This chapter offers an innovative twist to securitisation theory by introducing the notion of indirect securitisations, which occur when the speaker resorts to covert language rather than an explicit language of threats and enmity. This type of securitisation is more likely in societies where what Tali Mendelberg refers to the ‘norm of racial equality’ prohibits racist speech. It also speaks to everyday racism by exploring how the indirect securitisation of Islam in the war on terror constitutes a covert form of racism. To this end, the first section draws on John Searle’s indirect speech act theory and unpacks how Bush, Obama and Trump have used indirect speech acts when speaking about Islam. Because indirect securitising speech acts allow actors to avoid worst possible outcomes and ‘save face’, this chapter argues that indirect securitising speech acts are an important tool in elites’ securitising playbook.

This chapter makes the case for pragmatist philosophy in planning theory and practice. I argue that pragmatism can help us to understand trends in contemporary planning theory, as well as develop a more promising future direction. The chapter introduces the two major branches of contemporary planning theory: (1) communicative planning and (2) radical planning. I explore how pragmatic planning can go beyond some of the limits of communicative approaches while also embracing the insights of radical planning. Emphasising early pragmatists’ emphasis on lived experience and the importance of pluralism, the chapter argues that pragmatism can connect different ideas in contemporary planning theory with great potential for practice, improving outcomes for publics.

Looking so intently at the work of D. W. Griffith during the crucial years of 1908 to 1913 runs the risk of losing sight of the wood for the trees. During this period, in Europe as well as America, enormous developments took place in the production, distribution and exhibition of films. Italian film production grew phenomenally during these years, with subjects that called for huge resources and which returned equally large profits to the businessmen and financiers who backed them. Before 1906, filmmaking in Denmark was very similar to that found in Britain, small independent companies and showmen making actualities, filming stage acts, and eventually experimenting with the dramatic possibilities of film. The scope and scale of the epic production provided Giovanni Pastrone with the opportunity to experiment and develop shooting and structuring methods that were quickly absorbed and reworked by others.

This chapter concludes the edited collection published as The power of pragmatism. It takes us back to the ‘quest for certainty’ in knowledge production with which we opened the volume. The chapter makes the case for adopting a pragmatic orientation to embrace uncertainty as both unavoidable and potentially productive. Recognising the seductive temptations of certainty that appear to provide order, progress, authority and respect, the chapter advocates the a priori acceptance of contingency as an antidote to dogmatism. This requires a sceptical orientation towards all statements of truth and a very different approach to knowledge production. The contributors to this volume advance and illustrate the power of pragmatism as a mode of knowledge production in the social sciences.

The 1970s saw a growing challenge of assimilationist policies at the root of dispersal. Despite that, the hurdles to an efficient movement against it were many: the necessity to make a living among Asian immigrants, difficult access to information about dispersal schools, the fact that immigrants faced a bureaucracy which was opaque to them, etc. The Race Relations Board as well as the Ealing Community Relations Council proved instrumental in generating a growing awareness of the problems around and of the discriminatory nature of dispersal. For many Asians, the struggle against dispersal was primarily about equality and the recognition of a common human dignity, as is attested in some testimonies of former militants. In this chapter, the Kogan Report (commissioned by the RRB) is also analysed in depth, as well as the way dispersal illustrated in its last years a form of Welfare roll-back, rather than a policy of immigrant assimilation.

This chapter contributes to debates about the social life of methods by describing the co-evolution of a research practice and infrastructure. It offers straightforward description of an ethnographic practice where I collect sensor data with participants, such as heart rate or ambient temperature, rework it into interpretable form, and sit down together with them to co-produce its meaning. The chapter reflects on how that method evolved with the available technical infrastructure, and argues that taking the social life of methods seriously might also mean intervening directly in the tools that sustain cultures of big data.

