather than less, persuasive.

This chapter focuses on a conceptual understanding of democracy and values education in teacher education, taking the perspective that education, of necessity, must encompass broader purposes of qualification, socialization and subjectification and that the relationship between them is characterized by interdependence. This chapter analyzes two aspects of teacher quality: first, the importance of values and the understanding of and approaches to values and democracy; second, variations in conceptual understandings within a particular educational field (teacher education). The study maps what teacher educators and institutional leaders for teacher education programs have to say about democracy and values education in relation to teacher preparation given the context of democratic education reforms in the postwar period. This chapter addresses issues such as the readiness among teachers to teach democracy and values as an overarching and qualitative aspect of the teaching profession. This study finds that, on the one hand, there is strong curricular support for democracy and related values education in schools and, on the other hand, a mixed landscape in teacher education. The situation within teacher education suggests an embracement of these issues but with a high degree of conceptual ambiguity and vagueness.

The essay studies the introduction and use of audio-visual media in contemporary Swedish courtroom praxis and how this affects social interaction and the constitution of judicial space. The background to the study is the increasing use of video technology in law courts during the last decennium, and in particular the reformed trial code regulating court proceedings introduced in Sweden in 2008. The reform is called A Modern Trial (En modernare rättegång, Proposition 2004/05:131). An important innovation is that testimonies in lower level court proceedings now are video recorded and, in case of an appeal trial, then are screened in the appellate court. The study of social interaction and the constitution of judicial space in the essay is based in part on an ethnographic study of the Stockholm appellate court (Svea hovrätt) conducted in the fall 2010; in part on a study of the preparatory works to the legal reform; and in part on research on how media technology affects social interaction and the constitution of space and place.