Locating the ‘radical’ in 'Shoot the Messenger'

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below, copyright 2013 @ Edinburgh University Press.The 2006 BBC drama Shoot the Messenger is based on the psychological journey of a Black schoolteacher, Joe Pascale, accused of assaulting a Black male pupil. The allegation triggers Joe's mental breakdown which is articulated, through Joe's first-person narration, as a vindictive loathing of Black people. In turn, a range of common stereotypical characterisations and discourses based on a Black culture of hypocrisy, blame and entitlement is presented. The text is therefore laid wide open to a critique of its neo-conservatism and hegemonic narratives of Black Britishness. However, the drama's presentation of Black mental illness suggests that Shoot the Messenger may also be interpreted as a critique of social inequality and the destabilising effects of living with ethnicised social categories. Through an analysis of issues of representation, the article reclaims this controversial text as a radical drama and examines its implications for and within a critical cultural politics of ‘race’ and representation

Understanding Context in Learning?centred Approaches to Climate Change Communication

Communication on climate change research has long been dominated by top?down delivery of information aimed at informing on future climate scenarios and climate?related events. However, emphasis in this field is slowly shifting to more process?oriented approaches to communication, and the need to integrate learning is receiving increasing attention. This article argues that despite the challenges in shifting research communication on climate change into a more dialogical and learning?oriented model of practice, the realities faced by communities impacted on the ground make this shift imperative. Drawing on recent research, we consider how the context in which initiatives seek to engage in research communication will and should influence what is possible and what is desirable through these new approaches. We reflect on how efforts to understand context in one particular case served to shape a communication strategy from its outset, and note the opportunities and challenges revealed through this process. We then conclude by highlighting how climate change has reinforced arguments in favour of a focus of inclusive learning processes in communication for development

International journalism and the emergence of transnational publics: between cosmopolitan norms, the affirmation of identity and market forces

Much has been written about transnational public spheres, though our understanding of their shape and nature remains limited. Drawing on three alternative conceptions of newswork as public communication, this article explores the role of international journalists in shaping transnational publics. Based on a series of original interviews, it asks how journalists are oriented in their newswork (e.g. are they cosmopolitan or parochial in their orientation) and how they ‘imagine’ the public. It finds that interviewees imagine a polycentric transnational public and variously frame their work as giving voice to those affected by an issue (imagining the public as a cosmopolitan community of fate), performing and reaffirming a particular kind of identity and belonging (imagining the public as a nation) or pursuing audiences wherever they may be (imagining the public as the de facto audience)

Saving and reproducing the nation: Struggles around right-wing politics of social reproduction, gender and race in austerity Europe

This article suggests the analytic lens of cultural, social and national reproduction to understand the centrality of gendered and ethnic relations, in particular a focus on family life in contemporary UK. Proposing a theoretical focus on reproduction, the article then provides some contextualisation with wider European experiences to show connections between the political articulations across the far-right and mainstream right-wing. It argues that there is much overlap between the far-right and mainstream rightwing, conservative gender and family ideologies, where contradictory aspects of their gender and family ideals (simultaneously progressive and traditional) are articulated as care for the nation's future. Care is then articulated for the purpose of racist activism and constructing governmental belonging. The racialized migrant family plays a central role in these debates, marking the boundaries of the nation. The article explores these issues in depth through the example of material and symbolic constructions of the racialized migrant family as undeserving of care, exemplified through the UK policy of No Recourse to Public Funding

Political Trust and Job Insecurity in 18 European Polities

Several decades of trust research has confirmed that difficult national economic conditions help explain citizens’ low levels of political trust. But research points to a much less important role for personal economic factors. The latter finding, it is argued here, is a result of flawed survey questions and model misspecification. We actually know very little about the precise economic concerns that may generate low levels of trust and about the mechanisms via which they do so, resulting in a rather thin causal story. This paper seeks to address this lacuna, focusing on an issue of increasing importance in advanced economies: job insecurity. Using individual-level data from 18 European polities at two different time points, the paper finds that job insecurity generates lower levels of trust in politicians, political parties and political institutions and lower levels of satisfaction with democratic performance. Importantly, job insecurity’s effect does not diminish as one moves from specific to more diffuse objects of political trust, as previous research suggests it should. The paper also finds that the effect of job insecurity is exacerbated if citizens have negative perceptions of the performance of the wider economy. Finally, and drawing on the occupational psychology literature, the paper proposes a novel causal mechanism to link job insecurity to political trust. The intuition is that job insecurity violates a ‘psychologicaldemocratic’ trust contract between workers and the state. The mechanism is consistent with the observed results. The paper thus contributes to both the empirical and theoretical debates on the linkages between political trust and economic performance

A barrier and techno-economic analysis of small-scale bCHP (biomass combined heat and power) schemes in the UK

bCHP (Biomass combined heat and power) systems are highly efficient at smaller-scales when a significant proportion of the heat produced can be effectively utilised for hot water, space heating or industrial heating purposes. However, there are many barriers to project development and this has greatly inhibited deployment in the UK. Project viability is highly subjective to changes in policy, regulation, the finance market and the low cost fossil fuel incumbent. The paper reviews the barriers to small-scale bCHP project development in the UK along with a case study of a failed 1.5MWel bCHP scheme. The paper offers possible explanations for the project's failure and suggests adaptations to improve the project resilience. Analysis of the project's: capital structuring contract length and bankability; feedstock type and price uncertainty, and plant oversizing highlight the negative impact of the existing project barriers on project development. The research paper concludes with a discussion on the effects of these barriers on the case study project and this industry more generally. A greater understanding of the techno-economic effects of some barriers for small-scale bCHP schemes is demonstrated within this paper, along with some methods for improving the attractiveness and resilience of projects of this kind

A review of the rural-digital policy agenda from a community resilience perspective

© 2016 The Authors This paper utilises a community resilience framework to critically examine the digital-rural policy agenda. Rural areas are sometimes seen as passive and static, set in contrast to the mobility of urban, technological and globalisation processes (Bell et al., 2010). In response to notions of rural decline (McManus et al., 2012) rural resilience literature posits rural communities as ‘active,’ and ‘proactive’ about their future (Skerratt, 2013), developing processes for building capacity and resources. We bring together rural development and digital policy-related literature, using resilience motifs developed from recent academic literature, including community resilience, digital divides, digital inclusion, and rural information and communication technologies (ICTs). Whilst community broadband initiatives have been linked to resilience (Plunkett-Carnegie, 2012; Heesen et al., 2013) digital inclusion, and engagement with new digital technologies more broadly, have not. We explore this through three resilience motifs: resilience as multi-scalar; as entailing normative assumptions; and as integrated and place-sensitive. We point to normative claims about the capacity of digital technology to aid rural development, to offer solutions to rural service provision and the challenges of implementing localism. Taking the UK as a focus, we explore the various scales at which this is evident, from European to UK country-level