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Contents and Introduction
Journal of the British Academy, Volume 13 Issue 3, Contents and Editors’ Introduction
Elizabeth Edwards*‡
,
ejmedwards10@gmail.com.
Andrew Hadfield§
, Angela McRobbie¶
, Fiona Williams†
Abstract
The Editors introduce the third 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
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Tendai Mangena
RESEARCH ARTICLE
John Steele
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Carolyn McGettigan, Steven Bloch, Cennydd Bowles, Tanvi Dinkar, Nadine Lavan, Jonathan Reus, and Victor Rosi
COMMENTARY
John Heathershaw, Tena Prelec, and Thomas Mayne
THEMATIC COLLECTION
Decolonising Gender Knowledge in Sub-Saharan Africa: Empirical Insights and Theoretical Innovations from Early Career Researchers
Edited by Alicia Bowman, Evelyn Garwe, and Juliet Thondhlana
Alicia Bowman, Evelyn Garwe, and Juliet Thondhlana
Kemi Ogunyemi, Alicia Bowman, and Nangula Iipumbu
Oluwatosin Onayemi, Kemi Ogunyemi, and Belinda Smith
Kaarina Anna Paulus, Mbela Kalengay, and Denise Duncan
Rumbidzai Mpahlo, Evelyn Garwe, and Juliet Thondhlana
COMMENTARY
Robin Mansell FBA
Introduction
In the now-established tradition of the Journal of the British Academy, this third issue of 2025 presents a distinctive drawing together of contributions that seek 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, even from topics that on the surface look like ‘deep history’. Collectively they demonstrate the crucial importance of thinking within the humanities and social sciences, not only to impact upon debates on current pressing issues, but to signal their contribution to debates, such as AI, which challenge what it has always assumed to be ‘human’. It is the job of humanities and social sciences to keep such a question clearly visible and audible in these debates.
In this issue we have no fewer than three research articles, reflecting the very wide range and commitment of the Academy interests and support, and very different ways of being human.
The first research article is ‘It [vagina] does not survive on porridge’: The sexual lives of Shona single women in Zimbabwe’ by Tendai Mangena, University of Zimbabwe and British Academy Global Professor at the University of Leeds. Emerging from her new research on the lives of single Shona women in Zimbabwe, it constitutes a major contribution to the study of gender in Africa and afro-Feminism. Professor Mangena is a leading scholar in this emergent field. Most notable, and emerging from Professor Mangena’s fieldwork, are the powerful voices of single women that emerge through this ethnographically grounded piece. Single, whether out of choice, misfortune or widowhood, they bring a strong sense of the individual, negotiating their way through a fraught world of stereotypes, assumptions, religious pressure and societal prejudices. In particular, single status is equated with ‘whoredom’ (hure), a belief even perpetuated by other women. The essay points to the uneven distributions of fears and expectations around women’s sexuality, and their translation into the everyday experiences of women. Some of this is related to the religious teaching of the Pentecostal church about sex, notably fornication, and the status of single women. Expressed in the rhetoric of Jesus as the spiritual husband of single women, a position many of the women found unsatisfactory in terms of their sexual desires, religious teaching becomes embedded in the body, entangled with the values of self-control. The importance of such detail is that it challenges, through this intense study of Shona and the sense of voice and presence in the study, the universalising assumptions what Mangena calls ‘the Africa syndrome’. Instead, the study presents the profoundly local, yet one in its shape about the treatment and assumptions about single women that is echoed more broadly: for it is a study of the negotiation of autonomy and agency.
