This paper considers experiences of penal and voluntary-sector interventions in the lives of young people labelled as ‘troubled’ or ‘at risk’ of criminal behaviour. Drawing on data from a case-study conducted in the north of England, this paper focuses on the narratives of young people ‘on the margins’ of society who were involved with a range of community-based interventions, specifically youth clubs, a support group and a mandatory youth justice course. We consider how young people experience and respond to stigmatising elements prevalent in the structured interventions and everyday interactions with the institutions and agencies intended to support them. We argue that ‘promotive’ relationships between young people and the adults working with them enable young people to challenge risk-based identities and navigate the barriers they face.

This article examines gender, nation, and identity in the popular song of folk roots ‘Alfonsina y el mar’. Written by Félix Luna and Ariel Ramírez, the song is based on the suicide of feminist poet Alfonsina Storni and achieved worldwide popularity through Mercedes Sosa's 1969 rendition on the album Mujeres argentinas. Using Butler's theory of gender performance, Cusick's proposals for a feminist music theory, and Plesch's concept of dysphoric topics in Argentine nationalist music, this article deconstructs the song's poetic, musical, and visual discourses to critique its underlying cultural signification. It concludes that by infantilizing, romanticizing, and nationalizing Storni's public figure, her legacy was adapted to the patriarchal expectations of decorum and historical narrative about nation pervasive in Argentina in the late 1960s. Storni's white European urban background was adapted to more ‘authentic’ Argentine values through Sosa's performance and public image.

Introducing our Special Issue on marginalisation, this paper considers some of the challenges that this topic poses for legal scholars. The paper identifies that these challenges arise principally from the ambivalence of ‘marginalisation’ itself: at once an idea so broad that it arguably underpins the bulk of legal research (and socio-legal research in particular), but at the same time an idea that in practice too often quickly gives way to various other neighbouring ones: disadvantage, discrimination, disempowerment, exclusion, inequality, silencing, stigmatisation, victimisation and so on. This paper considers this ambivalence and traces etymological roots (and routes) by which we understand the margin, the marginalised and marginalisation.

This article considers in detail the choosing of a language for the liturgy and sermons in Roman Catholic parishes in Belarus. The choice of the Belarusian language is part of a deliberate nation-building policy by the Catholic Church. Moreover, a whole network of local peculiarities, historical stereotypes, and political attitudes is concealed beneath the unified cover of a preference for the use of the Belarusian language. Based on interviews with clergy and religious activists, the article shows that the Roman Catholic Church repeatedly works out compromise solutions that allow it to adapt to the pressures of the state and believers going through a process of contradictory and conflicting nation-building.

The performance practice of European serial music has long been misunderstood. This article uses Stockhausen's Klavierstück I (1952–3) as a lens through which to view the realities of this practice, drawing on close contextual analysis of the affordances of the score and the now significant corpus of recordings. These findings are used to extend M. J. Grant's view of serial aesthetics and to provide a practical basis for what she calls ‘serial listening’. Three principal styles of performance are identified and attendant modes of listening suggested, relating to the non-thematic principles and hermeneutic contexts of serial music, which include the embodied response of the performer to defamiliarized musical material and the nascent dialectic of instrumental and electronic composition. This investigation – informing serious judgements of value and taste – has broader implications for the development of Stockhausen's notation and temporal theory in the 1950s and for the performance practice of new music.

Under the recurring headline ‘the Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’, several British newspapers reported in early 1900 that, during the ongoing siege of Mafeking, British army concertina players were capturing enemy soldiers by simply playing strains of the concertina to distract them out of their hiding places. ‘One is sorry to learn that the art of music should be pressed into service to lure persons to destruction’, a commentator in the Musical News noted, but then, it was rationalized, ‘all's fair in war’. This hybrid use of the concertina during the South African War was further employed as a metaphor for the decay of the physical body itself: as has been noted by Elizabeth van Heyningen, food in Boer concentration camps was so meagre that the meat served to prisoners was once described as coming from a ‘carcase [who] looks like a concertina drawn out fully with all the wind knocked out’. Likewise, Krebs (1999) has discussed the presence of the concertina in the trenches as an example of contemporaneous stereotypes about the susceptibility of Boer soldiers to music in relation to perceived notions that they were backwards and easily manipulated. Drawing upon references to music – particularly the ubiquitous, anthropomorphised, instrument of the concertina – in concentration camps during the South African War, this paper will situate the use of British military music at the dawn of the twentieth century within the framework of trauma studies, proposing that the soundscapes of imperial war were implicitly tinged with traces of physical suffering.

This paper proposes an integrating interpretation of the term ‘place of safety’ in the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue, 1979, grounded in international human rights and refugee law. It argues that the exposure to harm as a consequence of the conditions under which sea migrants endure irregular journeys raises vulnerability concerns and the need to search for mechanisms of redress. It further claims that sea migrants are marginalised by states’ refusal to allow their disembarkation on land. It also argues that a narrow interpretation of the term ‘place of safety’ risks perpetuating, if not exacerbating, situations of vulnerability and marginalisation among sea migrants. Key themes addressed in this contribution are vulnerability and marginalisation of sea migrants, vulnerability reasoning in the interpretation process and the scope for a more integrating reading of the term ‘place of safety’ that is responsive to the specific needs among sea migrants.