“Our life is a struggle”: Respectable Gender Norms and Black Resistance to Policing

This paper investigates the role of women in anti‐racist campaigns against policing in post‐2011 England. It argues that imperial discourses about gender norms and respectability have helped to shape how race and crime are constituted in the contemporary period. Women's resistance to police racism has received scholarly attention from black feminists in North America; such attention has been less in Britain, particularly since the 1990s. While influential analyses of policing in Britain have deployed a post‐colonial lens, gender and women's resistance are rarely the primary focus. This paper significantly develops debates on gender, race and policing, by arguing that the colonial roots of race and gender norms are fundamental to conceptualising one of the key findings of the field research which informs this paper: that women lead almost every campaign against a black death in police custody in post‐2011 England. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with activists, ethnographic observations at protests and scholar‐activist participation in campaigns against black deaths in custody, this paper demonstrates how 18^th and 19^th century imperial discourses on respectability and nation do not simply contextualise racialised policing in the contemporary period, but expose the racialised and gendered norms that legitimise racist policing in modern Britain.     

The canopic jars of Rameses II: real use revealed by molecular study of organic residues

Four blue-glazed faience jars, on exhibition in the Louvre Museum, are referred to as the canopic jars of Rameses II. Their recent typological re-examination rendered this original assignment questionable. In order to clearly determine their use, a study of two successive organic residues from the canopic jars, using molecular biomarkers analysed by GC-MS and LC-MS and absolute dating by ¹⁴C, was initiated. The results revealed that these two materials were not contemporary to the reign of Rameses II. The first one, scraped from the interior face of one jar, was identified as an unguent made of coniferous oil and animal fat and dated from the Third Intermediate Period. The second one, originally stored with glued linen inside one jar, is likely an embalming substance, made of pure vegetable resin (Pistacia) and dated from the Ptolemaic Period. These results clarify a controversy which has been lasting over a century. The famous blue-glazed faience jars are not the canopic jars of Rameses II but are confirmed as situlae which were reused at least two times: first to store unguents during the Intermediate Period and later to store embalming packages of an unknown person during the Ptolemaic period.     

Sharpening Advocacy Coalitions

The concept of “advocacy coalitions” is the bedrock of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), one of the most established and successful approaches for understanding policy processes across the globe. This article revisits and sharpens the conceptual definition of advocacy coalitions. We summarize the lessons from its theoretical emphases under the ACF and specify its five attributes (policy actors, shared beliefs, coordination, resources, and stability). Through this specification, we identify the ideal coalition type and several coalition subtypes. We then clarify and make a distinction between how we think about coalitions as a concept and how we approach coalitions empirically. This article sharpens the lens for describing and explaining coalitions toward better observations, theorizing, and measurements. It ends with next steps for further deepening and broadening knowledge about advocacy coalitions.     

Platform Capitalism’s Hidden Abode: Producing Data Assets in the Gig Economy

In this article, we argue that the governance of gig work under conditions of financialised platform capitalism is characterised by a process that we call “dual value production”: the monetary value produced by the service provided is augmented by the use and speculative value of the data produced before, during, and after service provision. App-governed gig workers hence function as pivotal conduits in software systems that produce digital data as a particular asset class. We reflect on the production of data assets and the unequal distribution of opportunities for their valorisation, after which we survey a number of strategies seeking data-centric worker empowerment. These strategies, we argue, are crucial attempts to push back against platform capitalism’s domination, bankrolled by what we term “meta-platforms”. Ultimately, it is the massive wealth and synergetic capacities of meta-platforms that constitute the most formidable obstacle to worker power and social justice in increasingly data-driven societies.     

From Labrets to Cranial Modification: Credibility Enhancing Displays and the Changing Expression of Coast Salish Resource Commitments

Recent developments in evolutionary psychology expanding on signaling theory provide key insights to the connections between expressing social commitments and resource rights. Credibility enhancing displays (CREDs) are a means to convince individuals of commitment to belief systems and can link costly acts or extravagant displays to social success. In the Salish Sea, the transition from labrets to cranial modification from 3200 to 1000 BP has often been framed in terms reflecting a shift from achieved to ascribed social status. Other researchers have argued that labrets may reflect village scale identity not tied to political power. We suggest that an explicitly evolutionary approach provides novel insights into the changing material expressions of Coast Salish social commitments, specifically reciprocal resource access. The shift to cranial modification reflects increased CRED investment and cost, but not necessarily a transition towards ascribed status. Instead this shift may be changing expressions of the same forms of social commitments.     

Mississippian monumentality in the Yazoo Basin: recent investigations at the Carson site (22CO505), northwestern Mississippi

Investigations at the Carson site (22CO505), located in Coahoma County, Mississippi, have uncovered data on the development of a large Mississippian mound center dating to the period from A.D. 1200 through European contact. Recent sediment coring, excavation, artifact analyses, and radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating shed light on earthworks and household structures at Carson, and on Mississippian culture in the Yazoo Basin more generally. Sediment coring demonstrates a laterally transgressing Mississippi River system deposited coarse sandy ridges and clay-filled swales underneath a surface horizon comprised of variously coarse to medium-fine sediment originating from generalized overbank flooding. In some instances, flood-borne sediments were found on mound flanks, indicating that at times river-based flooding may have interrupted mound construction. Sediment coring and trench excavation also demonstrate that Carson’s Mound D was built in four stages, with Stages II and III comprising the major stages of earth moving. Excavations on the mound summit reveal evidence of several superimposed structures that were burned in place and likely used for the production of stone, shell, and wooden craft items, perhaps related to Mississippi Ideational Interaction Sphere (MIIS) paraphernalia. Here we describe recent investigations at Carson and present preliminary findings; forthcoming publications will emphasize strategies of power, monumentality, craft production, and Mississippian exchange systems.     

Denial strategy in Australian strategic thought

Although denial has been at the centre of Australian strategic thought for decades, it has frequently been used as a broad catch-all term. This article shows, however, that there are two distinct denial traditions in Australian strategic thought: anti-access denial and area denial. Despite the different denial strategies having significantly different implications for defence budgets, procurement and force structure, official strategic guidance and defence scholars themselves have rarely specified which variant they are referring to. This article first maps the conceptual genealogy of anti-access denial and area denial within Australian strategic thought, before showing why acknowledging the specific type of denial is critical for policy and operational considerations. In addition to the two traditional approaches to denial, this article introduces a third approach—‘dissuasion by denial’—which, notwithstanding its growing influence in deterrence research and high relevance to twenty-first-century Asia-Pacific security dynamics, has yet to be introduced into Australian denial debates. The article finally addresses the conditions under which each denial strategy would be the most appropriate for Australia.