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AbstractThis volume follows failures out into the world, exploring how they unfold ethnographically. Taking a longer view shows how objects, narratives, and diagnoses of failures may be crafted, acted on, suffered, resisted – unmade or recomposed. Thus while tropes and diagnoses of failure can temporarily (re)organize, narrate, and stabilize the world, the kinds of failures explored here also indicate a mode of uncontainable excess that refuses the boundedness of knowledge objects, temporalities, and spaces. This volume offers three main interventions. The first concerns knowledge production: how objects of failure are crafted through selective ways of knowing that occlude both other modes of apprehension at different scales and failure's many affective valences. The second thinks through the knotted temporalities – whether pasts, futures, suspended presents, or repetition and sedimentation – that make and are made by failure. Finally, writing about unfurling failures requires careful attention to non‐linear reverberations and traces as well as to open‐ended and mobile narratives that produce different social and material effects.

AbstractTracing the history of terrestrial fusion energy to a giant multinational experimental fusion facility under construction reveals a series of consequential failures, re‐evaluations of once defunct designs, but also persistence. To account for how this vast enterprise, dogged by failure, endures, I suggest that different ontological narratives re‐orientate the enterprise both temporally and vis‐à‐vis different forms and valences of failure. Thus the rhetoric of mission‐driven project vies with that of open‐ended, present‐focused experiment: the former is positioned as the crucial solution to the threat of climate change; the latter 'bakes in' virtuous failure as integral to creative practice. Visionary promise moves to a focus on the meanwhile. Finally, the sheer unfurling size to which attention is constantly drawn offers a disorientating spectacle, denying perspective or closure and acting to suspend judgements of failure.

AbstractThis article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelianoikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retraction compounded by austerity policies and national responses to excessive resource extraction and waste production. Both austerity and formal recycling schemes shift responsibility onto consumer citizens, regardless of capacity. Further, this model of thrift eclipses the thriftiness of low-income urban households, which emerges at the nexus of kin and waged labor, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need for decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicized ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift coexist, change over time, and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centered on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households and undermines their ability to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations.

I'll Take You to Mrs Cole is a multi-component practice research output including the creation and performances of children's theatre show I'll Take You to Mrs Cole, commissioned by Complicité and co-produced by Polka Theatre. The research intervenes in making and research practices in children's theatre and articulates a new methodology and dramaturgy informed by Two Tone music (established in the 1970s and 1980s in Coventry). The Two Tone dramaturgy developed in the practice influences not only the aesthetic and sonic elements of the work, but also the wider dramaturgical and creative process, and it underscores the importance of inclusive and non-hierarchical devising processes. Dealing with narratives of race, class and community, I'll Take You to Mrs Cole aims to stimulate inter-generational conversations amongst audiences around these issues. The Two Tone dramaturgy enables the practice to foreground the relevance of the socio-economic and political context of Two Tone music under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government in the late 1970s and 1980s to contemporary culture under a Conservative government in the late 2010s. And, in a context where children's theatre is often under-valued within the wider theatre ecology, contemporary dramaturgical practices of children's theatre are extended to present an innovative and challenging children's theatre production.

Drawing on meetings within structured project environments in Turkey and Britain, this essay explores how and if this kind of highly rational, instrumental meeting travels and why so much frustration is typically expressed by British participants in such meetings. Meetings held in the Turkish senior government bureaucracy did not conform to expectation: they embraced formal and informal relations and were spectacles and tournaments of skill. I suggest that expectations of what constitutes a proper meeting are shaped by a specific British genealogy of common sense and technologies of fact creation, neither of which necessarily have purchase elsewhere. Nor is their applicability 'at home' straightforward, despite the fact that 'common sense' is often treated as simply commensurate with cultural systems as practical action: how one gets things done. Rather, the meeting, as shaped by this tradition, appears as a subjunctive form, a fiction of selective relationality where the meeting and project are treated as if they were set‐aside spaces, participants act as if they had single formal roles cut from a web of internal and external relations, and highly summarized information allows discussion towards a shared goal.

