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Contents and Introduction
Journal of the British Academy, Volume 13 Issue 2, Contents and Editors’ Introduction
Fiona Williams*†
,
J.F.Williams@leeds.ac.uk
Elizabeth Edwards‡
,
ejmedwards10@gmail.com
Andrew Hadfield§
,
a.hadfield@sussex.ac.uk
Angela McRobbie¶
A.McRobbie@gold.ac.uk
Abstract
The Editors introduce the second issue of Volume 13 of the Journal of the British Academy. This Introduction includes an overview of the content of the issue.
Keywords
social scienceshumanitiesartsinterdisciplinaryinnovativeinquiryContents
CONVERSATION
Vered Lev Kenaan, in conversation with Rachel Bowlby FBA
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Vered Lev Kenaan
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Lu Sipei and Huang Cenyan
CONVERSATION
Adrian Favell FBA, in conversation with Fiona Williams FBA
PERSONAL REFLECTION
Paul Bou-Habib
COMMENTARY
Ievgeniia Kopytsia and Natalia Slobodian
COMMENTARY
Ben Ansell FBA, Martin Daunton FBA, Emily Grundy FBA, John Muellbauer FBA, Michael Murphy FBA, Avner Offer FBA, and Susan J. Smith FBA
PERSONAL REFLECTION
Shani Dhanda, Susan J. Smith FBA, and Jessie Speer
COMING TO TERMS WITH…
Gurminder K. Bhambra FBA, Catherine Hall FBA, and Sarah A. Radcliffe FBA
Introduction
The Journal of the British Academy is distinctive in drawing together contributions from the span of the humanities and social sciences. Each issue seeks to give coherence to the ways in which leading academics use their disciplines to investigate key intellectual, social, political, economic, and cultural concerns of the day. This issue is no exception. Its contributions address matters of urgent importance through the disciplines of art, philosophy, history, literary antiquity, geography, economics, political sociology, law, and environmental studies. The contributions elucidate matters as diverse as the UK housing emergency, images of reconciliation in war, Northern working-class lives after Brexit, women’s leadership for reconstruction in Ukraine, the recent history of political philosophy, the resistance of the artist-in-exile, and the meanings of racial capitalism.
The issue opens with two pieces that pick up where our previous issue left off. In issue 13/1, we published an article entitled ‘Scholasticide in Gaza’, by Professor Avi Shlaim FBA, on the destruction of institutions of learning in Gaza. We start this issue with Professor Vered Lev Kenaan’s research essay, ‘Hospitality in times of war’, on the historical significance of the handshake. The essay is preceded by a conversation with Professor Rachel Bowlby FBA, which explains the origin, genesis, and development this article. Professor Kenaan works at the University of Haifa—a university and a city known for the coexistence of Jews and Arabs—and is, in common with Bowlby, a Professor of Comparative Literature with shared interests in antiquity. She explains that she was inspired by a much-reproduced photograph of Yocheved Lifshitz, an eighty-five-year old hostage who was eventually released having been taken hostage by Hamas from the Nir Oz Kibbutz, close to the south-eastern border of the Gaza Strip where she lived with her family. The picture, taken in October 2023 shows Ms Lifshitz shaking hands with one of her masked captors, not knowing that her husband, Oded, had been killed by his captors (his body was not returned until early in 2025).
The image inspired Professor Kenaan to reflect on the significance of the handshake throughout history, how it was invariably seen as a sign of a shared bond between men from classical Greece onwards. In the photograph, however, the bond between the handshakers is far more problematic, as it becomes a sign of a woman asserting her agency and facing her attacker, leaving observers uncertain of the significance of the gesture. Is this a sign of reconciliation? A warning that reconciliation will have to come? Or, an appropriation of a male gesture by an unbowed and powerful woman who refuses to accept the status of victim? Professor Kenaan uses her initial surprise when she saw the photograph to reflect on the history of women and handshakes, and to reflect on wider issues such as the duties of a guest to a host and a host to a guest, intimacy and estrangement, friendship and conflict, and resolution and the desire for revenge. Through a detailed comparison of The Iliad with contemporary conflict, Professor Kenaan explores the power of Ms Lifshitz’s gesture, concluding that, however we read the act, ‘The image of a woman’s handshake is a challenge.’
