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Contents and Introduction
Journal of the British Academy, Volume 14 Issue 3, Contents and Editors’ Introduction
Elizabeth Edwards†
, Hilary Graham*‡
,
hilary.graham@york.ac.uk
Andrew Hadfield§
, Pablo Mukherjee¶
, Mike Savage♠
Abstract
The Editors introduce the third 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
RESEARCH ARTICLE
John Muellbauer
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Cheryl Saunders
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Iryna Kushnir, Vitaliy Shpachuk, and Sharifah Intan Sharina Syed-Abdullah
COMING TO TERMS WITH…
Davina Cooper, Lydia Morris, Shirin M. Rai, Mike Savage, and Sylvia Walby
THEMATIC COLLECTION
On Greenland
Tim Ingold
Ulrik Pram Gad
Naja Dyrendom Graugaard
Mark Nuttall
Gérard Duhaime, Birger Poppel, MarieKathrine Poppel and Louis-Jacques Dorais
Rasmus Leander Nielsen and Jeppe Strandsbjerg
Oran R. Young
CONVERSATION
Marcy Norton, in conversation with Josh Milburn
CONVERSATION
Lea Ypi, in conversation with Pablo Mukherjee
Introduction
We are delighted to introduce Issue 3 of Volume 14 of the Journal of the British Academy. As previous Issues have done, Issue 3 draws on insights from across the humanities, arts and social sciences to address today’s challenges. In this current issue, these range from crises in the UK housing sector to the threats of US annexation facing communities in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). A central theme of Issue 3 is that harnessing insights from the humanities, arts and social sciences not only sheds light on how the legacies of the past have shaped today’s challenges; these insights also open up ways to address their inbuilt inequalities.
‘Land, housing and the British economy’ is derived from a British Academy Lecture by probably the leading British economist of land and housing, Professor John Muellbauer FBA. Drawing on Muellbauer’s long experience, this paper therefore conveys remarkable authority and will be a major reference point in vital academic, policy and political discussions about housing, planning, taxation and land in the future. It is therefore very telling that Muellbauer pulls no punches in emphasising the failures of housing policy going back to the 1980s and draws out that the UK housing market is ‘one of the most dysfunctional in the world’. The paper emphasises how land values have become inflated, in a way which feeds through to wider weaknesses in the British economy through attracting speculative investment. Muellbauer argues that simply promoting more housebuilding (difficult enough as this is) is not an adequate solution and the last part of the paper reflects on how more fundamental tax reform is needed. Here his reflections on the potential of taxing land values will be of wide interest and should contribute to deliberations on future UK government policymaking.
‘The constitutional potential of the idea of an imaginary’ is derived from a British Academy Lecture which powerfully argues for the need to extend the analysis of constitutions away from purely formal legal and institutional criteria to consider the role of the ‘imaginary’. At a time when the significance of constitutional protections is being radically tested through the rise of authoritarian populist regimes, this paper seeks to place constitutional analysis onto a wider and more interdisciplinary platform. This is especially fitting in contemporary globalising conditions and allows engagement with influential scholarship emphasising the role of imagination for the building of communities and nations (in the spirit of Benedict Anderson, for instance). Drawing strongly on the landmark work of Charles Taylor, Professor Cheryl Saunders FBA provides a very thoughtful reflection, which draws attention to the value of broadening constitutional thinking away from a purely institutional focus, to one which can address how constitutions are not fixed entities but can be mutable and adaptable. She also discusses potential pitfalls. This article will serve as an invaluable overview of an issue which is bound to gather increasing attention.
‘A sector-wide financial crisis in higher education: a scoping review of institutional responses in England’, co-written by Dr Iryna Kushnir, Professor Vitaliy Shpachuk, who was supported through the British Academy’s Researchers at Risk Fellowship programme, and Dr Sharifah Intan Sharina Syed-Abdullah, provides a detailed, empirical account of how higher education institutions are responding to current funding problems. This is a subject which gets considerable media and public attention, but which is not always subject to detailed scrutiny. This is vital in order to assess how the crisis is a systemic one, or amenable to skilful management by effective leadership in higher education institutions themselves. Using a systematic literature review of all relevant empirical studies, this analysis outlines the main responses used by academic management (cost cutting, for example, through staff severance schemes; seeking increased revenues through partnerships and innovation; increasing managerialism as a means of cutting costs) and attempts at more sustainable solutions. The last of these offers the opportunity for taking up environmental concerns, and the value of equality and diversity issues as a means of developing more optimistic and potentially effective strategies. This paper therefore offers invaluable evidence to senior academic managers that they can be creative and reflective in developing strategies to manage the undoubted stresses that higher education currently experiences.