This extraordinary and moving piece of original theatre tells the true stories of modern day slaves and their traffickers. Two hundred years since the abolition of the trans-Atlantic space trade, virtually every country in the world is affected by trafficking. 'Sold' is based on original interviews conducted this year and has been created by the company of actors and designers under the direction of Complicite Associate, Catherine Alexander, who created 'The Boy from Centreville' performed at Edinburgh Fringe in 2008. CAST - BA (HONS) ACTING COLLABORATIVE AND DEVISED THEATRE Fisayo Akinade - Gbenga Nadia Balfe - Gina/Mara Jordan Dawes - Danny/Luan Palkici Laura Dewey - Denise Marshall/Natalia Nicholas Hart - Jack Sara Hirsch - Claudia Schmidt Peter Hobday - Krisjãnis Magnus McCullagh - Iain/Alex Elizabeth Menabney - Anna Puzova/Police Officer John Montegrande - James/Andreas Peter Randall - Anthony Steen Cherrelle Skeete - Oliviette/Adjo Sarah Vevers - Christina Caine Paula Videniece - Aija Rhiannon Wallace - Carys Miles Yekinni - Tayo/Leo PRODUCTION TEAM - BA (HONS) THEATRE PRACTICE STUDENTS Sarah Beaton - Set and Costume Design Samantha Buckmaster - Costume Supervisor Gareth Wide - Lighting Design/Programmer Douglas Green - Video/Projection Design Peter Malkin - Sound Design James Nicholson - Sound Design Tal Landsman - Production Manager Elliot Bennet - Technical Manager Nikita Wolski - Stage Manager Sally Inch - Deputy Stage Manager Ellie Phillips - Assistant Stage Manager Sam Jeffs - Chief Electrician Kieran O'Brien - Media Production/Programmer CREATIVE TEAM Catherine Alexander - Director Andrew London - Assistant Director Max Mackintosh - Assistant Director Tara McAllister-Viel - Vocal Support Marina Tyndall - Accent Coach CHARACTER BIOGRAPHIES AND SOURCES Luan & Natalia Luan Plakici is an Albanian immigrant who was convicted of human trafficking in 2002. He was the first person to be tried under the new UK human trafficking laws and sentenced to 24 years in prison. Scenes are based on media reports about Luan and interviews with Denise Marshall. Danny & James In the north of England forced labour is a consistent underlying problem. These characters are based on original interviews with two Mancunians who have a connection with this issue. They have asked to remain anonymous. Tayo & Gbenga This storyline is based on accounts of boys and young men trafficked to the Ivory Coast to be used as forced labour. Taken from their homes in places such as Nigeria and Mali, these boys work on cocoa and sugar plantations. Much of the chocolate on sale in this country has links to slave about in Africa. The starting point for this storyline is the YouTube video: 'Chocolate, not so sweet after all'. (www.fairtrade.org.uk) Anthony Steen Anthony was a Conservative MP for Totnes. He is the chairman of The Human Trafficking Foundation and has been instrumental in raising UK governmental awareness of human trafficking. Character is based on original interviews with Anthony Steen. (www.allpartygrouphumantrafficking.org) Denise Marshall Denise is the director os Eaves and The Poppy Project: these organisations campaign for the freedom and rights of trafficked women. Character is based on original interviews with Denise Marshall. (www.eaves4women.co.uk) Jack & Carys One of the more sophisticated forms of coercion is the 'Loverboy'. A 'Loverboy' lures young girls into boyfriend/girlfriend relationships before cutting them off from family and friends and trafficking them from one town to another. (www.mydangerousloverboy.com) Aija & Krisjãnis These young Latvians came to the UK on legal passports with the promise of legitimate work and found themselves the victims of human trafficking. Storyline based on original interviews with sources who wish to remain anonymous. Oliviette Many people trafficked to the UK are enslaved as domestic servants in private homes. Some start as servants in their home countries, but when they are illegally transported to other countries to continue working they find themselves trapped. Storyline based on several sources which have been fictionalised. - 'Enslaved: The New British Slavery' by Ramila Gupta Anna Puzova Anna Puzova was the first woman in the UK to be convicted of child trafficking. As a mother with eight children named on her passport, she was easily able to traffic children from Italy to UK. Scenes are fictionalised based upon interviews with Superintendent Bernie Gravett, Metropolitan Police. Christine Caine Christine is a Christian leader from Sydney, Australia. She is actively involved in supporting victims of human trafficking through the A21 campaign. This character is created using verbatim text from Christine's YouTube videos. (www.thea21campaign.org) Andreas Andreas is a Greek immigrant who has integrated himself into the criminal underworld of Soho. The character is based on encounters with a source whose anonymity we wish to protect. Mara Mara is a Latvian masseuse whose career has been ruined following an accident. She awoke with amnesia and injuries which, she believes, resulted from being sold for sex whilst unconscious. Story based on original interviews with Mara Vaitkuse. Other Sources * UN Office on drugs and crime: www.undoc.org * US Trafficking in Persons' Report: www.state.gov * The Bible, Leviticus 25:44 * The Koran, The Believers 23:1 * London School of Hygiene and Medicine * Stop Trafficking Now: www.sctnow.org * 'Designing Trafficking Research From a Labour Market Perspective', by Beate Andrees and Mariska N. J. Van Der Linden * 'Stop the Traffic: People Shouldn't Be Bought and Sold', by Steve Chalke

Who Owns Native Culture? Michael Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)

This article explores the question of how long‐term transactional agreements endure when the environment in which they exist is necessarily subject to change. Different models of connection are examined, including the classical model of freedom of contract. It appears that contracts in practice do not substantiate ideas of free choice and equal bargaining power. Instead, the symbolic power of contracts, as a means of conjoining parties and opening an arena of negotiation, inheres in many supporting structures (trust, the ritualization of legal language) but particularly in the materiality of the document itself.