While confessional tales are a common feature of the research process, stories of exiting the field remain scarce. This chapter is a reflection on the author’s experiences of leaving a post-industrial town after a long period of study. First, it troubles the popular narrative of ‘leaving’ as a voluntary and deliberate decision. The author’s abrupt departure from the research site prompted questions and anxieties about researcher responsibilities and commitments. Second, it highlights the affective nature of leaving the field and sketches out the interpersonal intensity of the relationship between both the researcher and the participants. Third, it reflects upon the author’s trepidation about writing once he had left the site, both in terms of doing justice to participants’ lives and not further stigmatising a maligned community. By sketching out not the reasons for leaving the field, but what concerns emerged because of his departure, the author argues that researchers must treat disengagement as a serious matter – pragmatically and analytically – which rarely leaves them unaffected.

When it comes to leaving the field of ethnographic study, the procedures we have been taught in methodology coursework or even our own social template for what it means to make a good and graceful exit, fall short. The things that make for a ‘good exit’ – grace, smoothness, loose strings neatly snipped into place – do not work in the context of awkward human relationships, the fluid and unending field, and the fruitful, beautiful but complicated ethnographic mess. This chapter tells the story of the necessity of the ‘bad exit’ in childhood ethnography. Making a ‘bad exit’ is defined as intentional complication, partial leaving, possibly returning and valuing the complexity of human relationships in muddying the waters of departure such that the ‘exit’ defies the procedural and unidirectional, tying exit with entrance like two ends of a Mobius strip. The project described to illustrate the ‘bad exit’ was an ongoing ethnography of young transgender children and their families. And, as per the tenets of the ‘bad exit’, the departure was complicated by the entrance: the author is not just a researcher interested in the lives and stories of gender-diverse children but also the mother of a transgender daughter. So, leaving this work was never possible in the classic sense of departure. While the author does not suggest that one cannot really leave the field, she does suggest that our understanding of what it means to ‘leave’ should be carefully reconsidered in light of childhood work.

The introduction establishes the context for the book, as well as the central argument: that the world is racing towards unparalleled catastrophe by entering a dangerous Third Nuclear Age that cannot be understood simply by focusing on the realm of the ‘high politics’ of state leaders, techno-strategic developments and military doctrine. Instead, the work of the peace activist and historian E. P. Thompson on the concept of exterminism is introduced in order to demonstrate how an attention to the broader cultural politics and lived experiences of the Third Nuclear Age can help us to understand and address the challenges that now confront us. This chapter highlights how the book builds upon and extends a burgeoning field of research on critical nuclear studies, before providing an outline of the book.

While the acceptance of a communal partition in the Indian subcontinent was a collective majority decision of the Indian National Congress Party, Jawaharlal Nehru (prime minister of the interim government since September 1946 and of free India from 15 August 1947) was the architect of the federal plan for Palestine. His approach towards colonial situations and partition as a possible solution to communal problems in India and Palestine highlighted his dichotomy between pragmatism necessitated by the politico-territorial immediacy of the Indian condition, and moral posturing facilitated by geographical distance. Having achieved independence through communal partition, he was urging the Jews and Arabs of Palestine to coexist under one political authority through accommodation and cooperation. The federal plan was not only a sign of Indian naivety regarding international diplomacy, but also a reflection of its duality; political pragmatism was confined to the subcontinent while moral eloquence was visible and useful elsewhere. The duality towards the two partitions was compounded by the uncritical adulation of the federal plan by various Indian scholars and writers.

Brazilian Homeless Workers associations, organized in the context of very active movements struggling for the right to housing, not only participate in the design of their future social housing complexes but are educated by groups of activist housing experts (including architects, sociologists, economists, urban planners etc) to be able to work in the construction process efficiently and through organized forms of collaboration. The work of the group USINA analyzed in this chapter is characteristic in its emphasis on the tradition of mutual help (mutirão). Deeply influenced by the relevant ayuda mutua tradition of Uruguayan Housing Cooperatives (FUCVAM), USINA’s projects develop the potentialities of urban commoning through a direct involvement of the future inhabitants in the construction process. The chapter includes an interview with one of the USINA architects.

The Introduction considers the significance of historical research into urban space and the built environment; it also provides a broad outline of the academic landscape and goes some way towards defining key terms for the book. It also provides advice as to how to read and engage with this guide, and an outline of the book structure and chapter contents.