Sanctuary cities exemplify the rescaling of citizenship, community, and belonging. This chapter sets the stage for the book by exploring urban sanctuary practices and policies in different countries. Drawing on the USA, the UK, and Canada the chapter shows how sanctuary policies and practices aim to accommodate illegalised migrants and refugees in urban communities. The concept of the ‘sanctuary city’, however, is highly ambiguous: it refers to a variety of different policies and practices, and focuses on variable populations in different national contexts. The chapter examines the international literature to show how urban sanctuary policies and practices differ between national contexts and assess whether there are common features of sanctuary cities. It uncovers legal, discursive, identity-formative, and scalar aspects of urban sanctuary policies and practices. These aspects assemble in ways that differ between countries. The chapter discusses these aspect in relation to urban practices in other countries, such as Germany, Spain, and Chile. It concludes by raising important practical and theoretical questions about urban sanctuary.

This chapter traces the history marrying sound with pictures and begins with Thomas Edison's laboratory assistant W. K. L. Dickson's attempt in 1889. Warner Bros. Pictures' Don Juan had impressive synchronised sound effects. In 1927, they had completed construction of the first sound studio in the world and started production on The Jazz Singer. The chapter highlights the changes that had to be made to the filmmaking process with the advent of synchronous sound. By 1929, it was mostly agreed that it was preferable to re-record the cutting copy soundtrack to re-balance the levels and adjust tonal differences during the production process. By 1933, sound could be manipulated on the editing bench with the same flexibility as picture and all the means were in place that would quickly be refined into a cinematic form that would remain largely unchanged for the next 27 years.

Chapter 3 investigates the printed magazine as a site where the world of art and fashion merged in the 1980s. Since the early 1990s fashion photographs have migrated effortlessly between the art field and the commercial field, between being considered as personal works or assignments limited by the ideas and wants of designers, brands and fashion publications. As pointed out by several scholars a crucial part of this development was the new aesthetics that emerged in the 1990s which challenged traditional notions of fashion as glamorous depictions of garments, a style labelled ‘trash realism’, ’radical fashion’ or ’post fashion’. However, as the chapter shows, an equally important material basis for this development was the emergence of new fora in the 1980s. Later on, in the 1990s and early 2000s several magazines that straddled art, style culture and high fashion appeared, such as Purple Prose, Tank, 032C and Sleek. This chapter trace the beginnings of these transgressions through a close examination of the two magazines i-D and Artforum, which from different positions and with different strategies served as an active interface between art and fashion in the 1980s.

This chapter draws on writings by race theorists and pragmatists to inquire into the internal politics of our academic communities. The argument is built around the epistemic injustice articulated by students of colour in my own doctoral programme. The chapter starts with this situation and develops the concept of ‘embodied ignorance’ and its embeddedness in positions of power in order to explain such epistemological injustice and find ways to overcome it. Embodied ignorance arises at the individual level from the limits and particularity of being just one person in space and time; and it arises at the social level from the mobilisation of categories of bodies that mark some as more authoritatively, legally and normatively entitled and powerful than others. Greater epistemological justice within the academy cannot easily remedy practical harms, requiring, instead, engagement with the broader society. The chapter examines the history and current practice of affirmative action to better understand the political and economic dimensions of academic exclusion/inclusion. It then turns to pragmatist thought to understand how to go beyond the current limitations imposed on racial and other forms of inclusion in the creation of new knowledge aimed at more democratic ways of knowing and living.

Football studies are replete with analyses of hooliganism. Yet ultras are distinct from hooligans. The ‘English style’ of hooliganism has influenced ultras through greater match attendance at international tournaments. Yet violent incidents are still relatively rare. Increasingly, violence is symbolic and displayed in the overtly masculine choreographies and chants of the ultras. The gendered dimension of ultras fandom remains dominant as masculinity underpins much of the symbolic violence in the ultras’ performance.

This chapter relies almost wholly on ethnographic fieldwork, i.e. interviews of formerly bussed pupils sharing their recollections some decades later. An analysis is provided of their broad sociological profile and how this may impact their memories of bussing. Then, various pragmatic elements about the bussing routine are studied, as well as the way racism in the dispersal schools was an unchallenged norm. Just as importantly, bussing’s effect was in fact to segregate rather than to integrate children in various kinds of ways. The fieldwork also illustrates sometimes the way individual children or families managed to circumvent certain demands through their seeming compliance and calculated conformity. Lastly, some exceptions to how negative bussing was are studied, as well as the way bussing ‘toughened up’, with hindsight, many of the interviewees themselves.