In the research article, ‘Where is home? Wen Peor’s art and social practice’ Dr Lu Sipei and Huang Cenyan explore the life and work of a little-known artist Wen Peor, born in Indonesia of Chinese heritage in 1920. The paper, originating in an eclectic British Academy-funded conference on inequalities and visual media, considers the ways in which political and cultural tensions, and migrations between China and Indonesia, shaped Wen Peor’s work, its reception, and indeed its visibility and archiving. In a life and work reflecting and framed by Asia’s 20th-century political and cultural upheavals, he fled his native Indonesia for fear of persecution and then, for instance, struggled with the Chinese governments’ expectations of ‘Returned Overseas Chinese’. Entangled with this account is a narrative on institutional involvement with these multiple shifts. Wen Peor’s work itself comprises social-realist painting and woodcut, which, with its strong graphic forms, was pivotal in promoting modernist concepts and revolutionary ideals among the young artists in China in the 1930s. His recurrent themes were everyday life, the harshness of labour, and, in Indonesia, to which Wen Peor had returned for a while in 1937, on politics and anti-colonialist resistance.
Above all, the paper is a consideration of the artist’s own the difficulties of assigning ‘home’ in the face of cultural, political, and personal displacement. However, Lu and Huang are careful not to reduce Wen Peor to simplistic labels such as ‘patriot,’ ‘Communist’, or ‘nationalist’. Rather they seek to untangle the complexities, even contradictions, in his life and work as a prism through which to address wider concerns. The research is based in detailed archival research, site visits, interviews, exhibition analysis, contextual development, and above all engagement with the work itself. For Wen Peor, who died in 2007, left little textual material. The authors suggest that perhaps the tumultuous social climate of the period hindered timely documentation, or he may have sought to shield himself and his family from unnecessary scrutiny. Lu and Huang’s paper represents a powerful piecing together of scattered sources on Wen Peor. It is an example of the ways in which histories are texted by the pattern of their archiving. So, while the paper gives a unique and cogent account of the artist’s life and work, and of artistic practice through the specific political upheavals in both Indonesia and China, it also points to the complexities of cultural identities in shifting political and cultural times. The paper thus transcends nationalist narratives, to present a sense of precarious mobility and translocalism/transnationalism, which speaks to wider concerns in art history and beyond.
In a second, longer, conversation, Professor Adrian Favell FBA talks to Professor Fiona Williams FBA, about the research project, Northern Exposure: Race, Nation and Disaffection in ‘Ordinary’ Towns and Cities after Brexit. The study was part of the ESRC’s ‘Governance after Brexit’ programme and sought to interrogate simplified assumptions in politics, media, and research about the disaffection of the so-called “‘left-behind” white working classes’ of the North of England, a disaffection assumed to be linked to immigration and multiculturalism. Through ethnographic and interview-based studies based on a co-productive model, the research develops a nuanced and historical understanding of the lives, experiences, and post-industrial realities of working-class people in their ethnically and culturally diverse communities.
The research focuses on those larger towns and small cities—Preston, Halifax, Wakefield, and Middlesbrough—that have post-industrial histories which decimated their productive power in textiles, shipping, coal, and steel. Compounded by subsequent austerity politics and the pandemic, this has contributed to a sense of profound marginalisation. All were areas of high Brexit vote that have been left to deal with the tensions of polarised politics. All include populations drawn from earlier Asian and/or Caribbean migration combined with newer migrants of African, and Central and Eastern European origins, plus recent asylum seekers. These are not the ‘homogenous heartlands’ of popular discourse. They contain constituencies that contributed both to Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019 and to Keir Starmer’s in 2024.
