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At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Laurel Hubbard made history as the first openly transgender woman to compete in an individual sport. In the weeks leading up to and following her performance, hundreds of original news articles were written about her – few of which fully supported her participation. In this chapter, we detail our content analysis of written news media created in the weeks surrounding Hubbard's Olympic debut. Using Ahmed's (2000) theorization of the discursive creation of ‘strangers’, we relay how journalists' usage of imagery and narrative structures framed Hubbard as an ‘other’, separate from other elite athletes and undeserving of her status as an Olympian – serving to powerfully shape public perceptions of Hubbard's identity, humanity and her right to compete in the sport that she loves.

Measures to tackle anti-social behaviour and nuisance to residents, particularly in urban areas, have been a major focus of UK Government policies over recent years. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and subsequent legislation such as the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 introduced stricter powers, particularly through the use of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs), as a means of addressing problems in residential neighbourhoods. While there is clearly a need to tackle problem behaviour that impacts seriously on the quality of life of community members, evidence also suggests that behaviour previously tolerated by many is now targeted through enforcement measures, leading to increased polarisation and stigmatisation of some groups (Rowlands, 2005). At the same time, national agendas around Neighbourhood and Civic Renewal¹ aim to minimise conflicts in neighbourhood renewal areas through fostering understanding and building bridges between different groups within diverse communities. There is thus some tension between the different agendas which impacts on how such issues are addressed within localities.

This paper shows how a shorter fecundity horizon for females (a biological constraint) leads to age and educational disparities between husbands and wives. Empirical support is based on data from a natural experiment commencing before and ending after China’s 1980 one-child law. The results indicate that fertility in China declined by about 1.2–1.4 births per woman as a result of China’s anti-natalist policies. Concomitantly spousal age and educational differences narrowed by approximately 0.5–1.0 and 1.0–1.6 years, respectively. These decreases in the typical husband’s age and educational advantages are important in explaining the division of labor in the home, often given as a cause for the gender wage gap. Indeed, as fertility declined, which has been the historical trend in most developed countries, husband-wife age and educational differences diminished leading to less division of labor in the home and a smaller gender wage disparity. Unlike other models of division of labor in the home which rely on innately endogenous factors, this paper’s theory is based on an exogenous biological constraint.

This paper shows that the collector (like the flâneur) is a decisive character in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, specifically in the manifestation of the historical materialist, yet the paper is not so much about the collector or collecting as it is about the commodity and the experience thereof in consumer society.

The section “The Dream World of Mass Culture” discusses mass culture and the central problem of commodity fetishism as Benjamin sees it. The section “A Physiognomist of ‘the World of Things’” discusses the critical task of the historical materialist actualized and made possible through an activity akin to collecting. The section “Collecting, Child’s Play, and Seeing Similarities” illuminates the central importance of the activity of collecting for Benjamin’s research regarding mass culture, historical materialism, and the experience of modernity itself. The final section explains and fleshes out the central concepts of the mimetic faculty and physiognomic perception for Benjamin.

I find that, ultimately, to understand the ability of the historical materialist to witness history critically, according to Benjamin, is to understand the historical materialist as a collector. To understand the revolutionary activity of collecting is to understand collecting as a manifestation of a fundamental activity of human nature, the inclination to become “like” or to become “similar.” But such an impulse grounds, for Benjamin, not only the activity of collecting but also collective experience, the collective conscious, mass culture, and the essence of the commodity itself as a sociocultural artifact. The paper demonstrates that the mimetic faculty is the primary human faculty Benjamin focused on in his theory of experience.

The originality of this paper lies in the fact that it illustrates the primary importance of the theory of the mimetic faculty, the notion of physiognomic perception, and the work of Heinz Werner to Walter Benjamin’s theory of commodity fetishism that to date has been largely underdeveloped. But, more importantly, the paper shows that Benjamin’s theory of experience could illuminate a path toward developing a theory of experience within a fundamental philosophical anthropology.

Although Leutwiler's initiative in taking to the field has been well-documented by scholars and the University of Illinois alike, the role of the UPenn figure, “Benjamin Franklin” or alternately in Illinois narratives “William Penn,” has received little attention (Spindel, 2001; King & Springwood, 2001). Leutwiler's adoption of the “Chief Illiniwek” persona, which will be discussed in-depth later, was not a response to inquiries by the UPenn band who hoped to utilize their articulated personae of “Benjamin Franklin” during a halftime skit as other scholars have suggested. Leutwiler adopted the untitled personae that became the basis for the “Chief” two years earlier during experiences as a Boy Scout and for performances at his alma mater, Urbana High School.⁶ Although the University of Pennsylvania solicited the Illinois band and assistant director Raymond Dvorak in particular, to create its own figure to interact with “Benjamin Franklin” in a show of “good sportsmanship,” Lester Leutwiler was already performing as an “Indian” before the supposed 1926 inception.⁷ In fact, his performance was so well known to his classmates at Urbana High School that the yearbook contained multiple references to Leutwiler's penchant for dressing as his Indian persona at school events (Urbana High School, 1925). Importantly, then the UPenn invitation can be read as the opening of a new arena for performances of Indianness – the sports field – not as an inciting event in the creation of “Chief Illiniwek.” Focusing on “Chief Illiniwek” as a sports mascot has eroded the larger cultural context of performances of Indianness that was being undertaken in local and national venues including Urbana High School.

Risk notification is part of a focus on preventive medicine that is dominant in contemporary Western biomedicine. Genomics has forecasted great advances in alleviating disease and prolonging human life, moving from a reactive to a preventative practice. However, in doing so, genomics redraws boundaries, potentially classifying all people as possible carriers of malfunctioning genes. This chapter presents a critical review of the practice of ‘risk notification’ as undertaken by familial cancer genetic testing services, focusing on the right to be informed or not to be informed and implications of knowing.

With backgrounds in anthropology, psychology and public health, the authors draw upon literature around risk notification from a range of disciplines.

In the context of familial cancer, clients may be asked to provide contact information for biological family members to inform them of their potential genetic risk. Through these processes a number of tensions and issues may emerge that relate to fundamental bioethical principles. The ability and decision whether to know, or conversely, to not know, is ethically fraught. We consider the roles and rights of family members and clients, as well as the broader goal of population health.

While much attention has been devoted to clients’ right to know in the context of medical research and treatment, relatively little work has examined the right not to know and adverse consequences of knowing. This review addresses concerns which have rarely been critically examined and debated in the context of risk notification of biological family members.

Nineteenth-century animal protectionists endeavored to frame laws that gave animals direct legal protections, and they conducted large-scale public education campaigns to define the harm of cruelty to animals in terms of animals’ own suffering. However, animal suffering was only one of the many possible definitions of cruelty's harms, and when judges and other legal interpreters interpreted animal protection laws, they focused less on animal suffering and more on human morality and the dangers of cruelty to human society. Battling over the definition of human guilt for cruelty, protectionists and judges drew and redrew the boundaries of the law's reach and the moral community.

Since the late 1980s we’ve been inspired by feminist theorizing to interrogate our field of organization studies, looking critically at the questions it asks, at the underlying premises of the theories allowing for such questions, and by articulating alternative premises as a way of suggesting other theories and thus other questions the field may need to ask. In so doing, our collaborative work has applied insights from feminist theorizing and cultural studies to topics such as leadership, entrepreneurship, globalization, business ethics, issues of work and family, and more recently to sustainability. This text is a retrospective on our attempts at intervening in our field, where we sought to make it more fundamentally responsive to problems in the world we live in and, from this reflective position, considering how and why our field’s conventional theories and practices – despite good intentions – may be unable to do so.