Covid‐19 and Football: Crisis Creates Opportunity

This article looks at the financial performance and position of English professional football before Covid‐19 and the impact that the pandemic has had on the industry. It analyses revenue streams in different divisions, the dependency that clubs have on them and how they have changed as a result of the pandemic. The article also reviews key costs for football clubs, the extent to which they can be reduced, different business models that operate, and possible funding sources for the sport from third parties and within the industry.     

The Car as Avatar in Australian Social Security Decisions

This paper draws upon automobile semiotics and legal semiotics to argue that the car in Australian social security decisions becomes an avatar for the applicant that is then decoded into meaning streams concerning deservingness and prudence. It is suggested that this has two implications. The first it highlights the techniques where by a technical object (the car) and the ‘life’ of the applicant became bridged in law; and through that bridging life becomes ‘formatted.’ The second highlights the extent of automobile culture. The car has meaning beyond the highways and parking lots. The paper shows how these meanings have become integrated into processes of biopolitical governance.     

Public Inquiry Methods,Processes and Outputs: an Epistemological Critique

Public inquiries are an important phenomenon in modern British society, often used to address controversial or difficult issues of major concern to policy makers, the media and the public. Although people often comment adversely on how costly inquiries are and how long they take, inquiry methods are rarely discussed, let alone critiqued or challenged. However, from a social sciences perspective, inquiry methods, processes and outputs are often at odds with accepted standards for research methods. This paper discusses this divergence and the implications for how we should regard the inquiry as a way of knowing, or learning.     

‘Seeing’ is believing: Positivist terrology, peacemaking criminology, and the northern ireland peace process

In this essay, the authors seek to draw upon the understanding and critique of positivism within criminological discourse in order to offer one analysis of the British governments’ approach to the Northern Ireland peace process. They argue that this approach has been hampered not just by the political reliance of the John Major government on Ulser Unionist support at Westminster but by a political and ideological approach to the peace process, informed by positivist terrorology, which has lead to an inability to ‘see’ the potential for peace. Offering a brief analysis of one of its leading academic proponents, the authors argue that such a paradigm posits a view of the liberal democratic state as axiomatically legitimate. Politically-motivated violence within such a state is seen as a purely criminal attack upon it, fundamentally inexplicable in terms other than the deviancy of its perpetrators. Thus in this view, politically-motivated violence is only combatable through purely instrumental, technical, and scientific means. By way of contrast to this paradigm, the authors offer an alternative vision, based on the epistemologies of critical and peacemaking criminology which, they argue, offers much greater potential for the prospects of peace in Northern Ireland and similar political conflicts elsewhere. NIACRO     

Friendly Competition

Recently,I had the chance to attend the Ehbor Cup Tour of Fuzhou,which was a three-day,three-stage cycling event open to professionals and amateurs alike from all over Asia.Unfortunately,I wasn’t a competitor.I’m not quite fit enough to make it up a mountain at my own pace,let alone when trying to beat more than 100 other people.I’m not sure I’d want to see myself in spandex either.However,it was from my comfortable,and physically un-strenuous,position on the sidelines that I had time to reflect a little.     

Seeing,Moving, Catching,Accumulating: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Pokémon GO</Emphasis>, and the Legal Subject

This paper argues that the augmented reality gaming application for smart devices, Pokémon GO shows the fate of the legal subject as a neoliberal monster subjugated to the limitations imposed by hypercapitalism. The game, derived from Nintendo’s iconic Pokémon franchise, reveals the legal subject as a frenzied, diminished and impulsive being, allowed to see, move, catch and accumulate but unable to participate in more meaningful self-narration. It is not that the game is lawless, notwithstanding, anxieties in the semiosphere about users trespassing or engaging in criminal behaviour. Rather the game is over structured and highly limited, both within its game-play which is repetitive and impulsive, and in its absence of narrative. Unlike the classic Nintendo Pokémon games which are within the role-playing game genre, Pokémon GO abstracts the seeing, moving, catching and accumulating features of the classic games without the overarching narrative, questing and competition. In this Pokémon GO manifests the transformation of the liberal legal subject of capitalism to the neoliberal subject of a digital orientated hypercapitalism where seeing, moving, catching and accumulating is immediate and impulsive, obliterating the ‘prudent’ subject participating in their own self-narration.     

Participation in prevention programs for dating violence: beliefs about relationship violence and intention to participate

This study utilizes the Health Belief Model (HBM) to examine the factors related to the intention to participate in prevention programming for dating violence. Perceptions of susceptibility to future violence and the benefits of prevention programming appear to be the strongest predictors of participation in prevention programs. Perceptions of the severity of dating violence do not appear to be related to intentions to participate. There were no differences in intention between those reporting psychological or physical violence in their dating relationship, although some of the HBM factors were associated with a history of violence. Contrary to hypotheses, psychological and physical violence did not moderate the impact of the HBM factors on intention. Implications of these findings are discussed and recommendations for recruiting participants for primary and secondary prevention programs are offered.     

RESISTANCE,TRANSITION AND EXCLUSION: POLITICALLY MOTIVATED EX-PRISONERS AND CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION IN NORTHERN IRELAND

The landscape of political imprisonment in Northern Ireland was changed due to the general release and reintegration of politically motivated prisoners as part of the Belfast Agreement. This article reflects upon the post-prison experiences of former prisoners and their families, and in particular how the move from a resistant to a transitional framework has facilitated a greater openness and willingness amongs ex-prisoners to acknowledge the personal and familial problems related to incarceration. We also explore the ways in which ex-prisoners have attempted to deal with the continued social, political and civic exclusion which arises as a result of their conflict-related ‘criminal’ convictions. In the final section of the article, the authors further develop the move from a resistant to a transitional characterization of incarceration and its consequences.