Drawing on biographical interviews with residents and ethnographic place-based research with community organisers and local authority policy workers, Favell presents an analysis of disaffection combined with hope and creative commitment from people living and working with dwindling support from central government. The conversation focuses on the inability of successive governments to support a solid and positive multiculturalism. A turning point was the rejection of the vision in the Parekh Report in 2000, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (Parekh et al. 2000). Along with this, Favell argues, has been the lack of sophisticated thinking on race, migration, and diversity in that academic research on Brexit and political polarisation that garners most attention in political and media commentary.
If a more sophisticated understanding of the complexity of lives under pressure is needed, how did this shape the approach of Favell’s team to ‘impact’? As well as developing conventional academic publications, the team took the more innovative step of producing two videos and a film to disseminate their work. The videos, whose links are embedded in the text here, involve local authority workers, community organisers, and activists discussing the tensions in building both infrastructure and alliances. The film, made by an independent film maker, is a poignant and moving documentary of local people talking about their lives. Both media present us with the crises and contradictions people face. Rather than being given a list of bulleted recommendations, we are led to think about what is going on. Creating the possibilities for reflection and engaged dialogue has been Favell’s experience in taking the film and videos to mixed audiences in the UK and to students across Europe and the USA. He concludes that 'the research is not going to be a set of fact-based findings and recommendations that change the world. It’s going to be a different way of looking at things.’
It is interesting to follow this conversation above between Favell and Williams by reading the essay by Professor Paul Bou-Habib on the recent development of political philosophy, ‘Reflecting on the Barry Prize: political philosophy before and after Brian Barry’. The essay is based on a presentation given at the British Academy in 2024 to mark the tenth anniversary of the Brian Barry Prize in Political Science. Using Barry’s academic career and influence as a turning point, Bou-Habib examines the ways in which the winners’ essays over the past ten years reflect a shift in the discipline of political philosophy. He starts by proposing that the winners’ work marks a perceptible move from ‘disengaged scrutiny’ in the two decades after the war to one of ‘committed prescription’ over the past decade. In between, from the mid-1960s onwards, were the vital contributions of John Rawls and Brian Barry, which elaborated theories of justice. Not only did these signal a shift from, loosely speaking, observation to commitment, but they also revived a discipline whose obituaries were already being prepared in the 1950s.
Bou-Habib sees the prize-winning essays over the past decade taking on and developing the work of Barry, Rawls, and others on justice. However, in common with political philosophy more generally, they are characterised by being both more applied and more focused on specific disempowerments/groups/issues for whom justice needs to be developed. This contrasts with the overarching questions about the nature of equality and justice addressed by their predecessors. At the same time, the author suggests, this difference should not be overstated. Philosophical applications of earlier periods included issues such as the debate over decriminalisation of homosexuality in the early 1960s; meanwhile, current political philosophy does raise the big questions about global justice, and racial and gender equality. In concluding, Bou-Habib proposes that the current focus on specificity would do well to re-examine the distinctive processes by which Rawls, Barry, and others justified their political principles. This might enable them to develop more coherence between specific principles of justice and the principles that can hold them together.
Drs Ievgeniia Kopytsia and Natalia Slobodian are Ukrainian scholars supported by the British Academy’s Researchers at Risk programme. Their article provides fascinating commentary on ‘Women’s leadership in environmental peacebuilding: converging nature, climate, and peace’. They argue that the conflict in Ukraine serves to illustrate how geopolitical instability, environmental destruction, and humanitarian crises intersect. The conflict further highlights the importance of recognising the gendered nature of this intersection. This is particularly important when the media coverage of conflicts often fails to account for the specific dangers faced by women in conflict situations as well as their actions and resilience.
Energy destruction has been a weapon of war in Ukraine and women have to deal with constant power outages, coordination of childcare during air raids, and caring for older members of the community. Women have also taken on work previously done by men, such as coal mining, power plant operations, and warehouse work. The authors point to the particular significance of grass-roots organisations and women’s leadership in environmental protection and renewable energy. Such experiences generate a critical potential in future peacebuilding initiatives, reconstruction, and environmental sustainability, which the authors insist must not be overlooked. Furthermore, women’s central involvement can better ensure that post-conflict reconstruction strategies are gender responsive. They conclude that ‘addressing the gendered dimensions of both conflict and climate change [create] the pathways for a more equitable and resilient future that transcends national boundaries’.
