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This chapter considers the place of responsibility in confronting ecological sustainability and social equity problems in the food system. We present two illustrations addressing the following question: In what ways does responsibility present a way to close the metabolic rift in line with the vision of the global food sovereignty movement? First, using the example of Metro-Vancouver in Canada, we consider the ways in which urban people claim responsibility for land protection through the concept of urban agrarianism, defined as an urban ethic of care for foodlands, with an associated responsibility to exercise solidarity with those who cultivate and harvest food. Second, we discuss how deepening relational responsibility in legal and regulatory frameworks might hold the corporate food regime accountable in the Canadian context to address their role in and responsibility for mitigating an increasingly risky world, as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the responsibility of urban people to mobilise in solidarity with food movements, and against the corporate food regime in particular, will play a critical role in supporting the transition to sustainable and just food systems. This applies both to finding new ways to claim responsibility for this transition and to hold those actors that have disproportionately benefitted from the corporate food regime responsible. Such a reworking of responsibility is especially necessary as the context for food systems change becomes increasingly urbanised and risky.

The Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act of 1996, better known as Welfare Reform, implemented, in addition to many other features, a 60-month lifetime limit for welfare receipt. Research to date primarily documents individual-level barriers, characteristics, and outcomes of those who time out. Very little scholarly work considers experiences of mothering or carework after timing out. In this chapter, I ask, what kinds of carework strategies are used by women who have met their lifetime limits to welfare? What do the ways mothers talk about these strategies tell us about the discursive forces they are resisting and/or engaging? Using in-depth interviews at two points in time with women who have timed out of welfare (n = 32 and 23), this analysis shows how mothers’ strategies and the ways they discuss them reveal covert material and symbolic resistance to key discourses – negative assumptions about welfare mothers and a culture of work enforcement – and the conditions shaping their lives (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004). Mothers use carework strategies very similar to those identified in many other studies (e.g., London, Scott, Edin, & Hunter, 2004; Morgen, Acker, & Weigt, 2010; Scott, Edin, London, & Mazelis, 2001), but they provide us with an understanding of carework in a new context. The three groups of strategies explored here – structuring employment and non-employment, protecting children, and securing resources – reveal raced, classed, and gendered labor in which women engage to care for children in circumstances marked by limited employment opportunities and limited state support. The policy implications of mothers’ strategies are also discussed.

Over the past decade, criminology in Australia, Canada and other settler colonies has increasingly engaged with activist challenges to the penal system. These anti-carceral engagements have been levelled at its laws, institutions and agents. Following a long history of criminology explicating and buttressing penal institutions, the criminological gaze slowly transitioned in the 1970s to a more critical lens, shifting focus from the people who are criminalised to the harms of the apparatus that criminalises. However, the focus remained steadfastly on institutions and dominant players – until much more recently. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the strength of activist organisations and grassroots movements in affecting change and shaping debates in relation to the penal system. This chapter will explore the role of activism in informing criminological scholarship during the pandemic period and how criminologists, in turn, have increasingly recognised the need to build alliances and collaborations with grassroots activists and engage in their own activism. The chapter focuses primarily on Australian and Canadian criminology and its growing imbrication with the prison abolition movement, especially in the shadow of ongoing colonial violence. It considers how activist scholars, including ourselves, attempt to build movements for structural change in the criminal system and beyond.

Very little research has examined how prostitute women relate to each other. Drawing on interviews, focus groups, and observations with 76 women engaged in street-level prostitution in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and a mid-Atlantic state, we show how prostitute women provide mutual assistance both to meet their basic needs and as part of their ethical norms, in contrast to the stigmatized characterizations of prostitute women as morally deficient. Women’s relationships offer them concrete support and encouragement while simultaneously producing a counter-narrative that challenges their stigmatized identities.

In the city setting in which this chapter's photographic investigation took place, high school dropout rates have remained at or above 50% for better than three decades. The research on which this chapter reports began with a photographic inquiry into urban youths' foundational perceptions of school itself, as well as their insights into the impediments to and supports for their school success. This examination revealed some of the reasons behind the multi-generational community disengagement that have lead to the strained relationship to schools represented by these graduation rate statistics. Grounded in critical pedagogy, “new literacy” and visual sociology traditions, this study looked to visually based mechanisms for research tools with which city students are already proficient. The findings presented here suggest that these tools can not only provide previously inaccessible data on school detachment but also supply perspectives on what these youth want to learn in school – lessons that might support their re-engagement with these institutions.

The average American child spends more time “playing”¹ than doing any other activity besides sleeping and attending school (watching television comes in next, with children gradually replacing play time with TV time as they grow older) (Hofferth & Sandberg, 2001a, b). In fact, free, unstructured time makes up between 20 and 50% of children’s waking hours² (Hofferth & Sandberg, 2001a, b; Larson & Richards, 1989). Nonetheless, sociologists currently know very little about how children’s free time use influences their well-being. Although scholars, teachers, and parents all have strong opinions about the types of free-time activities that they think are “best” for children, recent studies of the association between children’s time use and their well-being have failed to find consistent associations (Hofferth & Sandberg, 2001a, b; McHale, Crouter & Tucker, 2001).

There is no argument among serious researchers that a mongoloid stock first colonized the New World from Asia. Nor is there controversy about the fact that these continental pioneers used the Bering Land Bridge that then connected the Asian Far East with Alaska.– Gerald F. Shields, et al.American Journal of Genetics (1992)