In 2018, Hannah Gadsby created a sensation through her stand-up show Nanette. In it she shocked audiences by telling her hard-hitting trauma narrative, revealing the impact of sexual abuse, male violence, and homophobia on her mental health. Controversially, Gadsby also claimed that stand-up as a form and the mainstream stand-up industry itself were significant agents in deepening her psychological harm. This chapter examines Gadsby’s dramaturgical strategies and struggles in attempting to construct a means of speaking about the pain of her lived experience and seeking a therapeutic means of addressing her trauma through stand-up. Luckhurst analyses Gadsby’s interest in ethical story-telling and her notion of educating audiences about laughter and political complicity. Finally, Luckhurst argues that Gadsby draws on therapy models to transform her trauma narrative into a story of healing for herself and her audiences.

One of the most interesting, and rapid, recent changes in live stand-up comedy is the increased number of disabled comedians performing. This chapter examines the performances of two disabled comedians – Laurence Clark and Rosie Jones – to explore how their performances may be viewed as social justice comedy through an analysis of the techniques used, and themes explored, in their performances. The chapter begins by considering the ways in which disability has been represented in comedy across history. Attention then shifts to how stand-up comedy can be considered a tool for social justice. The focus then turns to the methodological framework used to gather and analyse performances by Laurence Clark and Rosie Jones, before examining how the techniques used, and themes explored, in their performances may have social justice potentials and impacts for disability and disabled people and how the limits to these potentials and impacts can be understood.

The subject areas that form the HASS learning area are founded on and around ‘values’, and values underpin everything we do in educational settings. This is not surprising, given that values are at the core of our thinking and actions. As human beings, we have core values to which we subscribe – things that we think are of importance and of worth. These values are diverse and influenced by a complex relationship between the individual and their social environment. As an example, consider the values listed by Burgh, Field and Freakley: friendship, security, health, education, beauty, art and wealth. You may disagree and think that holding one or more of the values listed would not in fact lead to a good life; or that an important value is missing from this list; that is, we may disagree that each of these values is of importance. The point, however, is that ‘[e]veryone has values, but there is not universal agreement about what is valuable’. In this chapter, the use of a community of inquiry will be explored as a means of supporting meaningful values inquiry in HASS. The community of inquiry is an approach that empowers learners to think critically about issues pertaining to values, ethics and social justice in a safe environment that promotes diversity and student voice.

With the criminal law’s duty to advance social justice at the site of culpability evaluation established, Chapter 2 provides the substance of that duty and offers a conceptual tool to aid in its fulfilment, in the form of the Real Person Approach (RPA). The chapter introduces the target of the RPA as the dominant construct of personhood represented by excuse doctrine, and identifies its contribution to both moral and social injustice, through the subversion of core criminal law principles of proportionality and parsimony, respectively. The RPA responds by offering a guiding framework which helps to identify and explain these injustices, and aids with the challenge of holding people to account for wrongdoing in a way that advances social justice. Finally, the chapter explains the core features of the RPA in terms of acknowledging agency as vulnerable, responding with recognitive justice, and maintaining conceptual feasibility.

In the majority of the cases examined, workers and communities sought to address their grievances through a range of host-country state institutions alongside their claims to transnational NJMs. Chapter 6 explores the conflicting roles of the state in enabling and constraining the ability of NJMs to support community struggles for redress. Non-judicial mechanisms sometimes enlisted useful support from various state agencies, drawing on the distinctive functional capacities and sources of legitimacy that state agencies possess. However, other state agencies also, at times in the same case, attempted to block or at least significantly impede NJM efforts to influence redress processes and outcomes. The chapter shows that because state actors often hold highly ambiguous roles as enablers as well as regulators of business-related human rights violations, opportunities for transnational NJMs to actively collaborate with national governments in addressing grievance claims were usually limited; instead, the ability of NJMs to support human rights redress often depended on indirect or unintended effects of their interactions with the state. Consequently, it was not primarily via efforts to actively collaborate with governments that transnational NJMs contributed to redress, but rather through shifting power balances among competing coalitions of actors engaged with grievance struggles, inside as well as outside the state.