Emergency of a different sort underpins the second commentary in this issue: ‘Six provocations on the origins and impacts of the UK housing emergency’. Originally organised by Professor Susan Smith FBA, as an event at the British Academy’s Fellows’ Engagement Week in 2024, the authors, all FBAs, offer brief and accessible commentaries based on their disciplinary expertise to an analysis of the particular problems in the UK’s housing emergency. As Susan Smith comments in her Introduction, the dynamics of the British housing situation ‘are so wide-ranging as to seem intractable’. In this context the collection offers ‘a springboard for wider reflection and action’. The first contribution from Martin Daunton puts the economic inequalities of the housing system into historical perspective. Before World War 1 most people privately rented their housing (90 per cent of houses were owned by private landlords). The interwar period saw a decline in privately rented accommodation with a rise in public renting and an expanded owner-occupied sector. By the end of the 1970s this last shift was intensified with Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ for council house tenants. Along with the liberalisation of house-financing and the expansion of domestic credit for house-buying, the 1980s was the start of a downward spiral, as Avner Offner explains in his piece. His analysis provides an understanding of the political and financial stalemate among different stakeholders. At the same time, he sees potential room for movement through a well-regulated rental market with security for tenants and by restoring the link between earnings and the volume of housing credit.
Michael Murphy, a demographer, analyses the crisis in terms of ‘a persistent mismatch between housing needs and provision’. Murphy argues that long-term planning is required to address housing needs produced by the changing shape of the population, and supply problems issues of adequacy, quantity, and quality. The mismatch also creates vulnerabilities and precarities for particular groups. This is picked up in a closer examination by Emily Grundy of older people and housing. She explains how the relationship between housing and the health of older people highlights complex needs. In order for people to remain healthy (keeping warm, for example) or for their housing to offer suitability for their health needs (mobility or cognitive problems, for example), more joined-up policymaking and investment are needed.
Public opinion expert Ben Ansell draws on surveys conducted in 2021 and 2022, where YouGov’s panel of British residents were asked their opinions on the possibility of new housebuilding in their area. Their answers and their reasons—which saw a perfect divide between 38 per cent support and 39 per cent opposition (with 23 per cent as neither)—reflect not only a housing system which has created real winners and real losers but also, he argues, one of the central difficulties for governments: to address the housing emergency with policies that can mobilise across-the-board support. In the sixth provocation John Muellbauer offers highly constructive and topical proposals to address the UK’s housing market, which he says is ‘among the most dysfunctional in the world’. He does this with a four-part package of policies which combine housing supply and inequalities with environmental sustainability. It includes land value capture which ‘would ensure that the benefits of land value increases are shared fairly between landowners and the wider society’. Second is the increased building of affordable social housing made available to vulnerable groups; third, planning reform to join up local authority development and transport; and, fourth, property tax reform to counter the regressive council tax system.
Continuing the theme of the housing emergency, the next contribution brings together insights and reflections on the needs of two groups particularly marginalised by migrant status and disability. The two contributions by Dr Jessie Speer and Shani Dhanda were first given as public talks at the British Academy’s Summer Showcase in 2024. This was organised by Professor Susan Smith, who writes the introduction which contextualises the talks in terms of the processes that have given rise to widening housing wealth inequality and disparity in after-housing incomes. Jessie Speer argues that this situation has fuelled the mobilisation of anti-immigration sentiment that blames migrants for the shortage of affordable housing. In tandem, immigration controls have restricted migrants’ rights, introducing, for example, proof of legal residency in order to access employment, welfare, and housing support. Both developments have led to material difficulties and risks for migrants and asylum seekers: discrimination and exploitative rentals, and homelessness with the threat of deportation. In relation to disability, Shani Dhanda argues that accessible housing is a basic human right. Yet 91 per cent of homes lack basic accessibility features. She describes the costs to both disabled individuals in lack of independence and dignity as well as to the NHS in social and health care for illnesses caused by inadequate insulation and unsafe housing. Both authors put the case for affordable and accessible housing as an urgent social justice issue.
