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Considerations of the legal rights of incarcerated juveniles are often concerned with the myriad ways in which due process rights are circumscribed, abridged, or undermined by the operations of the juvenile court (e.g., Berkheiser, 2016; Cleary, 2017; Feld, 1999; Rapisarda & Kaplan, 2016). Studies of youth legal consciousness have additionally sought to explore the role of media, legal status, court experiences, and even parents in the formation of youth attitudes about the justice system (e.g., Abrego, 2011; Brisman, 2010; Greene, Sprott, Madon, & Jung, 2010; Pennington, 2017). This chapter builds on this work by exploring the way rights shaped the everyday lives of incarcerated youth. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a juvenile hall, this chapter explores three different moments outside of a formal legal context where the invocation of due process rights limited the self-expression and exploration of incarcerated youth. In each of these cases, the invocation of protecting due process rights by adults served to stifle youth efforts to remake juvenile hall as a place open and receptive to their needs. These three moments demonstrate that rights project a particular legal vision onto a world that does not neatly conform to the reality in which youth lived. For these reasons, the consideration of legal rights for youth must also consider how these rights can forestall the very transformation in circumstances that many youth seek.

This chapter provides a brief overview of community sanctions in Australia and examines the extent to which McNeill’s analysis in Pervasive Punishment (2019) is applicable in the Australian context. Two key issues in the Australian context are, firstly, state and territory-level variations within a federal political structure, and secondly, disproportionate Indigenous imprisonment and community sanction rates and the generally destructive impact of the criminal legal system on Indigenous communities and peoples. The chapter argues that developing a better agonistic politics around community sanctions requires descending from the broad level of historical and sociological analysis to examine state and territory-level variations in judicial and correctional structures, histories and cultures. Further, that Australian community sanctions cannot be understood without a primary focus on the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous rates, experiences and meaning. The key to addressing the destructive impact of criminal legal processes and practices on Indigenous peoples lies in developing Indigenous governance, empowerment, self-determination, sovereignty and nation-building. Two recent developments promoting Indigenous governance are examined: the Uluru Statement from the Heart and Justice Reinvestment projects initiated by First Nations communities, highlighting the importance of activism, contest and struggle by community organisations.

Drawing on interviews with men and women gun carriers, this paper considers the intersection of femininity and guns. It argues that two sets of expectations shape the normative relationship between women and guns: First, armed women are a blind spot in feminist discourse, which tends to reproduce the “pacifist presumption” that women are nonviolent caretakers and peacemakers. Second, contemporary pro-gun discourse often bases women’s gun carry within their duties and obligations as mothers in a form of “martial maternalism.” Inflected with a post-feminist appropriation of rights and equality, this pro-gun discourse reproduces gender binaries through a discourse of gender inclusivity. Following previous analyses that emphasize the contradictory politics of gender in conservative spaces, my analysis emphasizes how the gendered politics of guns is sustained by multiple, though not necessarily shared, understandings of women’s guns by men and women within American gun culture.

This chapter argues that modern societies are changing in ways that disrupt the complementarity between social structure and character structure. One source of this divergence occurs because, on the one hand, there exists a “neoliberal” character structure that is oriented toward the accumulation of human capital and holds that such accumulation and hard work will allow one to achieve the “American Dream.” On the other hand, the deep embeddedness of this character structure may in fact deepen the possibility of structural crisis, as developments in automation and ongoing transformations of labor continuously shift the economic structure and many feel they are employed in meaningless “soul crushing” jobs. This diagnosis prompts the question: is the accumulation of human capital futile? In other words, can there exist an abundance of jobs that simultaneously pay enough to provide a middle-class lifestyle and be both socially respected by most members of society while also providing subjective meaning for the individual – without accruing high social costs? Through reflections upon my own biography growing up in East Tennessee, this chapter utilizes the framework of Planetary Sociology to encourage sociologists to rethink the category of “human capital” and recognize the divergence of social structure and character structure to be a serious problem with planetary implications. Only by critical examination of the sociohistoric context from a planetary perspective can these challenges be constructively evaluated and reckoned with.

Spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in the open acknowledgment of the importance of teaching and learning praxis that is grounded in compassion, understanding, cocreation, community, and flexibility. This is especially so for ‘traditional’ university spaces, in essence questioning and resisting the many established dynamics that face-to-face teaching and learning took for granted within many neoliberal and neocolonial higher education contexts. In this chapter, I propose positioning a love ethic as a primary point of departure for all educational engagements, a foundational shift in ontology (way of being) of the university. By focusing on love as liberation and justice, and teaching as an act of love, I draw on critical, engaged, and feminist pedagogies, as well as my experience as a lecturer in a social justice– and global citizenship-oriented program at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, where I positioned a love ethic as central to my pedagogical approach. I argue that when we begin to view love as more than mere emotion, but as an ideological position that informs values and praxis within higher education (and our university “classrooms” in particular), we may move toward new and exciting ways of envisioning the decolonized university of the 21st century. A love ethic, as defined by bell hooks, offers possibilities for an approach to critical transformation that is not merely motivated by the change of institutional structures, but by the reform of values guiding teaching and learning and ways of being within higher education institutions.

This chapter describes how ambitious, educated, professional women engage with a range of reproductive technologies across their lifetime in an attempt to achieve the much-lauded post-feminist ideal of the perfect ‘work-life balance’ and ‘having it all’. Drawing on interviews, this chapter shares women's experiences of using several reproductive technologies over a 15-year period and how their configurations of bodies, technologies and responsibilities change. In our initial conversations, bodies were seen as a source of disruption to well-laid plans; bodies bled, throbbed, conceived, aborted and were often incompatible with the many social expectations and demands on young women's lives to balance their professional and private lives. At this time, women were attempting to control and direct their malleable bodies using different technologies, a tool, that were accompanied with new gendered responsibilities to make the right choices about if and when to menstruate, to get pregnant, to become a mother and to be intimate. Over time these technologies proved to be imperfect and often failed to deliver the promised future and a counter-narrative emerges in which bodies are not so malleable and technologies are less of tool and more of an additional burden. By looking at interactions of several reproductive technologies over time, experiences of bodies, of technologies and of responsibilities change; they are not static but more cumulative.

This paper investigates why mothers are losing to fathers in contested child custody battles that have occurred between 1980 and 2003. It employs quantitative, qualitative, and contextual strategies to understand the complex set of forces involved. The findings suggest that single mothers and children are increasingly trapped in a war zone between cost conscious policymakers ideologically opposed to the welfare state, angry fathers shouldering the burden of a shift from public to private transfers of funding in the form of child support, religious zealots intent on turning back the clock to a mythical patriarchal Eden, and the legal doctrine of gender neutrality reflecting these political forces.