Communicating research findings is a storytelling practice. The stories we tell as researchers are important to how the publics understand research findings and how research circulates in society. This is especially true for fields that have important social, political, or policy implications, such as the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). In this chapter, we introduce the term ‘narrative choreographies’ to describe how researchers, clinicians, science journalists, and other actors embed DOHaD knowledge claims as part of larger scientific, social, and political narratives. Using examples from our own research, we show how DOHaD narratives can inadvertently pathologise and stigmatise marginalised people, such as low-income mothers and obese mothers. In order to combat this potentiality, we advocate for deliberately choreographing DOHaD narratives to address structural inequality and advocate for social justice and health equity. At the end of the chapter, we offer concrete recommendations for DOHaD researchers who are interested in reflecting on and workshopping their own narrative choreographies to better support the healthy development of parents, children, and communities.

In the last decade, scholars in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) have increasingly engaged in translating the field’s insights into policy and society. Several multidisciplinary advocacy groups have been formed to promote women’s reproductive health as well as maternal and child health. They have framed DOHaD in different ways in order to attract policy attention. Framing is the practice of contextualising and interpreting the meaning of research results in various communication activities. Overall, DOHaD has often been shown to exhibit a narrow focus on individual responsibility and translation at the clinician–patient interface instead of focusing on wider socio-economic, cultural, and political factors influencing health in its framing activities. In this chapter, we examine two case studies of multidisciplinary networks (the Venice Forum and UK Preconception Partnership) and explore how they have framed DOHaD findings when communicating with and for policymakers. We analyse the social valences of these framings and make recommendations for framing DOHaD in ways that better align with social justice and health equity goals.

This chapter charts the evolution of social unrest in the streets of Prague from the war years to the end of 1920, a moment of heightened occupation of public space by crowds. Most of these protests resist clear-cut labels as socialist or nationalist. They must be considered in terms of the protesters’ relationship to the state, in the larger context of the Habsburg Empire’s collapse and the Czechoslovak republic’s difficult stabilization. Food supply deficiencies generated many riots, demonstrations, and strikes. The trajectories of protests, from suburban centers of local power to the city’s main squares, show declining trust in imperial institutions and increasing recourse to violence. Postwar demonstrations signal a shift in conceptions of citizenship and democracy, the streets becoming a forum for legitimate popular political participation. The housing crisis and evictions by crowds constitute a good case study of the willingness to resort to direct action to establish a new form of social justice.

The conclusion discusses the benefits of an examination of imperial collapse through streetscapes, highlighting the significance of the urban war experience in this process. In this light, the 1918 revolutionary moment acquires major significance as a complex movement revolving around issues of democratization and social justice, beyond Bolshevik or national revolutions. The everyday experiences of Prague citizens in the First World War and in the transition period nurtured disappointments and expectations that found repercussions in the struggles faced by the First Czechoslovak Republic at home in the interwar years.

Analyzing major and lesser-known utopian and dystopian literature from 1945-present, we define white supremacy as both a regime of exploitation and violence by people of European descent upon others deemed to be outside of whiteness and a process of centering whiteness. We look at the relationship between white supremacy and American culture from the period through two main trends. The first asserts white supremacy in either a default form assuming the centrality of whiteness or an explicit form that calls for white supremacist revolution. Texts here range from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold to McCarthy’s The Road to the notorious Turner Diaries. The second trend directly challenges white supremacy, including some notable texts such as Butler’s Parable series to a flood of post-Black Lives Matter works such as Ruff’s Lovecraft Country to Coates’s Between the World and Me to short works by adrienne maree brown and others.

Community-engaged research (CEnR) has moved from the fringes to the mainstream of academic research, particularly that which orients to goals of social, racial, and health equity. The construct of empowerment, which encompasses interconnected processes at the level of the individual, the organization, and the community, can be used to understand the mechanisms by which CEnR may contribute to improvements in equity and justice. This chapter introduces and describes a conceptual model for empowerment in CEnR that synthesizes ideas and empirical advances from community psychology and public health. We use the model to examine the processes by which social power can be built and exercised through CEnR at multiple levels of analysis, suggesting that the power that comes from community-led and grassroots community organizing processes has the greatest significance for equity-based CEnR and ultimately for goals of equity- and justice-focused social change.

This Introduction has three objectives. The first is to situate this volume within the current phase of South Africa’s difficult engagement with land reform in particular and transformative constitutionalism in general. For this purpose, we characterise the recent debate on ‘Expropriation Without Compensation’ (EWC) and the political developments leading to the tabling, and failure, of the Constitution Eighteenth Amendment Bill. In section two, we begin with an account of the research project and conference that led to this volume and then review the book’s three-part structure and its individual chapters in relation to each other. While there are important points of convergence with regard to the contested assemblage of law, land reform and redistributive justice, there are also divergent views for probing further. In the third section, we respond to this challenge by addressing three interlinked issues that emerge from a transversal reading of the chapters, which we regard as central for the future of redistributive justice in South Africa. These are, first, the respective roles of the state, popular politics and the private sector in driving this project; second, the relative importance to be attached to productive and redistributive measures as building blocks of change; and third, the scale of the structural changes that are needed.