The second research article is that by John Steele on ‘The place of theory in Babylonian astral science’, which originated in a British Academy Lecture, in May 2024 at the University of Leicester. While very different from Professor Mangena’s paper in time, space and focus, both these research articles are concerned with categories of understanding. Professor Steele, Wilbour Professor of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University, USA, not only gives a detailed account of the practices of astral science, the science of the stars and the heavens, in ancient Babylon in the first millennium BC, but also asks very topical questions about what we understand by science: What categories of evaluation are in play? Can we talk about Babylonian ‘science’? Professor Steele explores this through a rich historiographical account intertwined with a history of Babylonian scientific practices. In this account he demonstrates the implications of the way in which ancient Greek science has been positioned as the originating and ideal form of scientific enquiry. He sets out to challenge and complicate the characterisation of Babylonian astronomy as empirical and mathematical and practised by priests, in contrast to that of ancient Greece as theoretical, physical and explanatory and practised by philosophers/scientists. Our knowledge of Babylonian practices emerges from the over 5,000 cuneiform tablets already known and their contents provide fascinating detail. They reveal Babylonian astronomy to be based in systematic, recorded observations of cyclical phenomena, but also on predicted data, creating a capacity, for example, for ‘goal-year predictive astronomy’ and what Professor Steele terms ‘schematic astronomy’. While it is a dynamic practice, to what extent can it be deemed ‘theoretical’? This discussion forms the second half of Professor Steele’s detailed analysis of these practices and their implications as they reveal knowledge of the underlying astronomy, in particular a tablet recently discovered in the British Museum, which shifts extant characterisations of Babylonian astronomy. Again, like Professor Mangena’s essay, there are wider issues in play. Professor Steele’s article demonstrates, as did Professor Kenaan’s essay in the last issue of the Journal of the British Academy, the relevance to contemporary debates and issues of detailed studies of ancient civilisations. How do categories shape our studies and how can they be challenged?
The third research article presents a paper on an increasingly pressing topic that is perhaps necessary reading for everyone: ‘Voice conversion and cloning: psychological and ethical implications of intentionally synthesising familiar voice identities’. Carolyn McGettigan of University College London and her colleagues Steven Bloch, Cennydd Bowles, Tanvi Dinkar, Nadine Lavan, Jonathan Chaim Reus, and Victor Rosi provide a timely overview of recent attempts to use AI to imitate human speech. Arising from Professor McGettigan’s British Academy-funded Mid-Career Fellowship 2023–4, it combines approaches from psychology, neuroscience, computer science, anthropology and other disciplines, and provides a coherent overview of these developments to assess the advantages and disadvantages of such technological advances and suggests possible future developments, enabling readers access to an area that is already starting to have an impact on social life and which will only grow in importance in the very near future. As they point out, making machines appear familiar and accessible can be both enabling and comforting, as well as sinister and dangerous. Voice cloning is nothing new, of course, and most of us will be familiar with the voice clone, Siri, but it will be an important component in shaping the future, in areas such as health care and banking (where they can facilitate both security and crime). Whereas early models of voice cloning required careful imitation and hard labour, more recent methods can generate immaculate imitations of human speech using only a few records. Accordingly, new ethical and legal questions need to be asked: What status do such voices have? Who hears them? What limitations can be placed upon them? What do preferences tell us about accepted norms and group thinking? How will they affect intellectual property laws and how might they foster identity theft? Pressing topics indeed.
Then, addressing a concept increasingly heard about, and originating in a Summer Showcase talk in 2024, we have a Commentary piece, ‘Professional indulgences: the kleptocracy problem and the transformation of global politics’ by John Heathershaw, Tena Prelec and Thomas Mayne (who is a British Academy Senior Research Fellow). In it the authors discuss the research findings recently published in their book Indulging Kleptocracy (Oxford University Press 2025). They explore how kleptocracy has operated transnationally in such a way as to both evade and circumvent legality, and indeed, in many ways, finding unperturbed spaces of operation within the law. Proposing that this scenario is not so much about corruption in a geopolitical framework, but rather that there has been an ‘enabler effect’. Using the metaphor of ‘indulgences’, the authors refer, by means of case studies, to how financier professionals are able to function as ‘enablers’ and operate across so many areas of the contemporary neoliberal economy of the service and property industries so as to establish acceptable presences within the institutions of Western liberal democracy.
