This edited collection emerged due to a shared sense amongst the editors that more needed to be said about how cinematic ethics is intertwined with the sociopolitical. This sense arose from the observation of a growing focus on this topic within the field, as seen in, for example, recent conference papers and publications in journals focusing on film-philosophy. With the turn to ethics in scholarship at the interdisciplinary intersection of film and philosophy now firmly established, it became clear that we should foreground the complex contextualisations, associations, imbrications, combinations and assemblages combining the ethical with the sociopolitical. Alongside this realisation was the growing awareness that cinematic ethics also requires a broader understanding of screen ethics to include examples of screen media ‘types’ which proliferate in our media-saturated world. Not a provincialising of cinematic ethics, but a recognition of the need to broaden the panorama to include television, digital media, virtual reality technology, and so on.

The contributions in Contemporary Screen Ethics together indicate how political the examination of screen ethics is. The manifestation of such politics, however, typically focus on the sociopolitical as opposed to the political strictly speaking (as in the politics of government, for example). Thus, collected in this anthology are chapters which examine screen ethics in relation to a range of topics which can be understood to be sociopolitical. It is worth outlining a few examples.

Feminist-informed explorations of screen ethics herein lead to three distinct contexts. First, considerations of decolonial analysis of the figure of the housemaid in a range of Brazilian cinematic genres and modes (intersectionally considering gender, race and class), which gesture towards an ethics of relationality that could be more inclusive of such otherwise marginalised figures. Second, the teasing out of what an ethics of care might look like in terms of documentary filmmaking practice, once more recognising of the nuanced intersectional nature of such practices and their subjects. Third, the affective nature of the ethical gaze when films explore sexual and gendered violence in the media and film industries.

We might equally consider the various approaches to race which open up discussion of, for instance, how televised stand-up comedy can make an ethicopolitical intervention into the circulation of stereotypes, or, how popular genre films may encourage people to ethically encounter otherness anew in a context which has normalised alignment with a constructed, racialised gaze.

This chapter critically reflects upon Gilles Deleuze's cinematic ethics, which considers cinema to have the potential to restore belief in humanity's ability to act upon the world, or, to put it in a more Deleuzian manner, to provide a reason to believe in this world. Through close analysis of the Chinese documentary Wo sui si qu/Though I am Gone (Hu Jie, 2006) – in which time-images are used to reconsider history – a key point of Deleuze's cinematic ethics is highlighted for further investigation: namely, in a world of cinemas broadly conceived, it may not always be precisely this world which a cinematic ethics asks us to rejuvenate our belief in, but this world's history. Or more precisely, to rejuvenate a belief in the possibility that other records of the past can potentially relativise the official version of history.

This nuancing of Deleuze's cinematic ethics is relevant to our globalised world for two reasons. First, due to the need to understand not the so-called ‘end of history’ but rather the elusive totality of world history. Second, due to neoliberalism globalisation's preference for authoritarian governance, especially the state of exception (Agamben 2005: 87). The second of these is of particular importance. Although the historical moment the documentary engages with – China's Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 – is politically far-removed from the present-day reality many experience worldwide, what it can nevertheless illuminate, which remains pertinent, is the way in which the state of exception shapes history. Neoliberal globalisation's attempted normalisation of the state of exception makes the emphasis on history in the time-image (which is so integral to Deleuze's cinematic ethics), extremely apposite. As the time-images in Though I am Gone indicate, histories obscured during a state of exception can remain ‘alive’ for the present. Thus, Deleuze's cinematic ethics, when understood in relation to both the engagement with world history found in a world of cinemas, and, more broadly, globalisation's emphasis on the eradication of alternative pasts in the state of exception (the return of which indicate the contingency of the present's norms), provides not only a reason to believe in this world, but also, in this process, emphasises the importance of believing in this world's history (the maintenance of its potential to relativise the official version of history).

Introduction

This chapter draws attention to the wider political economy of the labour market, and in particular provides a framework for a deeper, nuanced understanding of social processes and institutional relations in and through which employer engagement is framed. Our perspective takes on board an analytical framework that views a welfare regime as embodying historically formed class (struggle) relations, in which policies are contingent upon the balance of social forces and specific forms of political struggle. Struggles tend to be centred around both the redistribution of income and access to power resources and representation structures. In relation to representation we refer to both elected local and national government, and systems of political exchange such as social dialogue and corporatist networks (Jessop, 2016).

Esping-Andersen’s (1990) concept of welfare regimes as systems of power and negotiation between key interests and actors helps us understand the social and political dynamics of labour regulation. He argued that the redistributive and potentially inclusive dimension of a welfare regime is contingent on labour movement power and influence. The historic development of industrial capitalism in the Scandinavian countries, including Denmark, involved the formation of a highly developed trade union movement and systems of collective bargaining. In earlier work (Etherington and Jones, 2004a) we argued that ‘welfare through work’ in Denmark is shaped largely by the industrial relations framework and the key role that trade unions (TUs), labour movement organizations and the public sector play in labour market policy.

This chapter suggests that four key elements of the Danish system are crucial in shaping employment and skills. The first is that high union density and membership make TUs important actors. In Denmark, the TUs manage unemployment insurance (UI) benefits (the Ghent system), which are important in connecting trade unions to unemployment policies. All these elements combined are crucial to employer engagement in labour market policy. Second, and linked to this, is the TUs’ active involvement in social dialogue and bargaining around employment policy and relatedly, third, a developed system of collective agreements where unions negotiate changes and improvements to welfare and skills policies (Valizade et al, 2022).

Within the UK, and further afield, the spatial delineations of the ‘city region’ have seen a renaissance as the de facto spatial political units of governance for economic development (Clarke and Cochrane 2013, Sykes et al 2021). In the UK, successive governments have sought to reshape the ways in which economic development takes place, and although this shift in governmental delivery began under New Labour, it has been much vaunted by the UK coalition government (Deas 2013), and subsequently by the continuing Conservative administrations (Conservative Party 2015) and the Welsh Labour Party (Bristow and Healy 2015). This chapter, therefore, addresses the (re-)positioning of civil society within these new structures of city region governance. Based on stakeholder mapping and semi-structured interviews with key actors operating across each city region, the chapter illustrates how this has created several significant tensions as well as opportunities for civil society actors.

The chapter draws from four UK case study city regions (two in Wales and two in England from 2015 to 2019) and specifically looks at the ways city and devolution deals have impacted upon the positioning of civil society actors. It was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under grant No: ES/L009099/1; part of WISERD’s ongoing civil society research programme. This methodology takes the form of thematically grouping stakeholder responses to look across the four differing city regions for points of convergence and divergence. This allows the chapter to consider the ways in which civil society organisations and individuals have sought to interpret, rationalise and respond to the challenges of the city region agenda. In doing this, we draw out three thematic tensions that straddle the development of each city region; the purpose being to highlight how the ongoing processes of restructuring sub-national economic space has significant impacts upon the ways in which civil society actors think and mobilise. This is important when much of the city region agenda has been primarily focused upon economic development, often to the detriment of more social concerns. In turn, this has significant implications for civil society autonomy and criticality.