This chapter draws on a year of fieldwork with housing activists in Berlin to examine law as a cultural archive of putatively long-defunct utopian visions, and at once as the key for resurrecting these visions in the present. In the German elections of September 2021 a referendum for expropriating hundreds of thousands of apartments owned by real-estate multinationals in the federal state of Berlin won by a resounding majority, to the surprise of both supporters and detractors. The inclusion of the referendum on the Berlin ballot represented the successful culmination of several years of intensive organizing and campaigning by a grassroots movement facing a largely uncooperative and antagonistic government led by the Social Democrats. The movement based its campaign on an article in the German constitution that grants federal as well as state governments the power to “socialize” private property on a massive scale. Included in the 1949 constitution with the support not only of the Social Democrats who now oppose it but also of many conservatives, the article reflects a bygone time when competing visions of how best to structure Germany’s economy had not yet reached a political resolution, when ideas about the supremacy of public over private interests held sway over broad constituencies, and when aspirations for the collective ownership of the means of production were central to working-class discourses. Notably for how these struggles panned out, this article has never been used in the history of the Federal Republic. The chapter examines how contemporary housing activists seek to reanimate such past futurities through their legal afterlives, locating in the law the potential for a radical change that in contrast with the largely ineffective impact of existing rent regulations and city ordinances would fundamentally transform the nature of the real-estate market from the ground up. The chapter argues that far from naively staking their hopes on law, these activists elaborate creative strategies for reckoning with the limits that an antagonistic political conjuncture as well as enduring hegemonic ideologies about the market place upon it.

Chapter 3 considers different approaches to data collection. Three case studies are included. The first study involves a purpose-built corpus of news articles about obesity. We focus on theoretical considerations attending to corpus design, as well as practical challenges involved in processing texts provided by repositories such as LexisNexis to make them amenable to corpus analysis. The second study focuses on how corpus linguists might work with existing datasets, in this case, transcripts collected by research collaborators conducting ethnographic research in Australian Emergency Departments. We discuss the ways in which data collected for the purposes of different kinds of analysis is likely to require some pre-processing before it becomes suitable for corpus-based analysis. The third study is concerned with the creation of a corpus of anti-vaccination literature from Victorian England. We discuss the challenges involved in sourcing historical material from existing databases, selecting a principled set of potential texts for inclusion, and using optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert the texts into a format that is appropriate for corpus tools.

Chapter 1 introduces the context and aims of the book, and provides a brief introduction to corpus linguistics for readers unfamiliar with it. It finishes by providing a chapter-by-chapter overview of the book.

Chapter 11 introduces the concept of legitimation in discourse and considers how it might function, and be studied, in the context of health(care) communication. First, we look at how contributors to the online parenting forum Mumsnet use labels denoting attitudes towards vaccinations. We point out how labels that involve opposition to vaccinations, such as ‘anti-vaxxer’ tend to collocate with negation, and then consider how people justify negating the applicability of the label to themselves. This reveals a range of different concerns around vaccinations. We then draw on a study of patient feedback in which we examined how patients legitimate their perspectives and the evaluations they gave in their feedback. For example, this included patients representing themselves as experienced users of healthcare services. Additionally, some patients used aspects of their identities to position themselves as requiring attention, while others used techniques such as employing second person pronouns to imply that their experiences could be generalised to other patients.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the land rights movement, drawing from the experience of the Yolngu peoples in northern Australia. This chapter identifies the different ways that land rights may be recognized. Each of these mechanisms has strengths and weaknesses, with a constitution being the most robust form of protection for land rights. However, the biggest challenge is in the implementation of land rights. Despite the challenges, Indigenous Peoples have successfully protected and reclaimed their lands under the ongoing force of dispossession, employing strategies such as direct action and litigation. Drawing from the contexts presented in this edited book, this chapter identifies the barriers to advancing land rights; the strategies to overcome these barriers and to support the reclamation of land; and identifies some of the opportunities to strengthen land rights moving forward.

In 2011, the Brazilian Government began dismantling the country’s robust framework for Indigenous land rights by enacting measures to deny Indigenous Peoples’ access to their ancestral lands. From 2019 to 2022, the government did not recognize or title a single hectare of Indigenous lands, despite more than 700 pending requests for demarcation (or formal designation and titling). A change in government and six land demarcations in 2023, however, show signs of a new era for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and relationship with the state. This chapter analyzes evolving Indigenous land rights pre- and post-constitutionalization in 1988, the result of intense political mobilization and shifting colonialist perceptions of Indigenous Peoples. This chapter also discusses the main obstacles faced by Indigenous Peoples in enforcing Brazil’s protective land rights framework, accounting for the structures of settler colonial states – structures that permit institutional and physical violence against Indigenous Peoples by state and non-state actors alike. Finally, this chapter examines the opportunities created since the change in government in 2023, proposing new avenues to advance Indigenous Peoples’ constitutional land rights in Brazil.

This chapter examines conservative attacks on social media, and their validity. Conservatives have long accused the major social media platforms of left-leaning bias, claiming that platform content moderation policies unfairly target conservative content for blocking, labeling, and deamplification. They point in particular to events during the COVID-19 lockdowns, as well as President Trump’s deplatforming, as proof of such bias. In 2021, these accusations led both Florida and Texas to adopt laws regulating platform content moderation in order to combat the alleged bias. But a closer examination of the evidence raises serious doubts about whether such bias actually exists. An equally plausible explanation for why conservatives perceive bias is that social media content moderation policies, in particular against medical disinformation and hate speech, are more likely to affect conservative than other content. For this reason, claims of platform bias remain unproven. Furthermore, modern conservative attacks on social media are strikingly inconsistent with the general conservative preference not to interfere with private businesses.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is often called "The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet." This 1996 law grants platforms broad legal immunity against claims arising from both third-party content that they host, and good-faith content moderation decisions that they make. Most observers agree that without Section 230 immunity, or some variant of it, the modern internet and social media could not exist. Nonetheless, Section 230 has been subject to vociferous criticism, with both Presidents Biden and Trump having called for its repeal. Critics claim that Section 230 lets platforms have it both ways, leaving them free to host harmful content but also to block any content they object to. This chapter argues that criticisms of Section 230 are largely unwarranted. The diversity of the modern internet, and ability of ordinary individuals to reach broad audiences on the internet, would be impossible without platform immunity. As such, calls for repeal of or major amendments to Section 230 are deeply unwise. The chapter concludes by pointing to important limits on Section 230 immunity and identifying some narrow amendments to Section 230 that may be warranted.