The introduction situates political writing and publishing as vital tools in articulating, disseminating, and shaping political movements and ideas in modern Britain. It explores the diversity of political genres, from elite forms such as parliamentary novels and newspaper obituaries to grassroots expressions such as punk fanzines and coalfield women’s writing. It highlights how ‘high political’ and subaltern voices respectively engaged with political writing, sometimes to reinforce dominant narratives and at other times to challenge or subvert them. It examines the gendered politics of authorship, particularly how women and marginalised groups used writing to claim authority and reshape the boundaries of political discourse. Attention is given to the role of literature and publishing in mediating the intersections of culture and politics, from fascist propaganda and socialist poetry to the intellectual infrastructure of devolved Scotland and Northern Ireland. By contextualizing political writing within broader historical and cultural transformations, the introduction positions the chapters of the book as a series of ‘core samples’ that reveal the relationships between genre, ideology, and activism.

Chapter 7 will compare how shareholders in the three countries monitor management by exit, that is, the threat of hostile takeover, from the perspective of the tradeoff between management autonomy and monitoring management. In the United States, substantial numbers of hostile takeovers have occurred since the 1970s. In Japan, hostile takeover attempts have rarely been successfully done since the majority shareholding of listed companies was stabilized by cross-shareholding networks in the 1960s. After 2020, the control market emerged with several successful hostile takeovers by competitors, and at the same time, hedge fund activism exploded. In China, hostile takeovers are still nearly absent, particularly for SOEs. Regarding the balance between management autonomy and monitoring management, the United States has a relatively buyer-friendly legal system, and Japan has a seller-friendly legal system. China has the UK-type mandatory takeover bid rule, and the black letter law looks to create a UK-type balance between autonomy and monitoring, but the actual implementation of the statutes allows abuses by both buyers and sellers.

Chapter 6 will compare how shareholders in the three countries monitor management by voice from the perspective of the tradeoff between management autonomy and monitoring management. Japanese and Chinese corporate laws give shareholders wider decision-making power compared to the US corporate law. On the other hand, Japanese and Chinese corporate laws provide an ambiguous fiduciary duty of directors, which allows management to balance stakeholder interests, while the US law provides a strict fiduciary duty to shareholders. The three countries share similar disclosure regulations, both by corporate law and securities regulation. Institutionalization of stock ownership structure strengthened shareholder activism since the 1990s in the United States, and now Japan is catching up. In China, shareholder activism is historically nearly absent; however, the China Securities Investor Service Center (ISC) has raised a substantial number of shareholder activism cases and has become influential in Chinese corporate governance.

As advocates for play, teachers need to have a clear definition of play, a model of play used to guide their practice and a theory of play that underpins their philosophy of teaching and learning. This chapter brings together insights gained about play from all the chapters in this book and invites you to take a position on your own philosophy of play. We then ask you to become an advocate for children’s play.

This chapter considers the work of major First Nations figures in Australian poetry – Oodgeroo, Kevin Gilbert, Mudrooroo and Lionel Fogarty – as well as poetry produced by current or former First Nations inmates of Australia’s prison system or about First Nations deaths in custody. The language of these poets is both politically activist and community enhancing. It argues that the effects of such poetry can be redemptive, empowering or visionary. It considers such poetry as testimony, discussing the ways in which First Nations writers have created a poetic language that might not have been available, which, in turn, creates a community of readers and listeners. For many First Nations prison inmates, poetry becomes a mean to ground Indigenous identity and reflect on their lives and relationships. From the 1990s, poets such as Samuel Wagan Watson, Romaine Moreton, Ali Cobby Eckermann and Yvette Holt have broken new ground with work highlighting Aboriginal selfhood in an evolving Australian society. The chapter concludes with a consideration of a younger and emergent generation of First Nations poets.

This chapter examines the ways in which Judith Wright shaped Australian literary culture, not only through her poetry but also through her work as an editor, anthologist and critic. It contextualises the development of Wright’s poetry in light of her childhood, education and the impact of World War II, arguing that misreadings of her pastoral lyric during Wright’s lifetime failed to appreciate how it undercut settler mythmaking. The chapter discusses Wright’s exploration of a psychic interior during the 1950s and how she became increasingly focused on the settler-colonial mind during the 1960s. It outlines Wright’s engagement with Aboriginal land rights and her leadership in the burgeoning environmental movement. The chapter ascribes much of this change to the influence of Oodgeroo Noonuccal and discusses their poetic correspondence and friendship in the 1970s. The chapter also considers her turn from poetic voice towards practices of observation and listening, arguing that Wright’s attention to ‘the human pattern’ evident in her last volume, Phantom Dwelling, suggests less a silence in her later years than a realignment of her focus and energy.

Chapter 8 departs slightly from the focus on translation activity by shining a light on the translator, in an effort to highlight their role in the translation process itself, often minimized for the benefit of the text. The chapter serves as a reminder that the translator also has an impact on the text. It addresses what is meant by the translator’s (in)visibility and how practicing or aspiring translators can incorporate this notion into their practice and knowledge base. Also addressed are related topics such as norms, codes of ethics, agency, positionality and ideology. Additionally, the chapter helps inform aspiring translators and those who work with translators about the role and professional expectations for translators, including their role as agents of social justice, the translator’s workplace, recent changes in the field, translator profiles, and the qualifications and skills needed to work as a translator. This chapter guides readers to an understanding of the translator’s possible role/s and assists them with the creation of their own professional identity.