This chapter outlines the history of digital history and digital humanities more broadly. This historical narrative is intertwined with coverage of the technological changes which have made certain types of digital history feasible or even popular, and noting the economic drivers to certain types of material being preferentially digitised. The effect of the digital on the way historians approach reading, writing, collaboration, discovery (search) and citation is also discussed.

This chapter examines the Anglo-Chinese negotiations over Hong Kong between October 1982 and the end of 1983. It starts with an overview of the negotiating objectives, strategies, and teams of the two countries. From the outset, Britain and China had polar-opposite approaches to the negotiations. During the preliminary talks until late June 1983, the Chinese side insisted on the British acceptance of China’s ‘premise’ on sovereignty as the prerequisite for substantive talks, which Percy Cradock resisted. When the ‘second phase’ of the talks started in July, the Chinese still refused to be drawn to detailed discussion until Cradock abandoned all claims to administrative rights or the ‘British link’. Thatcher was pulled in different directions by Cradock and the foreign secretary, who constantly warned against the breakdown of talks, on the one hand, and on the other by Hong Kong’s unofficial members, who endlessly pressed for continuing British administration. Through a close reading of the British archives, this chapter reveals how Thatcher was actively involved in policy deliberations, and why her initially tough stance gave way to pragmatism and concessions to China. Thatcher was not simply led by the nose by British diplomats, but she also convinced herself that a Chinese commitment to ‘a 50-year period of autonomy’, for example, would help secure Hong Kong’s capitalist system after the relinquishment of British sovereignty.

The implications of statelessness at refugees’ end of life are profound, but socio-political exclusion in old age is rarely examined. Resettlement with a path to citizenship is considered a durable solution. But in this chapter, we interrogate a limit case: older monoglot refugees from Bhutan find themselves resettled yet stateless in the United States. This limit case illustrates how U.S. refugee law clashes with U.S. citizenship laws, specifically policies on language, to create the precarious – and permanent – situation of statelessness for older refugees, with no viable path of ever becoming U.S. citizens. We argue that the failure of the U.S. state to decide and act to make an exception in this case is a form of state violence, extending theories that draw upon Giorgio Agamben’s ‘state of exception’. Non-decisionism, as the philosophical reverse of decisionism, also constitutes state violence. Furthermore, we argue for linking the decisionism of the Bhutanese state some 30 years ago with the non-decisionism of the American state currently. Non-decisionism is not an anomaly but a rule, its existence across time and across a state’s territorial boundaries acknowledged. For the older monoglot Bhutanese refugees in the United States, it is a suspension of inclusion, rather than merely an effect of exclusion; they are caught in a violent cyclical suspension of hope and despair that they would be one day accommodated into a polity. The weight of state violence notwithstanding, contestations materialise in localised community efforts for resistance and redress, for dignity upon old age and death for stateless refugees.

The 'Partnership for Peace' programme of the NATO alliance embraces such traditionally neutral countries as Sweden and Switzerland. Historical perspective, however, must lead to instant suspicions of any claims of the death of neutrality. The period from approximately the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth has witnessed, overall, an advance of the position of belligerents at the expense of that of neutrals. The world may be entering a period somewhat like the early and mid-nineteenth century, in which the absence of protracted great-power warfare led to a general belief that the balance of legal power was swinging in favour of neutrals and against belligerents. That hope on the part of champions of neutral rights proved misplaced at that time. And it could very easily prove misplaced again now.

This chapter discusses the aesthetic of refusal as it is articulated in contemporary performances in India and South Africa while the debates around the #MeToo movement continue to sadden, agitate and exhaust womxn around the globe. In the aftermath of the Indian Supreme Court acquitting the Chief Justice of India of all sexual harassment charges in May 2019, feminists are beginning to feel let down by the failed promises of the movement. The incessant pressure to vocalise narratives of sexual harassment preclude self-care, rest and strategic (non) productivity by burdening womxn with the emotional labour of reliving the trauma in public. This chapter discusses the artistic works of Thandiwe Msebenzi and Lebohang Motaung in South Africa, and Vijila Chirappad, Vanitha Mathil (women’s wall) and Blank Noise in India to explore their engagement with rest, sleep, beauty, stillness and community as forms of performing radical resistance. The artists and performers discussed highlight the workings of racialised capitalism and raise questions about labour and production – who has the right to leisure and who needs to keep working – and how they are intertwined with markers of class, caste, sexuality and gender. The discussion affirms the affective potential of art and performance as a powerful mode of creating community while #MeToo exhausts our faith in the legal infrastructures of the state.