This issue’s Thematic Collection presents four short papers from early career researchers in West Africa, who participated in a British Academy International Writing Workshop in Ghana in March 2024, held to support emerging scholarship in the Global South. In their introduction to this Thematic Collection, Decolonising Gender Knowledge in Sub-Saharan Africa: Empirical Insights and Theoretical Innovations from Early Career Researchers, the collection editors, Alice Bowman, Evelyn Garwe and Juliet Thondhlana, emphasise the importance of current research carried out by early career researchers from the Global South as both extensions of and updates to the paradigms developed by African feminist scholarship. The process of knowledge production is foregrounded shorn of dependence on ‘Eurocentric constraints’, permitting a sense of both conceptual and methodological freedom. With an interdisciplinary openness spanning a wide range of social science topics, including urban studies, legal theory and educational sociology, the articles demonstrate the contribution of decolonial research.
In their article ‘Gendered effects of corruption: the South African state capture experience’, the authors Kemi Ogunyemi, Alice Bowman and Nangula Iipumbu tackle the gender dimensions of exacerbating gender-based violence, poverty and inequality that accrue from political corruption. By drawing on a case study, the Zondo Commission Report (from South Africa) and other archival sources and informed by the Afro-feminism of Tamale, the article makes a number of policy proposals for ensuring the safety and well-being of girls and women. The second article, ‘Gender, precarious employment, and coping strategies: lived experiences of domestic workers in urban Nigeria and Ghana,’ by Oluwatosin Onayemi, Kemi Ogunyemi and Belinda Smith, presents research on the experiences of female domestic workers based in two West African cities, Accra and Lagos. This sector of the workforce has not been represented in recent feminist sociological research and this interview-based study begins to rectify this by drawing attention to poor conditions and precarious contracts. A case is made for further training, fair pay and stronger regulation of the sector. The third article, ‘Exploring gender-based violence against men in African universities’, authored by Kaarina Anna Paulus, Mbela Kalengay and Denise Duncan, is an innovative study examining how normative masculinity leads to under-reporting of gender-based violence against men in the academic environment, leaving them isolated and unsupported. By employing a range of methodologies, the research reveals both physical and psychological violence. The authors make a case for a range of policies which are gender-sensitive and which ensure confidentiality. The final article for the thematic collection is titled ‘The role and influence of women in housing cooperatives: evidence from Caledonia, Zimbabwe’ and is authored by Rumbidzai Mpahlo, Evelyn Garwe and Juliet Thondhlana. The research team here approach the topic of the gender inequalities that prevail in various housing cooperative projects that have been set up as provisions for low-income populations. By focusing on a case study in Caledonia on the outskirts of Harare (Zimbabwe), the authors employ a ‘right to the city’ framework informed by feminist urban theory. Using qualitative methodologies (including in-depth interviews), the research considers patterns of inclusion and exclusion, resistance and structures of cooperative governance. The study provides proposals for countering the marginalisation of women through transformative practices of change to existing cooperative models that the informants themselves describe as more equitable. We are pleased to be able to publish these essays alongside Mangena’s important contribution to the field, noted above, as they point to the critical mass of emerging gender studies from African scholars in ways that rebalance the empirical and theoretical biases of such studies.
This issue finishes with another extended commentary piece, ‘A capitalist contest: the AI industry v. the creative industries’ by Professor Robin Mansell FBA on the urgent question of the relationship between AI and the creative industries, the latter worth over $120 million to the British economy, that is 5.7 per cent of gross value added (GVA). The article provides a valuable overview of what has become a topic of key concern for those working in the UK’s creative industries: the threat of their work being used without permission to ‘train’ artificial intelligence models typically belonging to the handful of leading US-owned tech companies whose power to dominate what Mansell calls the major ‘social imaginary’ is overwhelming.
