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Contents and Introduction
Journal of the British Academy, Volume 14 Issue 2, Contents and Editors’ Introduction
Elizabeth Edwards†
, Hilary Graham‡
, Andrew Hadfield§
, Pablo Mukherjee¶
, Mike Savage*♠
m.a.savage@lse.ac.uk
Abstract
The Editors introduce the second issue of Volume 14 of the Journal of the British Academy. This Introduction includes an overview of the content of the issue.
Keywords
social scienceshumanitiesartsinterdisciplinaryinnovativeinquiryContents
THEMATIC COLLECTION
Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving a Sustainable Net Zero Transition
Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou and Ievgeniia Kopytsia
Alessia Vacca and Karolina Glowka
Sarah Jasim, Joseph Simms, Anne Watson, Karina Izquierdo, Aiysha Qureshi, Ben Cook, Michelle Reeves and Ben Rogers
Co-developing evidence on climate justice: learning from a dilemma game on sustainability assessment
Eirini Gallou and Andrew Crerand
David White, Lynda Stevenson, Tim Pringle, Coriarna Morris, Rebecca Sawyer, Jacqueline Bailey, Alex Lewney, Katie Mouat and Natalie Southall
Max White, Jing Zhao and Neil Phillips
Alireza Moghayedi
CONVERSATION
Michael Hrebeniak, in conversation with Pablo Mukherjee
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Richard Wallis
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Eva Moreda Rodríguez
BOOKS THAT MADE ME
Rowan Williams FBA, in conversation with Ritula Shah
Introduction
The second issue of this volume includes articles which speak directly to the Journal of the British Academy’s aim to publish material which informs ‘the political, social, cultural and global challenges of the present’, notably around climate change, addressing precarious working conditions, enhancing cultural inclusion, and in celebrating humane scholarship. Following our policy to also champion diverse formats of publication, we include research articles, a conversation with a leading intellectual pushing vital intellectual boundaries, a thematic collection from early career researchers and a personal reflection of ‘books that made me’.
The issue begins with the Thematic Collection: Participatory Engagement and Game Playing for Achieving a Sustainable Net Zero Transition. It takes as its starting point the need for a rapid reduction in the emissions released by the burning of fossil fuels. And yet, even though many governments, including in the UK, have introduced policies to transition away from fossil fuels, there is a need to avoid purely technocratic ‘top-down’ policies which can alienate communities on the ground. It is therefore essential to reduce emissions in ways that promote sustainable development, address deep-seated inequities and enable communities to play a meaningful role in shaping policy and implementation to slow the advance of climate change.
This context provides the backdrop to the Thematic Collection. The Collection is authored by members of the British Academy Early Career Researcher Network (ECRN), a UK network of 10,000 ECRs across the arts, humanities and social sciences. Among other opportunities, ECRN members are supported to work collaboratively on urgent multidisciplinary issues, including sustainability and the transition to net zero. We are excited to be publishing these papers from early career scholars—who are more likely to be exposed to the full damaging forces of climate change than more established and senior scholars. This collection has its origins in the second Sustainability Multidisciplinary Meet-up: SHAPEing Net Zero conference in 2024 and the consequent establishment of an ECRN net-zero collective. The papers explore different approaches to engaging diverse communities in strategies to inform the net-zero transition and particularly on how these can be designed and enacted in ways that promote equity and sustainable development. The Thematic Collection opens with an Introduction by the editors, Jing Zhao, Eirini Gallou and Ievgeniia Kopytsia, explaining its overarching ambition and unifying themes. Six substantive papers follow. The paper by Alessia Vacca and Karolina Glowka explores the legal foundations for community participation in climate and environmental action. Sarah Jasim and colleagues give the example of a co-design workshop to promote the retrofitting of homes, highlighting power imbalances and illustrating ways in which decision-making can be democratised.
