Levins-Morales’s powerful quote opens this chapter: ‘There is no neutral body from which our bodies deviate. Society has written deep into each strand of tissue of every living person on earth.’ She sets the stage for an appreciation of how all bodies, ecosystems, organisations, institutions, and societies are shaped by the circumstances of their emergence. The notion is used to understand the influences that forge Buddhist modernisation and the secularisation of White Mindfulness – both of which are regarded as political processes. The advent of Western Buddhism, contextualised by anti-colonial developments in Southeast Asia, paved the way for White Buddhist converts to access Buddhist teachings and form the Western vipassana movement. Both these developments are mapped as primary antecedents in the rise of White Mindfulness. They depoliticise teaching contexts and authoritatively re-present the ‘authentic, original teachings of the Buddha’, independently of traditional Buddhists. White Mindfulness is located in this history. Normative defaults of whiteness that overlay the rise of the vipassana movement are perpetuated by White Mindfulness’ lack of engagement with Asian Buddhist voices in the West. The emergence of an ‘apolitical’ mindfulness, unfettered by context, is believed to be seeded in these developments that ironically train a ‘forgetfulness’ of context and of People of the Global Majority.

The epilogue interrogates the book chapters’ understanding of violence and the city. Both violence and the city seem to resist attempts towards conceptualisation. The authors’ thick empirical descriptions, however, allow to carve out temporal and spatial features of violence: In its direct, physical form, violence enacts space and shapes rhythms of life as it shrinks the experiential, emotional and agentic repertoires of victims, enforces docility and differentiates subject positions. In its organised form, violence unfolds enormous dynamics, sets people and things into motion, and accelerates movement. The immediacy, suddenness and speed of physical violence can be contrasted with the slow, indirect and gradual mode of violence’s sublimation into domination. This transformation materialises in technologies that control mobilities and direct movement (such as barriers, roadblocks and walls). Space is thereby contained and constituted as static and stable. Violence is therefore always inscribed in an urban imaginary that depicts the city as a spatially bound and distinct totality. In this reading, violence is neither taking place in the city nor is it of the city. Instead, it is generative of multiple material-time-space figurations that are assembled in different rhythms and speeds while differentiating lived experiences producing, among others, racialised and gendered bodies.

The introduction lays out the core questions of the book and sketches out the main themes discussed. What does it mean to make a living with ‘gigs’? In what way are inequalities reproduced in new forms of temporary, low-paid jobs in the digital economy? On the basis of in-depth interviews and participant observations with young men in their twenties and thirties, the book explores their making do in precarious jobs of the digital economy. It probes a comparative methodology to develop analytical lenses that allow discussion of the making of livelihood beyond modern standards of formal employment, welfare and status as self-accruing individuals. Young men’s practices of making do in the digital economy are at the focus to explore the role of symbolic economies in the reproduction of inequalities in globalized urban precarity.

The RSPCA, founded in 1824, is often treated by historians as an arm of the establishment, primarily intent on reforming the disruptive behaviour of the lower orders. This chapter gives a more nuanced view of the Society’s policies. Despite its admitted social discrimination, and its failure to grapple with such moneyed-class cruelties as field sports and live cattle transit, the Society was essentially a thoughtful, idealistic and multi-vocal body, the fulcrum of the nineteenth-century animal-protection movement. It was supportive of the many new initiatives and specialised animal charities that sprang from RSPCA work – many of them led by women. However, a perceived need to keep in step with public opinion on anti-cruelty measures, and to avoid charges of ‘sentimental’ extremism, made the RSPCA itself wary of promoting women to any positions of influence, despite their record of passionate and energetic support for the cause. While women represented a significant majority of donors and grassroots workers for the Society, they were debarred from membership of its executive until 1906.

To accentuate the micro-dynamics of urban violence and to advance typological and theoretical work, this chapter highlights that the different forms of violence need to be examined more closely. In focusing on forms of violence as a specific set of violent practices that a social actor routinely uses to make claims on other social actors, the chapter develops a relational understanding of violence. Within this relational understanding, time and space are crucial factors. By including the interplay of space and time, the approach grasps details of escalations and de-escalations of violence and the (re)production of different forms of violence within violent confrontations. Therefore, this chapter elaborates on different forms of violence and their spatial and particularly temporal dynamics. It scrutinises the particular entanglements of space, time and various forms of violence from a comparative perspective throughout San Salvador and Kingston. The two capital cities of El Salvador and Jamaica expose extraordinarily high levels of violence and a particular diversity of forms of violence, predominated by gang violence. In so doing, it adds a temporal dimension to an ongoing discussion on the spatial foundations of violence, shedding light on different forms of violence. This chapter emphasises that mobilising and organising violence requires the manipulation of space and time.

The powerful poem ‘Justice’ by Danai Mupotsa recognises that liberation is seldom freely given and is worth nurturing and protecting. It encourages a view of decoloniality that is possible. Acknowledging that White Mindfulness serves certain audiences and neglects others, the conclusion’s textured notion of social norms as the very air we breathe remembers People of the Global Majority. To remain relevant today and to foster responsive transformation and innovation, incentives to change are now required of organisations, institutions, and networks of White Mindfulness, rather than individuals. With a nod to those projects engaged in shifting the needle on radical change, the conclusion asks us to name our own sense of power and justice and to relate this to the world of Western mindfulness. It paves a path that allows White Mindfulness to fully engage with a fast-changing world forged by many initiatives unrelated to and independent of it. Lorde’s master’s tools concept is read here as a guide to widening the solution space and move beyond binaries. Changing the narrative, mechanisms, and power dynamics – the master’s tools – through which White Mindfulness is reproduced is necessary for change. This book extends the invitation to White Mindfulness to turn towards the sea change, respond to calls of justice, transform radically, and become part of the solution space.

During the 1920s the Chinese government published lists of national ‘Humiliation Days’, dedicated to the remembrance of imperialist violence in China. Events like the May 30th Shanghai incident, or the infamous ‘21 Demands’ were to be commemorated according to this calendar, which was also intended to unify the millions of Chinese people living all over the world. In the cities of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, with their traditionally large Chinese populations, the practice of celebrating these holidays became part of the complicated framework of entangled spatial and temporal connections. The repetitive rhythm of remembering came into contact with other social or political rhythms of urban space-time, thus contributing to its constant reorganisation and transformation. The chapter investigate how the remembering of urban violence was practiced in an environment that was temporally and spatially removed from the original event. It considers how the ‘Humiliation Days’ conjured up new acts of violence or led to the expectation of violence by the governments of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies – and as such tended to occupy all three temporal dimensions of past, present and future at once. By taking a closer look at how the contemporaries dealt with these recurring events, it is not only possible to understand the temporal and spatial roots of urban violence, but also to analyse how this specific space-time changed from year to year.