This chapter explores land reform and redistributive justice from the vantage point of the Karoo, a large, sparsely populated and marginalised area that constitutes some 40 per cent of South Africa’s commercial farmland, where major land-use changes are recalibrating the significance of this land both locally and nationally. Underpinning the discussion is a concern with the narrow framing of contemporary land debates in terms of land as redistributive justice, rather than one plank in a larger framework for social justice. The argument is not that the Karoo is typical of the country as a whole, or that the time for land reform is past. Rather, thinking through social–ecological changes here pushes one to scale down expectations of land reform while foregrounding other issues of concern. Five cross-cutting themes are highlighted: the scale of the Karoo; its challenging environment; current land-use changes; the small-town character of the region; and its multi-layered history. The chapter draws on recent research on land-use change and sustainable development in the region, concluding with a case study of land restitution and renewable energy in the small town of Loeriesfontein.

The headline aim of the UK governments ten-year strategy for work, health and disability is to have 1 million more disabled people in work by 2027. Good work can be health-enhancing, so there is a prima facie case for encouraging those with chronic health conditions and disabilities to work. The use of assistive technology could help improve their ability to work. However, disabled individuals may have greater difficulty in both accessing good work and having opportunities to improve their health. The concern is that disabled people who remain unable to work may find themselves stigmatized (as freeloaders), though their inability to work may be due to their greater difficulty in achieving sufficient health, or the medical assessment process, or both. These multidimensional barriers should be reflected in the strategys implementation, and valuing the agency of disabled people - respecting their choices in relation to working or not (and not blaming them if they choose not to work) - would increase their health more than the current strategy. The chapter suggests that the headline aim should really be to give 1 million more disabled people the opportunity to work by 2027.

The chapter analyses how the political and economic realities of the aftermath of the First World War gave the term ‘tax justice’ a new meaning in Belgium, occupied during four years by Germany, but also how it was fought over for moral and economic reasons during the 1920s. On the left of the political spectrum, the Socialists brought their own fiscal agenda, entailing new progressive income taxes on the wealthy. On the right, Liberals and Catholics disapproved of such innovations, judging them morally wrong and economically harmful. Compromises were found, with a real shift in the tax system. However, as the 1920s wore on, the Belgian franc suffered from a depreciation like the French and German currencies, with capital fleeing the country. The political debate on progressive income taxes shifted from justice to injustice: the massive level of tax fraud and tax evasion was making the system unfair towards honest taxpayers. Tax policies made in the name of social justice became an achievement to be defended for some and an excessive ideal to be attenuated for others.

Social justice has returned to the heart of political debate in Europe. While the phenomenon has received significant attention from several academic disciplines, social justice has rarely been explored as a historical subject in its own right. This chapter explores why this should have been so. It argues that the elusiveness of social justice as a historical subject can be explained by the way in which conceptions of social justice were located at the confluence of other historical narratives that have shaped the historiography of twentieth-century Europe. The chapter provides an extensive survey of these influential narratives, which include the rise of state power, the development of cultures of social improvement, the changing popular expectations of government, and the domain of citizenship. The chapter then presents an innovative approach for the historical study of ‘social justice in context’. Focusing on the ways in which conceptions of social justice grew out of the intricate interplay between rulers and ruled, it develops a research agenda that concentrates on the analysis of three distinctive dimensions, including the temporalities, the spatiality, and the actors and agencies of conceptions of social justice.

This chapter discusses the conceptual foundations of the notion of social justice during the Enlightenment before surveying the volume’s achievement in historicizing twentieth-century European proposals. Social justice presupposed the invention of the “social,” in and through the insight into informal cultural and institutional ordering. And while social justice was coined earlier in the nineteenth century, the concept became unavoidable later in the century as both left liberals and Roman Catholics responded to individuals and laissez-faire, in part by innovating a new ‘social science’. This chapter concludes by speculating about the future trajectory of claims on the notion of social justice.

This chapter seeks to illustrate from the bottom up the role that social justice played in establishing and maintaining authoritarian rule in Czechoslovakia under National Socialism and state socialism. The author investigates how notions of social justice were included in the social practice of both regimes and how the working population responded to these policies. By analysing legal disputes, this chapter explores the critical space between rulers and ruled to assess when and how notions of social justice were articulated in Czechoslovakia. In their opposition to the ‘injustices’ of past governments, such as those wrought by social inequality and economic suffering, both National Socialists and Communists drew on a language of social justice to articulate their own visions of a new order. However, their respective notions of social justice differed radically: from social justice defined in racial terms, typical for New Order movements, to social justice delimited by social class and attained for all members of the ‘socialist working society’. The main difference that emerged from the transition from the Nazi to the post-war Communist regime was a shift from the language of individual rights to a language related to the collective, to society, and to the state.

At first glance, social justice seems to be absent in the history of European integration, which ultimately led to the European Union of our own times. This chapter arrives at a different conclusion. It focuses on the period from the 1950s until the Maastricht Treaty and argues that European integration was not simply the neoliberal project it is often described as. Already the Schuman Declaration of 1950 called for a ‘solidarité de fait’. While social justice never became a key concept defining the policies of the European Community, the EC started to develop a distinct approach to social issues since the 1950s. It primarily sought social progress through economic cooperation, not through redistributive social policy. Moreover, the EC served as a platform for the exchange of experts, complementing the role of national actors, transnational forums, and other international organizations such as the International Labour Organization. But it also started developing a highly diverse set of policy instruments with deep implications for social justice. These policies remained patchy. They gained importance only incrementally and never seemed to be driven by an overall logic. Even if the EC was a hidden actor on questions of social justice, it clearly mattered.