In recent years, there have been calls to work against the ‘neo-liberal’ university in the UK, especially as metric systems such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and more recently the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) are introduced. With REF in particular, there is a need to demonstrate the impact academics have made with their research, which could include advising and sharing our research with governmental bodies. Being part of the neo-liberal university means that research is only deemed ‘impactful’ if it engages with the very structures which are creating and perpetuating the harmful policies scholars are trying to dismantle. For example, work on the Prevent duty may very well require scholars to engage with the Home Office to demonstrate they are trying to implement ‘change’. However, scholars of colour are aware that their bodies as visible Muslim women in these spaces can be harmful and so we often question who their research is really for. This chapter calls for a politics of refusal as a way to address how universities create uneven spaces of knowledge production and for a fundamental rethink of what it means to refuse the current conditions for engaging in ‘impactful’ work. Although the starting point is the university, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that a politics of refusal is also necessary beyond the university space, especially in these turbulent and violent times.

There are no significant technological obstacles to achieving the Health Society. However, there is work to be done in constructing national infrastructure: a secure, national data and sample management system is necessary. This will permit disiy and use of new biomarkers for estimating reduction in risk and will enable continual estimation of changes in health risks in the population.

The chapter analyzes the fourth case study: Uri Avnery, editor of the weekly Haolam Hazeh, a Knesset member, and a peace activist. Avnery was an Israeli PPE who established and maintained contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) during the 1970s and 1980s. The analysis extends from Avnery’s first unofficial diplomatic activity in the 1950s and his first contact with PLO official Said Hammami in 1975, through the establishment of a channel between the Israeli Council for Israeli–Palestinian Peace members and Issam Sartawi and other PLO members, to Avnery’s direct dialogue with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat in the early 1980s. The chapter also discusses how Avnery used his news magazine as a tool in his peace efforts.

In June 2017 Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan had a poem go viral online, ‘This Is Not a Humanising Poem’. Accruing two million views in a few days, the poem seemed to resonate with people far and wide. It was a condemnation of the culture in which Muslims are asked to ‘prove their humanity’ by distancing themselves from ‘terrorism’. The poem was written a day after the London Bridge attack, as an attempt to resist the gazes upon her body and the multiple emotions raised – she asked whether her refusal to write a humanising poem meant she was radical – ‘Is this radical? Am I radical? ‘cos there is nowhere else left to exist now.’ This chapter outlines some of the thought process that went into the poem, and the trappings of performing it too, as, ironically, since then, whilst she has received invitations to appear, perform and talk on many stages both nationally and internationally, people have often reproduced and reduced her work and thoughts in a way that means she often struggles to navigate a line between palatability and honesty. The chapter homes in on a few key moments subsequent to the initial poem that highlight the way racism functions to trap us.

Roland Rat became Breakfast television’s first and only successful superstar. Breakfast TV was up for grabs at the point where the break-up of the public broadcast monopolies combined with new media technologies. Together these brought about an ‘increased experimentation with new journalistic formats’. The new formats blurred the line between politics, current affairs and entertainment, often described as ‘infotainment’. Roland Rat’s appearances turned around TV-am’s viewing figures, particularly with children during school holidays. He went on to be given his own Christmas specials, became a regular on chat shows, released successful records, and had his own series, Rat on the Road, which ran during the school holidays in 1983 and 1984. Roland Rat was, in many ways, the perfect star for Thatcher’s Britain. He connected with the aspirations and the realities of the decade. He loved both caviar and chips, and embraced the latest technology – videos, walkmans and compact discs. In this chapter, TV-am and especially Roland Rat are a hook into a bigger discussion, as various analysts and commentators could quantify audience numbers and attempt to qualify the ‘quality’ of broadcast material.

Thatcher used the metaphor of ‘oxygen’ for the publicity that succoured terrorism: we must, she argued, starve them of the oxygen of publicity. Chapter 6 starts with the Broadcasting Ban (described as ‘restrictions’ officially) which was introduced in October 1988 and lasted until September 1994, alongside the IBA circular from November 1988, which restricted music broadcast. The IBA circular was circulated in response to The Pogues’ song ‘Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six’. The Broadcasting Ban didn’t just affect those directly proscribed groups, and the IBA circular did not only impact music sympathetic to the republican cause. These interventions also reminded the press of their place and brought to light the tensions between the BBC as the ‘cornerstone of public servicing’; and the government’s channelling of the ‘national interests’ and ‘national security’. UK broadcasters responded by using actors’ voices when reporting the words of Sinn Fein, and using subtitles for lyrics of proscribed songs. It did not go unnoticed that this actually made Pogues’ lead singer Shane McGowan’s delivery more not less intelligible. In news footage, music and a series of controversial television documentaries (including the BBC’s At the Edge of the Union, Real Lives and Thames TV’s Death on the Rock), the voice and who could be heard acted as the touch paper between oxygen and publicity for proscribed political positions.