`Our next contribution forms part of the Journal’s ‘Coming to Terms With…’ series. These contributions reflect on the significance of widely used terms in academic and public discourse; here, the authors' reflect on the question, ‘What is society’s potential to be otherwise?’. This was a question discussed by a panel of Fellows convened during the British Academy’s Fellows’ Engagement Week in 2025. The question is set against a backdrop of public concern about today’s societies; the five contributors critically re-examine past and present societies in order to inform debates about future societies.
Professor Sylvia Walby FBA discusses the concepts of ‘society’, ‘potential’ and ‘otherwise’. She develops the concept of society, while rejecting the notion that societies can be understood as nation-states, pointing to the significance of empires. Drawing on comparative sociology, she addresses the concept of ‘otherwise’, and presents alternative ways of thinking about ‘potential’ through the concepts of ‘imaginary’ and ‘crisis’.
Professor Lydia Morris FBA looks backward to the past in order to look forward to the society of the future, to understand how far social structures are amenable to change. She addresses the dynamic nature of rights, including their gradual expansion and acquisition by previously disadvantaged groups and their gradual erosion and contraction. In this way, Morris adds an important ‘meso-level’ analysis to the issues of how society changes.
Professor Mike Savage FBA starts from how society has been made otherwise in recent historical change. He notes that recent societal changes, including the neoliberal turn and war, were not predicted in social theory. Savage goes on to argue that the analysis of power is key to understanding the potential of society to be otherwise, in particular the melding of intellectual blueprints with the forces of elite power.
Professor Davina Cooper FBA invites us to think creatively about the present and the future, exploring where ‘potential’ sits through the concepts of the ‘prefigurative’ and ‘utopianism’. Rejecting narrow critiques of utopian thinking, she argues for the importance of prefigurative thinking in imagining the potential for future society.
In the final part, Professor Shirin M. Rai FBA reviews how the contributions provide different ways of thinking about social change in troubled times. She invites us to reconsider our understandings of dominant power relations. Rai asks us to always take the global into account, relevant for issues from coloniality to migration. She addresses not only the nation-state, but also capital, the state and the environment. Further, she suggests a performance approach can bring together an analysis of how structures of power are mobilised by actors.
The interdisciplinary Thematic Collection ‘On Greenland’ addresses a topic much in the news and in the public imagination over the last year as US President Trump eyed up its strategic and mineral importance. As this issue went to press, the US and Denmark came to an agreement giving the US permanent control over security. This agreement does little, however, to address the deeper concerns of history, culture and sovreignty addressed in this thematic collection. This collection, edited and introduced by Professor Tim Ingold FBA, explores the deeper histories and broader contexts that have been largely submerged, overlooked or ignored in the global debate: namely the long history of colonisation and claims to Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. This is encapsulated in Ingold’s opening statement: ‘What the atlas calls Greenland is a country known to its Indigenous people as Kalaallit Nunaat, “lands of the Kalaallit”. But these names carry very different meanings: the first embedded in a history of colonisation; the second in practices of habitation’ and lived environment, as he sets out what is at stake. What follows are a series of interdisciplinary incisions, many by scholars from the University of the Arctic, an affiliation of northern and Arctic universities and scholars with interests in common.
Dr Ulrik Pram Gad, from the Danish Institute of International Studies, lays out the long and persistent colonial desires and actions that have entangled Greenland, not so much from a narrative account but from the politics of how stories—in Norway, Denmark and the United States—about Greenland’s contested status work.
The second contribution is from Dr Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, a Kalaaleq Inuk scholar working on colonial relations. She explores the public discourse around Greenland in one of those colonial dynamics—Denmark. She does so by looking at the strong reactions to the documentary film Orsugiak for which Graugaard was the principal narrator. Focused on mineral exploitation, ‘cryolite [orsugiak] colonialism’, it questioned Denmark’s dominant narrative of colonial benevolence.
This is followed by anthropologist Professor Mark Nuttall’s essay, which argues that, despite political autonomy, the global framings of Greenland—environmental, geopolitical and extractive—have obscured Kalaallit Nunaat as an Indigenous homeland. He argues that to realise sustainable goals for the region, Indigenous knowledge and self-determination are essential.
