Preaching to the choir: patterns of non/diversity in youth citizenship movements

Within many youth-focused or youth-led civic and political action groups in the UK, a common discursive refrain is the importance of promoting equality and diversity in politics in order to empower the participation of marginalised young people and communities. This chapter explores the dynamics of diversity in two youth-led UK political groups, in order to understand rhetorical positions and material outcomes of organisational commitments to prioritising diversity. Reflecting on the implications of the contrasting ‘diversity’ repertoires of both organisations (Momentum and My Life My Say), this chapter explores how economic, social and historical contexts inflect youth citizenship spaces and suggests how strategies for effective diversification of youth citizenship movements can begin to expand possibilities for meaningful inclusion practices in youth politics

What about the Men? Gender inequality data and the rhetoric of inclusion in the US and UK film industries

This article argues that (cis-, hetero, abled, middle-class, white) men – as a group and as an identity category – are the structuring absence of inequality discourse and, as a consequence, it is ‘diverse’ persons who bear both the burden of and any hope for changing the film industry. By ‘rereading’ gender inequality data, diversity initiatives and inclusion rhetoric, this article shows the ways they elide men’s domination of the film industry and perversely reinforce it as the norm. Articulating how data on gender representation behind the camera can both illuminate inequality and can be used to obfuscate it, the article looks closely at selected reports to see what they do and do not tell us about gender inequality and the unequal presence of men in the industry. As the dominating demographic of the filmmaking workforce, the white middle class male is also the structuring absence of inclusion rhetoric which maintains the status quo of inequality in the film industry by interpellating ‘diverse’ persons as outsiders who must gain the attention of the white middle-class men who may choose to include them

Creative futures of Black (British) feminism in austerity and Brexit times

This paper will suggest that the cultural production made by Black (British) feminist millennial creative collectives during this period of austerity and Brexit is informed by the Black British archive(s) but seeks to move beyond those borders. The forms of Black cultural content emerging from these collectives offer clues as to what the future of creative Black British culture may become.</p

And ... action? Gender, knowledge and inequalities in the UK screen industries

This article explores how a knowledge ecology framework can help us better understand the production of gender knowledge, especially in relation to improving gender equality. Drawing on Law et al. (2011), it analyses what knowledge of gender inequality is made visible and actionable in the case of the UK screen sector. We, firstly, show (1) that the gender knowledge production for the UK screen sector operated with reductionist understandings of gender and gender inequality, and presented gender inequality as something that needed evidencing rather than changing, and (2) that gender knowledge was circulated in two relatively distinct circuits, a policy- and practice-facing one focused on workforce statistics and a more heterogeneous and critical academic one. We then discuss which aspects of gender inequality in the UK screen industry remained invisible and thus less actionable. The article concludes with a critical appreciation of how the knowledge ecology framework might help better understand gender knowledge production, in relation to social change in the UK screen sector and beyond