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Media power plays a role in determining which news is told, who is listened to and how subject matter is treated, resulting in some stories being reported in depth while others remain cursory and opaque. This chapter examines how domestic violence and abuse (DVA) is reported in mainstream and social media encompassing newspapers, television and digital platforms. In the United Kingdom, newspapers have freedom to convey particular views on subjects such as DVA as, unlike radio and television broadcasting, they are not required to be impartial (Reeves, 2015).

The gendered way DVA is represented in the UK media has been a long-standing concern. Previous research into newspaper representations of DVA, including our own (Lloyd & Ramon, 2017), found evidence of victim blaming and sexualising violence against women. This current study assesses whether there is continuity with earlier research regarding how victims of DVA, predominantly women, are portrayed as provoking their own abuse and, in cases of femicide, their characters denigrated by some in the media with impunity (Soothill & Walby, 1991). The chapter examines how certain narratives on DVA are constructed and privileged in sections of the media while others are marginalised or silenced. With the rise in digital media, the chapter analyses the changing patterns of news media consumption in the UK and how social media users are responding to DVA cases reported in the news. Through discourse analysis of language and images, the potential messages projected to media consumers are considered, together with consumer dialogue and interaction articulated via online and social media platforms.

Rough sex - or what is referred to in this chapter as ‘consensual aggression and violence during sex’ (CAVS) - has been the focus, in the United Kingdom and internationally, of some attention and also concern. The latter derives especially from criminal justice proceedings relating to incidents where male suspects have seriously or fatally injured another individual, usually female, and then made claims - that are widely believed to be false - that the incident was a ‘sex game gone wrong’. Despite the importance of this subject, there is little or no understanding of the state of knowledge surrounding CAVS. This chapter outlines results from what is believed to be the first scoping (literature) review of CAVS in the general population. The review was based largely on a search, during June and July 2021, of 15 major databases using 18 search terms, which was conducted in accordance with the JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis. A total of 74 sources were identified. The research reviewed covered a quite large number and diverse range of areas in respect of CAVS, comprising: conceptualization; attitudes; extent; context, dynamics and nature; explanations; CAVS-related pornography; effects; alleged CAVS; policy and practice responses; methodological weaknesses; and future research needs. Overall, the review highlights two distinct perspectives on CAVS: in the first, individuals chose to take part in CAVS, which they like and enjoy; in the second, individuals, especially women and girls, have experiences of CAVS that are non-consensual or unwanted, and which they find upsetting, frightening or scary.

To resurrect and renew the tradition of the early Frankfurt School, whose of Marxist–Hegelian dialectical approach to understanding the societal conditions of its emergence – post World War I Germany, the rise of fascism, New Deal politics, the defeat of fascism, and the subsequent rise of consumer society – remains relevant to studying present circumstances, stressing the cultural dimension of capitalism, the proliferation of alienation, ideology, and mass media, and, finally, the nature of the society-character/subjectivity nexus.

Employing a comparative historical approach to the study of alienation, ideology, and character, to articulate social-theoretical standards for critical social research today.

Global civilization faces an array of crises, beginning with economies whose lack of growth or stability the ability of a large segment of the world’s population to obtain jobs conducive to a decent standard of life. With governments’ inability to implement public policies to buffer instabilities, cultural values are in crisis as well.

Reviving the framework of early Frankfurt School Critical Theory is necessary to promote a better world.

Reconstructing key concerns of the Frankfurt School is conducive to critiquing this tradition’s recent preoccupation with communication and recognition, and demonstrates how the first generation’s legacy helps us understand contemporary social movements of the Right and the Left, in ways that are similar to the Weimar Republic in Germany. Both the Right and the Left being products of legitimation crises that trigger a desire for regressive or progressive social change – the Right would restore a mythical past, the Left would foster a new social order based on humanistic concerns.

The East India Company can lay claim to being the world’s first company whose operations involved systematic organization of multiple countries. It was a pioneer and innovator: it was one of the first companies to offer limited liability to its shareholders; it laid the foundations of the British empire; it spawned Company Man; it developed its own ‘university’. It was a trader, merchant, mercenary, military force and civil administrator; a pioneer bureaucracy as well as being a lean operation. Using an analytic lens drawn from contemporary discussion on MNCs the article reviews the role of the East India Company over its life and draws parallels with contemporary MNCs.

Commodity racism, as conceived by Anne McClintock (1995), describes a novel cultural formation, binding difference, power, and consumption to one another, a creation at the interface of imperialism and industrialism in the late 19th century that offered an emergent language to simultaneously make sense of difference, fashion identity, cultivate desire, and sell stuff. Importantly, as it remapped the world, placing peoples and cultures in ranked social locations, it also reconfigured gender, the body, and taste as it rerouted the flows between public and private spheres. At its core, as expressed quite clearly in the soap advertisements McClintock analyzes, commodity racism stated the (then) accepted facts of white supremacy, underscoring the propriety of imperial expansion and settling, in many ways, for consumers hailed through it the racial question of the day.

The use of art as resistance is well documented in academic scholarship. Gregerson (2007) acknowledged that taken for granted realities and histories are rewritten through lyrical poetic uses of pauses, words, and articulations. Ortiz and Raquel (2005, p. 107) explored the portfolio of Puerto Rican artist Alicea and concluded that he “successfully researches and rescues broken pieces of history to construct new images…he rewrites history through his portfolios, offering us a version of history that invites us to learn about and to question what has previously been written and presented” (Ortiz & Raquel, 2005, p. 107). Addressing black resistance through soul music, Yancy (2004, p. 289) explains that “style is the dynamic expression or articulation of the motif of overcoming…we need to move within the space of soul and style where our collective languaging is a commentary on both” (emphasis added).