Are non-judicial approaches to remedying business-related human rights violations a good use of the resources invested in them, or a counterproductive distraction from alternative legal or activist pathways to remedy? This chapter outlines the book’s approach to exploring this divisive question, drawing on field-work intensive case studies of human rights grievances across three industrial sectors in Indonesia and India. This introductory chapter launches the book’s argument that while NJMs are seriously limited in their ability to deliver adequate human rights redress, NJMs can nonetheless make small but useful contributions to broader struggles for human rights remedy, never by substituting for binding state-led regulatory and redress processes, but rather by providing entry points through which workers and communities can sometimes mobilise additional resources or sources of leverage in support of their struggles for redress. These findings imply the need for a responsive approach to NJM institutional design and regulatory strategy, in which NJMs are mobilised more explicitly as part of a wider field of struggle to counterbalance some of the entrenched inequalities that buttress recurring patterns of human rights grievances around the world.

The last chapter offers a comparison of protest movements in the territories: some appeared to be less politically motivated and more concerned with land rights and economic grievances; other movements, such as the march in 1949 in the BVI, openly called for greater political rights and autonomy. Yet, none of the campaigns by local pro-autonomy activists managed to achieve widespread public support or electoral success. This final chapter assesses local independence groups and their political discourse. It explores their interactions with the local population, existing political structures, and regional anticolonial movements. It is inaccurate to suggest that the non-sovereign status of these territories was a result of a lack of popular protest or a total absence of nationalism. Rather, through the relationship between popular protest movements, local politics, clandestine independence activists and the response of the colonial state, no widespread call for independence emerged.

In 1968, Martin Luther King gave his final major public speech, in which he praised the work of Sean O’Casey. This chapter highlights the way in which O’Casey’s work proved attractive to Black activists, pointing to the comments he made about race in his letters and autobiographies, and highlighting the way in which Black actors in New York began to perform in O’Casey’s drama in the mid-twentieth century. The chapter also draws attention to the way in which figures such as Harry Belafonte and Lorraine Hansberry felt inspired by the Dublin playwright’s work.

August Wilson forged a formidable legacy as an advocate for Black art and aesthetic practices on and off the stage. In 1996, he delivered a speech at the Theatre Communications Group national conference entitled, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” in which he made a case for the importance of creating, supporting, and sustaining Black art and cultural institutions. The speech continues to serve as an important manifesto for those interested in dismantling the harmful systems and structures that persist in the theatre. This chapter revisits Wilson’s speech and places it in conversation with more recent demands to upend and dismantle white supremacy in the arts, including those articulated by the collective of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color theatremakers organizing under “We See You, White American Theatre.”

The aim of this chapter is to illustrate how a robust long-term care system can positively influence the overall wellbeing of society, extending beyond the individual receiving care. Since the primary recipients of long-term care are often older or disabled individuals, it is sometimes viewed as a costly burden on society rather than an investment in the public interest or the common good. This chapter seeks to challenge such perceptions by emphasizing the positive and proactive social impact of a strong long-term care system on society as a whole. By highlighting these arguments, the chapter aims to provide further justification for countries to invest in their long-term care systems.

Becoming a subject to oneself is a challenge. To make the task somewhat more meaningful, I have presented a narrative that builds on experiences that are likely to resonate with other scholars from the Global South. In the academic journey from separation to synthesis, I have had the good fortune of collaborating with scientists from young students to renowned scholars, to whom I owe immense gratitude. I chose to modify the given metaphor of a pillar to better suit my orientation both to my inner self and to the outside world.

Readers are presented with achievable reforms of laws and policies discussed in earlier chapters.

This chapter presents themes that appear in earlier chapters and makes the case for legal reform to create an agricultural framework that represents the “real” west, rather than John Dutton’s west.