The next three papers focus on ‘gamification’ as tool for public engagement. Eirini Gallou and Andrew Crerand discuss how a multi-stakeholder climate justice game integrated expert and community knowledge—but had limited effects on policy development and implementation. David White and colleagues describe a project that developed a marine ecosystem card game with a grassroots community group. Max White, Jing Zhao and Neil Phillips consider the scope for digital gamification to promote community engagement in the design of domestic retrofit. In contrast to the UK and EU focus of the earlier papers, the final paper by Alireza Moghayedi presents a case study from the Global South that examines barriers to adopting net-zero-energy housing. The author points to strategies—including regulatory reforms—that can help to overcome the social and economic barriers to community empowerment in shaping sustainable housing.
Taken together, this innovative set of papers highlights how net-zero strategies can broaden out from a ‘top-down’ policy agenda that can alienate people—and thus how participatory approaches can point the way to empowering local decision-making and supporting the co-design of sustainable net-zero futures.
The next contribution takes the form of a conversation between Michael Hrebeniak and Pablo Mukherjee FBA. Hrebeniak is founder of the New School of the Anthropocene, which is seeking radical and innovative pedagogies to show the potential for higher education to rise to contemporary challenges. These are indeed multiple, including accelerating climate change, linked also to global capital’s most recent crisis of accumulation and the entrenchment of authoritarianism as the preferred political form across most of the world. Given the gravity of this ‘polycrisis’ (as some commentators call it), the conversation centres on how we now understand the role of education in this tumultuous age. More specifically, what is the role of universities—whose most recent historic mission has been to train a cadre of skilled and disciplined workers, managers and ‘leaders’—at a time when it is no longer obvious that such roles are viable or even desirable. Michael Hrebeniak talks about why he thinks that long-established, traditional universities are no longer fit for purpose. He argues that ‘micro-universities’, which are stripped of stifling layers of highly paid managers and administrators and where students and teacher collaborate to nurture care-giving, imagination, autonomy and collectivity, may instead be the home for student-citizens today.
Richard Wallis’s paper ‘“I’ve been working in TV for 10 years and I’ve never had that”: fostering perceived organisational support (POS) among skilled contingent workers in the television industry’ introduces research derived from his British Academy Innovation Fellowship, which considers how to address insecurity in the careers of television freelancers. This is, therefore, a telling, detailed case study of an issue which is also apparent across the cultural sector, and indeed in the wider ‘gig economy’. The paper draws on organisational psychology to consider how freelance TV workers might feel more strongly embedded in their workplaces to avoid the sense of atomisation which can follow from being employed on numerous disconnected projects. The article shows how relatively easy to implement procedures such as giving exit interviews (‘supportive offboarding’) and the opportunity for contracted employees to give feedback can give more of a sense of relationship of ‘care’ between employers and their freelance workforce. The very strong positive feedback from freelancers which the research evokes is telling in that, even in highly precarious employment conditions, there are still practical and doable interventions that can make a difference in enhancing the work life and morale of employees.
The research article ‘Engaging with art song in lesser represented languages: expanding or challenging the linguistic regime?’ by musicologist Professor Eva Moreda Rodriguez (derived from her British Academy Talent Development Award in 2025) may appear very different but also concerns how to encourage new strategies for inclusion in cultural work—this time focusing on the content of a cultural form—namely the linguistic regime of the art song. While the dominant language forms of French Chanson or German Lieder (for instance) are well established and familiar, Professor Rodriguez explores how to extend the visibility of lesser represented languages. She questions why, despite the inherent multilingualism of international art song, certain linguistic forms have become dominant in the ‘art song’ ecosystem of composers, singers, translators, teachers, institutional investment and audiences. She makes incisions into key elements such as translation, the nature of multilingualism and the impact of the relationship between individual and societal practices. These processes, and others, are carefully positioned and unpicked to illuminate the linguistic ecosystem of art song. While recent years have seen challenges to the established traditions of art song—with songs published in Japanese, Romanian or Brazilian Portuguese, for instance, it is still, she argues, operating within the constraints of traditional assumptions and practices.