Social scientists Professor Gérard Duhaime, Birger Poppel, Dr MarieKathrine Poppel and Professor Emeritus Louis-Jacques Dorais make it very clear, as do other contributors, what is at stake, taking on the threat is US annexation straight on. Set out through a careful political history of the situation, they argue that such an act would amount to ‘policide’—the forcible elimination of Kalaallit political authority, cultural and national identities.
This is followed by a related paper by Arctic defence policy specialists, Dr Rasmus Leander Nielsen and Dr Jeppe Strandsbjerg, which discusses recent developments in security and defence policy in Greenland as published by its government in 2024. They discuss how these issues have now come to the fore in Greenland domestic politics in resistance to US, and indeed Danish, strategies, which had in the past determined Greenland’s foreign policy. They show how Greenland has developed its own geopolitical vision for the Arctic, strongly articulated through its own political structures.
Finally, Professor Emeritus Oran R. Young, a specialist in international governance and environmental institutions, questions the plausibility of the global narrative that transforms Greenland from a site of Arctic exceptionalism to a site of increasingly intensive and competitive Great-Power politics. He argues that this narrative does not sit well with ‘Arctic realities’ and even with the facts of the situation. To this end he places Greenland into wider global issues, from the Ukraine War to Russian and Chinese foreign and domestic policy. Certainly, he argues, Greenland’s geopolitical status is shifting, but not necessarily in the ways we might imagine. The solution lies in collaboration and negotiation with Greenland rather than outdated imperialistic aspirations.
Collectively the papers in this themed collection bring new thinking to what constitutes ‘Greenland’, for whom, and why it matters globally. It is essential reading.
‘The tame and the wild: people and animals after 1492’ is a fascinating Conversation between historian Professor Marcy Norton and philosopher Dr Josh Milburn. Norton’s book of the same name was shortlisted for the 2024 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding; Milburn is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the British Academy and a former British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, whose work focuses on the place of animals in moral, legal and political philosophy.
Like Norton’s book, the Conversation explores the ways in which humans and animals have interacted across place and time. For its places, it focuses on Europe and Native America. For its timeframe, it takes the period from 1492 when the crew of Christopher Columbus’ Santa Maria first crossed the Atlantic, ushering in European colonisation of the Americas. The Conversation’s focus is on four modes of human–animal interaction, each with different understandings of animal subjectivity and each shaped by different cultural and economic conditions. One example that Norton discusses is livestock husbandry, the dominant mode of interaction in Europe. In this mode, animals are objectified. As Norton puts it, ‘they are raised so we can eat their flesh, wear their fibres, and so on’, and today 92 billion livestock animals are killed each year. Another mode of interaction is familiarisation, where a wild animal is captured and tamed so that it becomes a companion and is accorded subjectivity. In this Amazonian system, ‘the essence of familiarisation is you don’t eat who you feed … the opposite of livestock husbandry, which centres around us eating animals who are fed’. Norton notes that Europeans’ exposure to this very different mode of human–animal interaction helps explain the timing of the emergence of pets in Europe. These are just two examples from a rich cross-disciplinary conversation that weaves together understandings of the past, present and future across European and Indigenous societies.
The final contribution to Issue 3 is ‘Dignity and historical injustice: the history of an Albanian family’, a Conversation between the political scientist and philosopher Professor Lea Ypi FBA and Professor Pablo Mukherjee FBA. Here, Ypi looks back to her two enormously successful and prize-winning books Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Penguin, 2021) and Indignity: A Life Reimagined (Penguin, 2025) to reflect on why she turned to life-writing to capture some of the most pressing political, philosophical and historical issues at play today. Examining her own childhood and youth as well as those of her beloved grandmother through interviews, archives, personal anecdotes and her own memory, Ypi finds a fresh way of looking at Albanian history at a decisive conjuncture of our times. In so doing, she demonstrates once again that it is the small voices that unfailingly capture the tones and registers of the large tectonic shifts across space and time.
As always, we thank our Editorial Board for their support, and our peer reviewers whose comments are invaluable in improving the quality of the articles. We thank our authors whose research and professionalism make the Journal possible. We remain indebted to the Publishing Department of the British Academy for their combined experience and knowledge and efficiency in producing the Journal, and for their openness to discussions about the Journal’s future development.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/014.a20
Published on: 30 September 2026
Volume: 14
Issue: Issue 3
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© 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 3, Contents and Editors’ Introduction’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(3): a20 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a20Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
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July 2023
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