Politics

In 2008 an Iraqi artist was waterboarded as performance art. In 2010 artists upturned police cars in Russia. But what exactly do we mean by militant art and aesthetics? Bringing together the philosophy of art and politics, Martin Lang provides a comprehensive examination of militant art activism: its history, its advocates and the aesthetic theory behind it. Protest art is not a new concept and yet this book argues that after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 distinctly 21st-century forms of art activism emerged. On the one hand these became militant as artists retained belief in the possibility of radical political change through art. On the other hand, this belief developed in a hostile environment, when anti-terror legislations reclassified activists and artists as terrorists. Through first-hand interviews and experiences, Militant Aesthetics sheds light on numerous international case studies of modern art activism and the different ways they can be classified as militant. Many artists and collectives, including Grupo Etcétera in Buenos Aries, are prepared to break the law and risk arrest for their art. Others like Thomas Bresolin's Militant Training Camp utilise military uniforms in violent performances that connect with public anger, and artists such as Zthoven in the Czech Republic occupy, hack, antagonise and disrupt in increasingly militant ways. Combining these examples with the pioneering thought of Badiou, Zizek, Rancière and Mouffe, as well as up-to-date scholarship from Bishop, Léger and others, Lang investigates the instances, attributes and rules of militant art in order to introduce a new overall theory of 21st-century militant aesthetics.

This book considers the governance of autistic defendants and offenders in the UK courts.Utilising the social model of disability, it considers the dominant strategies of governance, including 'vulnerability', which the author argues obscure the rights of disabled people in the criminal justice system. In doing so it sheds light on how this group should be governed. Drawing on rigorously-researched case studies of autistic adult defendants through the court process, the book brings together relevant legal and policy literature, criminological and criminal justice theory and disability studies to provide insight into the 'dividing practices' that affect the governance of disabled defendants' conduct. Using interviews with elites and practitioners, textual analysis, and court observation of 8 adult defendants with autism through their court process, the book investigates why the status of autistic defendants as disabled under the Equality Act 2010 has been overlooked in criminal justice policy and criminal court decision-making. It explores the impact of the 'collateral' effects and 'symbiotic harm' of the criminal justice process on family members who support these defendants through the criminal justice process.

Written by a lawyer who works at the intersection between legal education and practice in access to justice and human rights, this book locates, describes and defines a collective identity for social justice lawyering in the UK. Underpinned by theories of cause lawyering and legal mobilisation, the book argues that it is vital to understand the positions that progressive lawyers collectively take in order to frame the connections they make between their personal and professional lives, the tools they use to achieve social change, as well as ethical tensions presented by their work.The book takes a reflexive ethnographic approach to capture the stories of 35 lawyers working to positively transform law and policy in the UK over the last 50 years. It also draws on a wealth of primary sources including case reports, historic campaign materials and media analysis alongside wider ethnographic interviews with academics, students and lawyers and participant observation at social justice conferences, workshops and events.The book explains the way in which lawyers' networks facilitate their collective positioning and influence their strategic decision making, which in turn shapes their interactions with social activists, with other lawyers and with the state itself.

Surveying print and digital graphic life narratives about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, this book investigates how comics and graphic novels witness human rights transgressions in contemporary Anglophone culture and how they can promote social justice. With thought given to how the graphic form can offer a powerful counterpoint to the legal, humanitarian and media discourses that dehumanise the most violated and dispossessed, but also how these works by western creatives may unconsciously reproduce Western neo-colonial presentations of the 'other,' Olga Michael focuses on gender, childhood and space within works from the United States, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Palestine, the United Kingdom, Syria, Italy, France, Niger, South Africa, Libya and Sri Lanka. Combining the familiar with the lesser-known, this book covers the work of Thi Bui's Best We Could Do, Mia Kirshner's I Live Here, Francesca Sanna's The Journey, Safda Ahmed's Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre and the works of Joe Sacco.Interdisciplinary in its consideration of life writing, comics and human rights studies, and comparative in approach, this book explores such topics as including the aesthetics of visualised suffering; spatial articulations of human rights violations; the occurrence of violations whilst crossing borders; the gendered dimensions of visually-captured violence; and how human rights discourses intersect with graphic depictions of the dead. In so doing, Michael establishes how to read human rights and social justice comics in relation to an escalating global crisis and deftly complicates negotiations of 'otherness' in discussions surrounding refugees and migration. A vitally important work to the humanities sector, this book underscores the significance of emphatic and ethical readings as forms of secondary witnessing.