This article examines the evolution of neighbourhood organising initiatives in Puerto Rico following Hurricane María and amid austerity policies imposed by the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (La Junta). It explores how grassroots responses to state retrenchment have transformed into semi-private welfare systems, embodying both potential emancipatory practices and contradictions shaped by dynamics of colonial neoliberalism. Drawing on literature from critical urban studies, political economy and colonialism, the study relies on interviews and field observations to examine 17 neighbourhood organising initiatives across Puerto Rico and highlight the emergence of a shadow state run by neighbourhood activists who resemble unwaged semi-private street-level bureaucrats. While activists strive for neighbourhood autonomy or independence, their workload, internal frictions, and reliance on resilience narratives hinder broader anti-colonial or radical mobilisation. Ultimately, the work of the shadow state underscores the deep tensions between pragmatic community practices and the transformative aspirations needed to confront the Archipelago's colonial and economic realities.
This study investigates how disability is relationally produced and negotiated within Thai family dynamics. While scholarship often treats the family as a benign support unit, this article conceptualises it as a site of governance that can produce psycho-emotional disablism. Integrating critical family theory with the social relational model of disability, the analysis draws on interviews with 32 blind street musicians (19 men, 13 women). A moralised framework of karmic consequence, compassionate pity, and elder-junior hierarchy authorises a benevolent cage of confinement. Gender stratifies these dynamics, imposing compounded obligation on women while rendering men's standing precarious through erasure from kinship structures. Welfare absence compels families to function as a shadow welfare state, wherein a debt of gratitude becomes a transactional mechanism making belonging conditional upon economic contribution. Non-transactional arrangements indicate that economic conditionality is a structural adaptation rather than a cultural inevitability. The findings conceptualise familial disablement as policy-mediated and call for rights-based defamilialisation.
Welfare retrenchment and workfare policies have made it significantly harder for disabled and chronically ill people to get public support. Whilst a number of studies have mapped the effects on living standards and quality of life for these groups, we suggest that welfare cuts can also have significant effects on how people exercise their political rights. As work capability assessments are getting increasingly strict, people relying on support may fear that political engagements will be seen as evidence of work capacity. As a result, people targeted by cuts may refrain from protesting. Based on 11 interviews with chronically ill activists and an extensive netnography, we examine how sick and disabled activists in Sweden perceive and navigate this risk, concluding that stricter assessments of sickness insurance applications influence the propensity to protest against cuts. In effect, there is a significant risk that groups targeted by cuts are not heard in the social policy debate.
Economic inactivity is a historic and persistent feature of labour markets in rich nations, with recent UK increases typically attributed to post pandemic shocks. Health related economic inactivity (HREI), both a symptom and driver of health inequalities, has become the most politically charged and apparently least tractable element. Contemporary UK social policy increasingly frames inactivity as a problem of individual deficit, with activation and personalised support posited as routes to productivity and growth. Using qualitative data collected with stakeholders in post-industrial North East England, this article illustrates how such logics can falter when they encounter structurally saturated systems shaped by long term sickness, insecure housing, debt, disrupted access to care and weak labour markets. In these conditions, frontline actors are required to perform the labour of joining up fragmented infrastructures while navigating conditionality driven fear and precarity. This paper argues that these dynamics expose the limits of supply side welfare reform by showing how structurally saturated conditions constrain what employment support systems can achieve in practice, underscoring the need for sustained, place-based approaches capable of addressing embedded inequalities.
This article investigates how national policy frameworks in Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Uruguay conceptualise transgender inclusion, justice, and state responsibility. Through a comparative documentary analysis of national action plans, it explores tensions between legal recognition and structural justice in countries regarded as global leaders in transgender rights. The findings indicate that advanced legal recognition can coexist with persistent inequality, discrimination, and exclusion. Canada, Denmark, and Norway place greater emphasis on recognition, protection, and institutional inclusion, whereas Uruguay integrates these approaches with a greater focus on historically situated responsibility, structural transformation, and reparative commitments. The article introduces the concept of the legal vanguard paradox to elucidate these tensions. Este art & iacute;culo investiga c & oacute;mo los marcos de pol & iacute;ticas nacionales en Canad & aacute;, Dinamarca, Noruega y Uruguay conceptualizan la inclusi & oacute;n, la justicia y la responsabilidad estatal de las personas transg & eacute;nero. Mediante un an & aacute;lisis documental comparativo de planes de acci & oacute;n nacionales, explora las tensiones entre el reconocimiento legal y la justicia estructural en pa & iacute;ses considerados l & iacute;deres mundiales en derechos de las personas transg & eacute;nero. Los hallazgos indican que un reconocimiento legal avanzado puede coexistir con la persistencia de la desigualdad, la discriminaci & oacute;n y la exclusi & oacute;n. Canad & aacute;, Dinamarca y Noruega hacen mayor hincapi & eacute; en el reconocimiento, la protecci & oacute;n y la inclusi & oacute;n institucional, mientras que Uruguay integra estos enfoques con un mayor & eacute;nfasis en la responsabilidad hist & oacute;ricamente situada, la transformaci & oacute;n estructural y los compromisos reparadores. El art & iacute;culo introduce el concepto de la paradoja de la vanguardia jur & iacute;dica para dilucidar estas tensiones.