Professor Mansell foregrounds questions of equity and fairness in a fast-developing environment, where the major imbalance is between powerful rightsholders and those who over the long term only ever earn average incomes in the sector—this is a field which despite its value to GNP/GVA comprises many relatively small income generating professionals. Mansell also points out that copyright law has not always served the less prominent creative well. It has been the ‘megacorporations’ that have succeeded in having their rights best protected:
The dominant AI innovation and creative industries social imaginary is remarkably insensitive to the reality of winners and losers in struggles over the distribution of rewards to creative labour. … ‘Common sense’ values within the alternative social imaginary are subordinated in favour of promoting Big Tech’s exploitation of data for profit.
This is the context within which Mansell calls for more attention to be given to an ‘alternative social imaginary’ for AI to contribute to a non-market agenda led by public and social value. As editors we see this as an ongoing debate of interest to all.
Acknowledgements
As ever we thank our Editorial Board for their support, and our impressive and insightful peer reviewers whose comments are invaluable in improving and refining the quality of the articles. We thank our authors for their good humour in revising articles and submitting to deadlines. We are also, 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. But it is also with a certain sadness that we report that this is the last issue of the Journal to be under the watchful eye of James Rivington, the Academy’s Head of Publishing, who retires at the end of October 2025. He joined the Academy in 1986, to develop their publications portfolio, and it is now an impressive list. His accumulated wisdom and steadying hand have been an immeasurable support to us editors and a fair number of contributors too. On behalf of all those involved in the Journal, we wish him a restful and long retirement—and lots of cricket—in for a century!
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/013.a28
Published on: 19 September 2025
Volume: 13
Issue: Issue 3
Article view count: 192
Article download count: 5
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Edwards, E., Hadfield, A., McRobbie, A. & Williams, F. (2025), ‘Journal of the British Academy, Volume 13 Issue 3, Contents and Editors’ Introduction’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(3): a28 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a28Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
Creating spaces for co-research Rachel Proefke, Anna Barford
In the current era of peak youth, young people’s voices and authentic participation are needed more than ever. This article focuses on how youth participation in research can enhance wider understanding of young people’s experiences, perspectives and solutions, while also empowering young people. There is an established tradition of engaging young people and children with the qualitative research process, ranging from youth focussed research to youth-led participatory action research. Within this we occupy a middle ground, arguing for the need to create heterotopic spaces for participation in which both young researchers and professional researchers learn from one another’s expertise. Mindful of the roadblocks to authentic participation, this article systematically approaches engaging young people at six critical stages in the research process, namely: setting the framework; question design; data collection; analysis; validation; and sharing results for discussion and action. Youth co-research offers methodological rigour grounded in a reconceptualization of where expertise can be found, a committed approach to research training and youth empowerment, greater access to hard-to-reach groups of young people and data validity built upon close engagement with young researchers. To demonstrate our approach, we share in this article three youth co-research case studies, which focus on young people experiencing climate change disruptions in Uganda, young people impacted by COVID-19 in Indonesia and Nepal and a youth think tank convened between East, West and Southern Africa. The rigour and value of youth-engaged qualitative methodologies can benefit young people, as well as the academics, policymakers and NGOs with whom they work.
2 November 2023
‘What are you doing here?’: (mis)trust, COVID-19 pandemic, and sexual reproductive health rights Winstoun Muga, Emmy Kageha Igonya
We explore how the government’s messaging on COVID-19 pandemic response perpetuated mistrust and impeded people’s ability to access and utilise sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services. While the need for SRH information increased, public health messages fostered mistrust in sexual and reproductive health services. We draw on in-depth interviews and focus group discussions conducted among women, girls, and healthcare providers in five African countries (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda) between May and October 2021. We show how trust was largely eroded through preventive measures, such as stay-at-home directives, social distancing, curfews, and lockdowns. We argue that, on one hand, while state-led epidemic preparedness and response were geared towards the common good, i.e., controlling the virus, on the other hand, de-prioritisation of much-needed services for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), as well as a lack of transparency among some of the service providers, bred mistrust in healthcare. We conclude that ambiguity in communication and implementation of COVID-19 prevention measures further compromised access to and utilisation of sexual and reproductive health services.
19 December 2023
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