Chapter 1 frames the chronology of the rest of the book. It is Glastonbury Festival’s relationship with Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, tensions with New Age Travellers and the commercialisation of music festival and the festival’s later association with Greenpeace. The festival raised funds for CND throughout the 1980s until 1991. When Glastonbury and CND joined together, the contradictions around pop and politics were writ large through the importance of politics as an experience, caught between the commercial festival with a free festival ideology, between spirituality and Cold War campaigning. The debates around the politics of CND were inseparable from debates over the political possibilities of pop music in the eighties. CND became a touchstone for a wide variety of mainstream pop acts to make a statement that they were not just entertainers; they were social commentators and political activists. As tricky a negotiation as it was, for both the organisers and the activists, it helped them draw a line between the professionalism of contemporary cultural politics and the countercultural past. From 1991 the festival supported Greenpeace, marking a shift in public focus from nuclear disaster, to one of ecological threat. This chapter traces these tensions and maps them in ‘Green Time’, with the growth of ecological awareness, and of UK festival culture. Green Time is simultaneously forward and backwards looking, predicated on saving humanity’s future by demanding action in the present, but inspired by models of the past.

When Thatcher said there’s no such thing as society, it provided a handy shorthand for individualism, in terms of both rights and responsibility. But in the process, communities, collectives, shared interest groups were accounted for, categorised, counted and their values calculated. Special Branch for, example, categorised the crowd in three ways: the number of attendees at an event (and the number of organised opposition to them); likely legal threat; and the mood of the crowd. In prison, groups of inmates were categorised according to potential risk they posed were they to escape. Throughout the eighties, collective moments raised and drew lines around the crowd – in disasters like the Clapham rail crash, King’s Cross fire, the sinking of the Marchioness, or the Herald of Free Enterprise; at football stadia Hillsborough, Heysel, Bradford, or in urban disorder over the Poll Tax; or prison conditions at Strangeways, mass pickets at Wapping, or marches for CND, the National Front, against the Falklands War, or in new political communities at Greenham common or the Battle of the Beanfield. The lines around these crowds, the ways in which they were counted and categorised, shone a spotlight on the individual within; indeed lines of command in the police and emergency services without. crowd management and crowd control distinguished the crowd from ‘the mob’. When things went wrong it exposed the uneasy alliances and lines of command across the establishment.

This chapter demonstrates how people perceive risk through a lens of hopes and fears. Perceptions of risk are illustrated by how we react every day to predictions of changes in the weather. When precise estimates of risk are hard to make, institutions manage risks to and within their organisations by using risk matrices based on experience of how severe are the effects of a risk being realised. This may take the form of a traffic light system that combines the scale and severity of a risk. In a health context where there is sufficient data such as the health risks of tobacco use, risk can be measured more precisely allowing the ascertainment of relative risk, absolute risk and attributable risk.

Drug-supported couples therapy is not a new phenomenon. In fact, MDMA was widely used for this purpose, to good effect in many cases, into the 1980s—before it was banned for largely political reasons. This chapter discusses the history of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, making clear that MDMA is not just ‘emotional glue’ that holds romantic partners together, no matter how incompatible. Rather, professionally guided, drug-enhanced counseling may help some individuals or couples realize that they need to end their relationship, and may allow them to do so in a more loving and healthy way. The chapter asks whether MDMA poses a threat to authenticity or personal identity and raises other risks that may be associated with its use under certain conditions. It concludes with a call for careful, controlled scientific research into the potential of MDMA as an aid to couples counseling

Many of the words that this book uses with precise definitions are in common usage with definitions that are less precise. Common usages and their limitations are illustrated and discussed in this chapter in order to prepare the reader for more precise definitions.

This chapter highlights the recent burst of controlled, scientific research on medical and non-medical uses of psychedelic drugs and MDMA to improve individual welfare, and argues that this research should be extended to couples in romantic relationships. It questions the line between ‘drugs’ and ‘medicine’ and argues that such distinctions often reflect dubious social and historical factors, rather than a clear-eyed assessment of actual benefits and harms. It introduces the idea that love drugs might help strengthen certain relationships, and that anti-love drugs might help other relationships end. But there are serious risks that might be associated with such drugs, and the wider social implications will be hard to predict. To minimize this risk and uncertainty, careful ethical deliberation and nuanced policy measures will be key.