Bearing Witness to the 'Pain of Others': Researching Power, Violence and Resistance in a Women's Prison

Addressing the dynamics of interpersonal violence, institutionalised abuses and prisoner isolation, this article consolidates critical analyses as challenges to the essentially liberal constructions and interpretations of prisoner agency and penal reformism. Grounded in long-term research with women in prison in the North of Ireland, it connects embedded, punitive responses that undermine women prisoners’ self-esteem and mental health to the brutalising manifestations of formal and informal punishments, including lockdowns and isolation. It argues that critical social research into penal policy and prison regimes has a moral duty, an ethical obligation and a political responsibility to investigate abuses of power, seek out the ‘view from below’. Challenging the revisionism implicit within the ‘healthy prison’ discourse, it argues for alternatives to prison as the foundation of decarceration and abolition.

Triggering employee voice under the European Information and Consultation Directive: A non-union case study

The transposition of the 2002/14/EC Directive, establishing a general framework for information and consultation (I&C), has proven contentious in largely voluntarist systems of employment regulation. Receiving particular criticism is the employee ‘opt-in’ mechanism as a means to access I&C rights. For non-union employees in particular, the ability and potential to negotiate rights for I&C is widely seen to be problematic. This article uniquely examines the opt-in mechanism in the context of non-unionism, considering how non-union employers respond to non-union employees invoking their legislative rights to I&C. Drawing upon a case study conducted over four years in a large non-union multinational, the evidence shows how the opt-in and negotiation process function to the advantage of the employer rather than the intended regulatory impact to advance employee rights

After the Critique of Rights: For a Radical Democratic Theory and Practice of Human Rights

The critique of human rights has proliferated in critical legal thinking over recent years, making it clear that we can no longer uncritically approach human rights in their liberal form. In this article I assert that after the critique of rights one way human rights may be productively re-engaged in radical politics is by drawing from the radical democratic tradition. Radical democratic thought provides plausible resources to rework the shortcomings of liberal human rights, and allows human rights to be brought within the purview of a wider political project adopting a critical approach to current relations of power. Building upon previous re-engagements with rights using radical democratic thought, I return to the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to explore how human rights may be thought as an antagonistic hegemonic activity within a critical relation to power, a concept which is fundamentally futural, and may emerge as one site for work towards radical and plural democracy. I also assert, via Judith Butler's model of cultural translation, that a radical democratic practice of human rights may be advanced which resonates with and builds upon already existing activism, thereby holding possibilities to persuade those who remain sceptical as to radical re-engagements with rights.

Unwilling Executioner:Crime Fiction and the State

What gives crime fiction its distinctive shape and form? What makes it such a compelling vehicle of social and political critique? Unwilling Executioner argues that the answer lies in the emerging genre's complex and intimate relationship with the bureaucratic state and modern capitalism, and the contradictions that ensue when the state assumes control of the justice system. This study offers a dramatic new interpretation of the genre's emergence and evolution over a three hundred year period and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon.

Archives and Copyright: Risk and Reform

This paper considers the place of the archive sector within the copyright regime, and how copyright impacts upon the preservation, access to, and use of archival holdings. It begins with a critical assessment of the current parameters of the UK copyright regime as it applies to the work of archivists, including recommendations for reform that have followed in the wake of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (2006-2010), the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth (2010-2011), the Consultation on Copyright (2011-12), as well as the government’s response thereto: Modernising Copyright (2012). It considers the various problems the copyright regime presents for archives undertaking mass digitisation projects as well as recent European and UK initiatives in this domain. It argues that the UK copyright regime, even when read in conjunction with current national and regional recommendations for reform, falls short of delivering a legal framework that would enable archivists to realise the full potential that comprehensive, universal online access to the country’s archival holdings would contribute to local and national democracy and accountability, to education, learning, and culture, and to the sense of identity and place for local people, communities and organisations. Ultimately, a case is made for the differential treatment of archives within the copyright regime – different, that is, from libraries and other related institutions operating within the cultural sector. The paper concludes with a policy recommendation that would greatly enhance the ability of archives to provide online access to their holdings, while at the same time safeguarding the economic interests of the authors and owners of copyright-protected work.