The final contribution to this Issue is part of the Journal’s series of discussions around terms or concepts that have become central to debate in different disciplines. In ‘Coming to terms with racial capitalism’ Professors Gurminder K. Bhambra, Catherine Hall, and Sarah Radcliffe, all FBAs, draw on their research in different disciplines—respectively, sociology, history, and geography—and in different temporal and spatial instances, to illustrate their own perspectives on racial capitalism. The collection originates from an event at the British Academy’s Fellows Engagement Week in 2024, organised by Gurminder Bhambra.
The contribution starts with Catherine Hall drawing on her book, Lucky Valley. Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (Hall 2024), an account of the development of a sugar plantation in Jamaica run by Long in the second half of the 18th century (see also the interview with Catherine Hall in 12.1). Locating thinking about the interconnection between race and capitalism in a genealogy stretching from Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others through to Stuart Hall and Cedric Robinson, Hall explains that the term ‘racial capitalism’ provided her with a ‘helpful provocation, a way of capturing the complexity of the articulations between racism and capitalism’. Her account carefully unpacks these complexities in the racialisation practices of the metropolitan and colonial state, the merchant house, the plantation, and the system of reproduction of both the enslaved population and the colonisers. Understanding this as ‘a system of racial capitalism, specific to its time and place’, Hall calls for more detailed studies that focus on other types of capitalism and the way they articulate with other types of racialisation to better understand the specificities of racial capitalism.
Sarah Radcliffe draws on Latin American scholarship on racial colonial capitalism to examine the history of Indigenous peoples’ incorporation into Spanish and North American systems of labour and accumulation. Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano argues that it was the racialised power associated with coloniality that helped bring global capitalism into existence. With reference to Indigenous experiences, Radcliffe addresses the ways in which they were racialised and positioned in colonialist capitalist economic processes. This leads into a discussion about how Indigenous peoples became subject to colonial regimes of labour, property, and wealth creation, and the differences between this and Black racialisation. By bringing a space-making and spatial differentiation into an analysis of the development of racial colonial capitalism, Radcliffe nuances debates on relations between racial capitalism and colonial modernity.
In the final part of the discussion, Gurminder Bhambra takes the discussion onto different terrain. She argues that the problem with the term racial capitalism is not so much how race and colonialism articulate with capitalism but with the analytical primacy given to capitalism. Instead, we should understand that colonialism did not just accompany capitalism in its development, it preceded and produced capitalism. Such an analysis requires a re-examination of the contribution made by colonialism, particularly through the expulsion of inhabitants from their lands, to the economic practices and conditions that have come to be attributed to capitalism. Bhambra’s careful and challenging analysis is illustrated by an examination of the ‘Adventure for Irish land’ in the mid-17th century. This was a colonial campaign by private investors, authorised by the British monarch and Parliament, to confiscate Irish land, remove its inhabitants, and mortgage the land to English merchants. Turning land into a commodity and a tax base provided investors and the state with large amounts of capital. As such, this, and other colonial conquests, provided the practices and start-up for the development of mercantile capitalism.
We thank our Editorial Board for their support, our impressive and insightful peer reviewers whose comments improve the quality of the articles, and our authors for their good humour in revising articles and submitting to deadlines. We are, as always, indebted to the Publishing Department of the British Academy for their combined experience, knowledge, and efficiency in producing the Journal, and especially for their openness to discussions about the Journal’s future development.
References
HallC. (2024), Lucky Valley. Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009106399
ParekhB. (2000), Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (The Parekh Report) (London, Runnymede Trust). https://www.runnymedetrust.org/publications/the-future-of-multi-ethnic-britain; https://doi.org/10.1080/00358530127219
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a18
Published on: 19 June 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 2
Article view count: 581
Article download count: 21
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© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Williams, F., Edwards, E., Hadfield, A. & McRobbie, A. (2025), ‘Journal of the British Academy, Volume 13 Issue 2, Contents and Editors’ Introduction’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(2): a18 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a18Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
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