In the second part of her paper, Professor Rodriguez considers the ways in which this pattern might be challenged, and singers, institutions and teachers encouraged to expand the repertoire, with confidence, into lesser represented languages of art song, thus enriching musical experience for all concerned. This methodological contribution is based in empirically practice-based work with singers, teachers and language coaches, working with them as interventions in their creative lives as they studied and performed those lesser represented aspects of the genre, considering their choices of repertoire when new opportunities arose. If the unique fit of musical and textual qualities of the song remained perennially important, so did a growing sense of the precise ways various languages worked with music—‘from word to phrase to meaning’. However, working with singers, voice and language coaches and other colleagues demonstrated how the model of ‘art song’ could be expanded and refigured.
Finally, in an important contribution to our occasional series ‘Books That Made Me’, originating in a packed event at the British Academy, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, The Rt. Rev. Rowan Williams, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, FBA traces the reading which has shaped his life and his thinking. What emerged in his conversation with the distinguished broadcast journalist Ritula Shah, is an address to the human condition. His first book, a childhood favourite was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, a story that starts with the devastation of a cholera outbreak (unusual for a children’s book) and ends in a form of redemption through kindness, grace and the natural world, themes that pulse through his other choices. As one might imagine, spiritual conversations and writings played a major part in Lord Williams’ reading, but at the heart of all his choices is a sense of the spiritual, the just and the humane, such as Trevor Huddleston’s writing on apartheid South Africa. This search for human ‘togetherness’ is central to Lords Williams’s most recent book Solidarity and is also reflected in his discussion of poetry and his translation work, which brings the ‘togetherness’ of understanding to the fore, ‘patterns of words that communicate’.
As always, we thank our Editorial Board for their support, our impressive and insightful peer reviewers whose comments improve the quality of the articles. We are grateful as always for the support of the professional and proactive Publishing Department of the British Academy who play a wonderful role in producing the Journal. What emerges from all the articles in issue 14.2, we hope, is the commitment of the British Academy to support a range of initiatives to expand inclusivity ‘on the ground’—whether this be working with communities affected by climate change; considering how universities can unshackle themselves from the chains of financialisation, managerialism and technocracy; evaluating strategies precarious freelance TV workers; working at the cutting edge of musical practice and theory to consider how to expand song repertoires; and by reflecting from the experience of Rowan Williams on how reading can expand humane sensitivities. We hope you enjoy reading it!
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a08
Published on: 17 June 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 2
Article view count: 2
Article download count: 0
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2026. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Edwards, E., Graham, H., Hadfield, A., Mukherjee, P. & Savage, M. (2026), ‘Journal of the British Academy, Volume 14 Issue 2, Contents and Editors’ Introduction’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(2): a08 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a08Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
The history of movement David Olusoga, Ritula Shah
Emerging from the British Academy’s Summer Showcase of 2024, this Conversation between two distinguished commentators explores the history of movement, of immigration and of emigration. It addresses the matrix of assumptions around race, identity, public policy, immigration, imagination and myth-making which feed into the understandings, and misunderstandings, of the history of Britain and of Empire. A particular focus is on the ways in which both immigration and emigration were subject to the differential and shifting application of values, hierarchies, rights and historical myopia in a complex of racial identity, politics and legal definition. While these processes can be historically defined, in Windrush, in Enoch Powell and in Second World War commemorations for instance, their challenging presence still resonates in contemporary Britain. This article arises from an ‘In Conversation’ event which occurred on 12 July 2024, as part of the British Academy’s annual Summer Showcase.
25 February 2025
Coming to terms with racial capitalism Gurminder K. Bhambra, Catherine Hall, Sarah A. Radcliffe
‘Coming to terms with racial capitalism’ brings together three scholars from the disciplines of History, Geography, and Sociology to open up consideration of this increasingly popular concept. This is done by engaging the idea of ‘racial capitalism’ with the historical role of colonialism in Jamaica, Latin America, and Ireland. Each author draws on the resources of their discipline to locate the concept within debates such as Black Marxism and to consider it in relation to discussions about Indigenous rights and questions of racism. Catherine Hall offers a case study of one temporal and spatial instance of racial capitalism in the mid-18th-century Atlantic world. Sarah A. Radcliffe examines the place of Indigenous peoples in the racial colonial capitalism of Latin America. The final paper by Gurminder K. Bhambra argues for the significance of colonialism to understandings of capitalism through an examination of Irish colonial history.
12 June 2025
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