This chapter is an overview of the life and work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker), whose poetry collection We Are Going (1964) was not only the first ever book of poetry by an Aboriginal person but also one of the fastest-selling books in Australian history. It traces her early involvement in civil rights in Queensland, her ongoing activism in Aboriginal struggles, and the power of her poetry to articulate the feelings and lived experiences of the Aboriginal people. It discusses Oodgeroo’s friendship with Judith Wright and her founding of Moongalba, an Aboriginal cultural and education centre on Noonuccal country. The chapter outlines her role in various national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts organisations and her international connections with Indigenous writers. Lastly, it emphasises Oodgeroo’s lifelong work in foregrounding Aboriginal cultural and political perspectives.

The concluding chapter offers three short ethnographic accounts of dance events in twenty-first-century Kolkata to argue how nautch has an afterlife. It persists, despite sustained bureaucratic attempts to legally annihilate it. It continues to be carried by bodies under compulsion and bodies with volition. Nautch has morphed into modern-day baiji dances in private rooms and into choreographed spectacles on public stages. A dance and performance studies lens shows how nautch has endured as a profession, a form of waged labour at times shrouded in secrecy, and in other moments displayed proudly in civic spaces. Its legacy of stigma hangs like a curse on multiple professional dance communities across India, who continue to grapple with the shame that accompanies a life of dancing, as other scholars have found. But the afterlife of nautch also features insistent and localised revolutionary movements, such as those led by sex workers’ collective Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) and its cultural wing Komal Gandhar in Kolkata. The chapter ends with a discussion of how Komal Gandhar’s dancing collectively activates spaces of possibilities, of new forms of decriminalised citizenship and of more equitable futures of social belonging.

Chapter 4 first examines two societal groups – labor and women – and asks two questions. How have these groups fared since the 1980s? And how have they responded to top-down changes in India’s political economy? The final part of the chapter also discusses civil society activism and social movements more generally. As with Chapter 3, Chapter 4 highlights that the story of India since the 1980s is not wholly top-down. While the state and business remain dominant actors, societal groups have challenged and continue to challenge that domination.

This concluding chapter, “Governing the Unknown: Legal–Scientific Settlements,” offers a new framework to describe the momentary stabilization of scientific facts in and through lawmaking: legal–scientific settlements. From these legal–scientific settlements emerge a range of distributional consequences that have material effects on people’s lives and shape the ability of individuals to survive and thrive despite public health crises.

Chapter 10 introduces the issue of moral dilemmas and elaborates this through game theory and social activism strategies. It further introduces the notion of worldviews, which are argued by evolutionary theorists to provide the bedrock for group formation in the human species through shared intentionality. Worldviews are argued to provide normative frameworks with which individuals orientate themselves in conducting their everyday affairs and on which basis they identify those like them from different others. The chapter proceeds to present research findings that demonstrate the role of worldviews in orientations to policy. They show that how different policy issues motivate some to action whilst others remain unmoved. Moreover, worldview studies further show how once moved to action, some individuals are motivated to support policy whilst others are motivated to resist it. Worldviews thus provide the mechanism by which we can understand social action in democratic societies that allow for the expression of dissenting opinions.

This chapter explores how the ranching-grabbing RDPE is supported by moral economic changes, which in this context is veneration for the cowboy lifestyle and scorn of traditional/Indigenous livelihoods. The cowboy lifestyle is often seen in a positive light, despite the violence that accompanies forest removal. These changes in the moral economy help to explain how locals increasingly welcome ranching-land speculation, even inside multiple-use conservation areas. Another key factor in deforestation processes are the policies and infrastructure investment decisions made at the federal and state level, which render large areas available for appropriation. These problems are also international, as groups expanding deforestation are still often funded by international banks, creating investment lock-in, as investors are more interested in preserving returns on investments than curbing illegalities. Simultaneously, there is a wide variety of activists in local communities who are resisting these extractivist pushes. The chapter examines where and how Indigenous peoples/forest-dwellers successfully resist land grabbing and clearcutting on their lands.

There is a long history of forest activism in Finland, including both contentious protest like blockades and more conventional actions like negotiation. There is a new generation of activists stemming from Extinction Rebellion and other environmental groups, who have extended occupations beyond logging sites to company headquarters and pulp mill entrances. This chapter focuses on this latest generation of resistance and the ways those involved have approached forestry activism in Finland. The protests against state-sponsored logging in different parts of Finland are used as examples to unpack the current contentious politics of forests and especially the sentiments of these rising youth activists. The overall actions of several Finnish forest movements since the 1980s have contributed to more and more people starting to defend forests, questioning the forest industry’s story that clearcutting is a sustainable way to interact with the forest. This chapter is based on extensive interviews with experts and activists and the author’s lived experiences and many years of ethnography in Finnish forests, especially in the most heavily logged forestry frontiers in the southeastern part of the country.