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In this chapter, I reflect on the place of hope in activist criminology. Offering reflections from my own activist scholarship, this chapter draws out the ways in which hope structures and sustains our work across temporal frames and distinct modes of academic practice. This chapter develops a hopeful analysis of lineage, memory and resistance, reflecting on my participatory research with the Tamil community in London, and reflects on the revival of utopian thought in criminological scholarship. Hopeful imaginaries of an abolitionist future inform my scholar-activism with Reclaim Holloway – an abolitionist collective formed to influence the redevelopment of the Holloway prison site. I describe this future-oriented work before considering hope as a practice in the present, focusing on ‘pedagogies of hope’ as activist criminology in the classroom.

Using the context of a farm holiday venue, the purpose of this study is to empirically test whether textual references can have significant influences on potential consumers' affective responses and interest in advertisements.

In a between-subjects experiment, a reference to sunshine (the underlined phrase in the following narrative) was inserted into a Facebook advertisement for a farm holiday venue: “Relax and Rejuvenate for a couple of days on our farm. Great food, fun, and sunshine … See More”.

Results indicate that a reference to sunshine significantly improves consumers' affective responses to the advertisement and significantly increases their interest (propensity to click “see more”). This study also examines the potential influence of a textual reference to fresh air as well as fresh air in combination with sunshine. No statistically significant results are found with the fresh air reference.

While a number of studies have examined text-based sensory details in marketing stimuli (Magnini and Gaskins, 2010; Torto, 2016), the notion of inserting textual references to fresh air and/or sunshine in advertising has not been empirically examined in the body of the existing literature.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between economic freedom and Islamic rural banks' efficiency in the case of Indonesia.

The study covers 40 Islamic rural banks in 34 Indonesian regions from 2014 to 2020. Tobit regression is utilized to expose the impact of economic freedom on the efficiency of Islamic rural banks, and nonparametric frontier data envelopment analysis is used to acquire banks' technical efficiency.

The findings reveal that overall economic freedom has a strong favorable impact on the efficiency of Islamic rural banks. The study’s breakdown components suggest that business freedom, government spending and investment freedom are favorable indicators, whereas government integrity and tax burden are negative indicators, and all indicators agree with previous studies.

This research can serve as a guideline for Islamic rural bank management in terms of maintaining financial efficiency. The government should think about the ramifications of financial sector liberalization and reforms, according to these findings. When financial intermediaries operate in a less constrained environment, they are more likely to pursue competitive practices that increase their operating rate and other efficiency metrics. Finally, academics might utilize this information to investigate the economic flexibility of Islamic rural banks.

The novelty of this study is in using data envelopment analysis and Tobit regression to identify economic freedom and Islamic rural banks' efficiency. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the study of the role of economic freedom in Islamic rural bank's efficiency is limited, particularly in the context of Indonesia.

This article aims to contribute to the literature linking the three pillars of sustainable development with the human development field. To do so, it analyzes how a group of stakeholders that participate in collective action for nature governance in Segre–Rialb, Catalonia, build collective capabilities and reconcile a holistic sustainable development with human development and collective well-being. The analysis is performed using nature governance and the capability approach theories. In particular, the framework providing the lenses to examine the collective action for nature governance is based on Elinor Ostrom's Institutional and Analysis framework and the collective capabilities concept.

The study is based on documental analysis (legal document namely and online resources available in Catalonian website) and a few online interviews since all fieldwork was canceled due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

The case study reveals that collective action for nature governance has a twofold function: it materializes holistic sustainability and produces capabilities, reconciling sustainable and human development. Therefore, the research proves that people who work together to govern nature can boost a holistic perspective of sustainability and reconcile sustainable and human development.

First, this work aims to reconcile sustainable and human development fields that have been usually separated in academia, contributing to the research body that has attempted to relate human development and sustainability. This analysis uses a holistic perspective of sustainability, including the social, economic and environmental aspects connecting them to human development; this was not deeply explored before. Finally, the rigorous documental analysis, namely legal texts that allow reaching conclusions, is relevant since all fieldworks were canceled in 2021.

This paper analyzes the effect of institutional quality and economic freedom on investment and economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

Focusing on a panel of 27 countries, the study employed the panel fixed and random effect models to analyze data spanning from 2005 to 2018. The study also employed the Wu–Hausman test to determine if the endogeneity problem exists in the model.

The findings of the study show that individually, an improvement in economic freedom stimulates economic growth while the improvement in institutional quality is effective in spurring investment. However, the interaction effect of improvement in institutional quality and economic freedom is the stimulation of both investment and economic growth. The findings are robust to alternative model specifications.

The study implies that for SSA countries to effectively achieve higher investment and economic growth outcomes, there is the need to simultaneously strengthen institutional quality and improve economic freedom. Focusing on either of the factors without the other leads to less desirable growth and investment outcomes.

The study examined the combined influence of institutional quality and economic freedom on investment and growth in SSA. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study has investigated this in the context of SSA.

This study explores the role of previous occupational identity in the formation of the (new) teacher identity of vocational teachers. The focus is on how vocational teachers discover their teaching identity, how they describe the connection between their previous occupation and teacher identity and how they describe a competent member of the teaching community.

The theoretical approach is inspired by Communities of Practice (CoP) theory. More specifically, the realignment between socially demanded competence in the profession and personal experience as well as identification with the teaching community are discussed. The research material comes from 14 interviews with vocational teachers in different disciplines.

Findings indicate first that the process of professional identity (trans)formation was initiated by finding one's teaching self when the individuals became aware of their interest in teaching by discovering that they had already achieved some sort of teaching-related competence. Second, individuals had been connecting their professional identities – finding common competence between their previous occupation and the teaching role. Third, vocational teachers experienced legitimising their competence and their new identity with reference to what their new CoP instructed as important competence (regime of competence).

While teachers' vocational competence is not scrutinised, their teaching competence needs to be constantly proved. This imbalance often leads to teachers returning to an aspect of their identity that is well established – their vocational competence. Looking back to their occupational competences constitutes a realignment backwards, when teachers attempt to serve their new professional goal by drawing on old competence.

There is ample evidence that financial market development leads to economic growth. If improving labor rights can be shown to positively influence equity markets, then that, in turn, will lead to economic growth. The finance literature has examined the impact of a broader metric, namely, the Economic Freedom Index, on equity returns worldwide, and the evidence is mixed. This study focuses on one dimension of economic freedom: labor rights. Specifically, the study analyzes the impact of labor rights on national equity market indexes using the Labor Rights Index developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Fraser Institute (FI). Using panel regression analysis for 49 countries (for the OECD Index) and 76 countries (for the FI Index) over the period 1985–2014, the study finds that changes in labor rights have a statistically significant positive impact on equity returns, after controlling for business-cycle effects and time-fixed effects. The study also finds significant differences in the labor–rights–equity returns relationship between developed and less developed economies.