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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.

The research for this study engages and assesses the relationship of the media from the 20th to the 21st century, combining scholar activism and public leadership in the disability rights movement. Having chronicled the disability rights movement from its roots, this chapter presents the discourse of media and movement, sampling mainstream media along with the advocacy and alternative media in support of disability rights. A range of media forms are engaged from advocacy bulletins to mainstream news media to public broadcasts that represent the diversity and complexity of the movement as it continues into the 21st century, pressing for the universalism of human rights for all.

This chapter reviews developments in the intellectual and activist work of African feminists and gender scholars over the past two decades. African feminists and gender scholar activists have broken with dominant epistemologies to frame their own sites of knowledge production and feminist identity, reflecting shifting conditions in local and global contexts. The knowledge they generate is rooted in a tradition of scholarship, activism, and engagements with state institutions and with transnational and regional feminist movements. I discuss (1) contexts in which African feminist standpoints have emerged over the past 20 years, (2) developments in women and gender studies programs, and (3) ways in which African feminist scholars in the continent and diaspora have stimulated intellectual engagement and activism through feminist research and publishing, collaborative scholarship, influencing policy, and new forms of activism.

These unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic have generated a variety of responses from national governments, local communities, and individuals. Using podcasting as a medium, this comparative educational project interviewed individuals living through and adapting to the unprecedented upheaval at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mumbai, India and Houston, USA. Using a decolonial lens, the podcasting project unpacks how similarities and differences in structures of privilege, prevailing ideologies, and sociopolitical contexts have influenced the experiences of people navigating this global challenge in two very different cities.

This chapter reflects on findings from this project and builds on it further to explore the use of podcasting as methodology. The inclusion of diverse voices from contrasting contexts provides opportunities for polyvocality and democratic dialogue. Podcasting is a medium that allows for academic content to be presented in an accessible format for education practitioners and the general public, ultimately contributing to reducing gatekeeping in academia. With the goal of contributing to comparative research, this essay closes with a reflection on the dynamics of power in the production of new media from two highly different primarily English-speaking contexts, whilst striving to consistently retain the authenticity of each city.

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the forms of activist organisation at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change COP16 in Cancún and reveals their attempts to create alternatives to a seemingly “depoliticised” response to climate change. The paper argues that existing attempts to challenge depoliticisation face problems in the form of governmental opposition, limitations on forms of organising, and internal conflicts between activists.

This paper utilises “scholar-activist” engagement with actors at alternative “popular” spaces established outside the COP16 in Cancún, Mexico. It draws upon extensive participant observation and in-depth interviews with 20 English-speaking activists.

Common among activists was a concern to try and model alternative forms of social relations, to the depoliticised and hierarchical forms found in the formal Conference of Parties, via forms of anarchist-influenced “prefigurative” practice. In spite, or perhaps because, of perceived challenges to attempts to organise their political praxis along non-hierarchical lines, many people were ambivalent about the scope of their action, revealing highly reflexive accounts of the limitations of these whilst simultaneously remaining pragmatic in trying to make the most of their involvement.

The paper helps us to better understand the potential to politicise climate change. Understanding the challenges faced by activists is important for trying to organise more effective political responses to climate injustice. It is suggested that we must understand activists’ responses to these challenges and limitations in terms of the pragmatism in response that allows them to continue to invest in activism in the face of unsuccessful actions.

The purpose of the chapter is to overview the sociological literature related to social media and digital technologies in sport, with particular attention to media representations, content production, and audience responses. The chapter examines how social media and digital technologies reproduce and challenge hegemonic representation strategies, while maintaining existing cultural norms in the industry. Further, the chapter evaluates how athletes and fans create digital communities to bring visibility to marginalized groups. Finally, the chapter considers the potential of digital media for social justice and advocacy.

The chapter synthesizes existing literature in sociology of sport, sport communication, and media studies to provide an assessment of the implications of social media and digital technologies for sport.

Scholarship on social media and digital technologies in sport has primarily focused on descriptive analyses. Sociological approaches provide a theoretical grounding for examining issues of power, inequality, and social justice in relation to media ideologies, production, and consumption.

The chapter identifies future areas of study, including a more robust engagement with theory and an expansion of methodological approaches.

The chapter provides an overview of the literature on social media and digital technologies in sport of nearly 80 scholarly publications. The chapter moves beyond focusing on patterns in content to consider how structures, journalistic practices, cultural norms, and audience interactions collectively shape ideologies about gender, race, sexuality, religion, and disability in the sport media industry.

This paper takes seriously the feminist adage that “the personal is political” by critically exploring my experiences as an early career scholar of gender and entrepreneurship studies to offer vital context for the contributions of my work and future research agenda, in light of the current historical moment of interconnected political, public health and environmental calamity.

The author presents reflections on her positionality, philosophical and political commitments, and theorises from her experiences of racist distraction and intersectional marginality in contemporary academia, considering their implications for incoming and aspiring gender and entrepreneurship scholars whose research agendas are still in development.

Racism functions as a persistent distraction from overall research agendas and activities, and delimits the lane of perceived contributions. However, collectively challenging it in work and study presents a vehicle by which intellectual and affective experiences of academic work may be enriched, and a spacious and expansive legacy of critical scholarship built that will be resonant for years to come.

The paper argues that although racism will doubtlessly continue to cause immense distraction, it presents an invitation to create positive social change, through collectivising with a community that aims to shape a liveable, equitable and imaginative academic future.

The paper seeks to introduce the “critical open access literacy” construct as a holistic approach to confront the challenges in open access (OA) as a dimension of scholarly communication.

The paper first introduces the concepts of information literacy (IL) and OA in the context of transformations in the scholarly information environment. Via a theoretical-analytical exercise on the basis of a literature review of the intersections between the two concepts and of the criticisms of OA, the paper discusses the role of critical IL in addressing the challenges in OA and lays the theoretical-conceptual groundwork for the critical OA literacy construct.

The structural nature of the challenges and transformations in the scholarly information environment require new foci and pedagogical practices in library and information studies. A more holistic, critical and integrative approach to OA is warranted, which could effectively be achieved through the re-conceptualization of IL.

The paper specifies the avenues for putting the theoretical conceptualizations of critical OA literacy into practice by identifying possible foci for IL instruction alongside a transformed role for librarians.

The paper extends deliberations on the role of critical IL for scholarly communication and attempts to advance the research fields of the two domains by proposing a new construct situated at the junction of OA and IL.