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Funding: This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under Grant PLP-2019-029. This article identifies a set of precarious, temporary, and travelling forms of commemoration that have been expressed in recent public artworks connected to Italy, and proposes them as case studies that together can enhance our understanding of how transnational memory is formed and functions across borders. These complex processes of memory-making are illustrated through a comparative analysis of Wes Anderson’s Bar Luce (2015), Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013), and Muna Mussie’s Oblio (2021). The selected works, which together add transnational nuance to James E. Young’s concept of the ‘counter-monument’, enshrine the creativity which can reside in acts of forgetting and misremembering, in experiencing things second-hand or at a distance, and in re-materialising memory through tropes of ephemerality, portability, and dislocation. Publisher PDF

This article sketches a history of how the concept of Italy has travelled worldwide to become a mobile cultural symbol in order to show how, as a signifier, “Italy” has also become increasingly detached from any national parameters of territory. It employs a lateral method of “looking sideways” at literary representations of Italy from “outside” the national canon to show how they can put pressure on what (and where) Italian culture now resides. Analyzing three contemporary works of world literature partially set in Italy (Daša Drndić’s Trieste, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, and Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing), it suggests that we might consider broadening out the canon of transnational Italian literature to include works neither written by Italians nor written in Italian, but that offer sideways insight into Italian history and culture from elsewhere. Publisher PDF

In concluding, we bring together theoretical, legal and practice-based perspectives to consider how stakeholders with safeguarding responsibilities best respond to online risk based upon our experience of ‘what works’ and how vulnerable adults can have their best interests supported. Building on previous arguments, we consider the role of technology, such as filtering and monitoring in safeguarding, what works, when it can be empowering, and how it can be excessive. Providing a counter-narrative, we argue that there is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach to the safeguarding of vulnerable adults when it comes to online behaviours, and cognisance of their capacity issues, online risk, and risk mitigation are required. We conclude by reflecting once more on the foundations laid by the Cobb ruling and how we are at the genesis of both thinking and practice around adult online safeguarding.

From the denial of abortion rights in Ireland to sexual violence against British South Asian women in England, the state and its institutions continue to fail women. This book offers a counter narrative to contemporary injustices and a persistent culture of victim-blaming.The academic and activist contributions to this collection explore contemporary research areas and pursue new discursive directions in order to present a feminist criminology, built on feminist praxis, for the twenty-first century. Providing a direct challenge to regressive and ineffective theory, policy and practice, this book resists the politics of gendered victimisation through extending feminist analyses of the state and documenting interventions into contemporary injustices.

This penultimate chapter brings together the theoretical, legal and practice-based perspectives to consider how stakeholders with safeguarding responsibilities can best respond to online risk. It is based on a ‘what works’ approach and how adults can have their best interests supported. It builds on the arguments about how technology, such as the use of monitoring and filtering in safeguarding practice, can be empowering but can also be excessive. This chapter considers both digital divides and social inequalities and draws on Actor Network Theory to emphasise one of the book’s central themes – that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to safeguarding adults online and an individualised approach is essential. It argues that a holistic approach across policy, organisations, education and training, technology and professional practice is critical to effective safeguarding based on evidence-led, informed, person-centred assessments free from value bias and in the best interests of the individual at risk.

The context of online safety, and its policy evolution, has been dominated by protecting children and young people in online spaces. The statutory focus, such as the UK government’s Online Safety Bill, continues with an approach that looks towards prohibition, rather than empowerment, while ignoring an evidence base that calls for inclusive approaches. Reflecting upon the impact of this policy direction related to adults, the risks associated with being online, for example grooming and exploitation (both sexual and financial), are poorly understood in multi-agency perspectives and are in conflict with the needs of individuals who might be at risk of harm online. With little formal training in adult safeguarding practice, and a dearth of research around adult online safety, professional practice falls back, instead, on personal experience, and biases arise from personal use of technology, which presents challenges to effective and consistent support of adults at risk.

This chapter proposes that the approach adopted in policy and practice around online safeguarding does not reflect best interests and instead centres on prohibition and prevention. We explore whether professionals and practitioners are in position to provide effective support to those in their care in relation to engaging with virtual environments and in assessing an individual’s capacity to make decisions about their online lives. As everyday interactions online comprise a milieu of activities from financial to social to exploring and interacting, effective support requires both an in-depth understanding of the individual and knowledge of the nature and arguably the risk associated with a variety of activities. Drawing upon empirical data and professional reflections on knowledge, understanding and training in relation to online safeguarding, we highlight taken-for-granted assumptions made about online risk and question the often overlooked rights of those at risk of harm in an online content.

The fundamental legal framework affecting adults who might be at risk as a result of online behaviours lies within the Mental Capacity Act 2005, the Care Act 2014 and statutory guidance which set out responsibilities for professionals working together. With a focus on the second principle of the five set out in the MCA that ‘a person is not to be treated as unable to make a decision unless all practicable steps to help him do so have been taken without success’, we question the notion of person-centred emancipatory practice in maximising and assessing mental capacity and the role of ethical decision making in professional practice in relation to online spaces for vulnerable adults. Using the Cobb J ruling in Re A and Re B and relevant Court of Protection rulings in the UK and the wider UK legal system, we also explore the right to online participation by vulnerable adults drawing upon the UNCRPD and the ECHR, making it clear that participation is a right for all.

This chapter focuses specifically on the debate on mental health and pro-harm content online. It outlines the increasing concern related to the widespread impact of online harms, mental well-being and reported mental health impacts of viewing harmful content online. The exploration of the complex relationship between mental capacity and mental health in the chapter reveals that vulnerability is a far from static concept. Using examples from pro-eating disorders, pro-self-harm and pro-suicide online communities and forums, this chapter examines the phenomenon of ‘pro-sites’, their significance in managing mental health and the importance of understanding their influence in safeguarding vulnerable adults. It is well recognised that vulnerable adults use these sites as they often lack a sense of acceptance and belonging in the ‘real world’, and this chapter argues that while calls to ban these sites and restrict access to such content have been ineffectual, supporting adults to understand how and why they use them alongside pro-recovery content in a non-judgemental way can enable a more realistic understanding of their mental health.

Funding: Leverhulme Trust. The catalogue to Rome-based Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s Europa exhibition of 2015 includes a short excerpt from Franco Cassano’s Southern Thought entitled “Thinking on Foot”. This article maps key elements of Cassano’s essay, namely the focus on “Mediterranean” values of slowness, contemplation, and conviviality onto readings of Italy-based works by Emily Jacir, Diana Matar and Hisham Matar, all of which provide capacious ways to rethink the idea of pilgrimage. Reflecting on the sites, sights and routes that form the basis of these works, the article shows how they represent pilgrimage as a slow form of contemporary cultural mobility, one concerned with deep contemplation of place as a response to experiences of loss, displacement and exile. Sacred journeying is experienced here through instances of micro-travel, such as walking, standing and looking, and personal transformation is charted through moments of slow thought and memory-work, as captured in multiple, mobile artistic forms. Publisher PDF

Unhelpful assumptions around ‘digital natives’ and assumptions of inherent digital literacies can create problematic scenarios for education providers in the higher education space. While we can show that students are comfortable engaging with digital platforms, and online learning environments are certainly to be welcomed, ad hoc and poorly defined critical digital literacy education in schools result in students frequently bringing poor critical thinking to the online environments, which can bring both pedagogic and institutional challenges for universities. Critical digital literacy, and associated risk mitigation, is not something that can be assumed with 21st-century students, and universities have a role to play in the development of these key skills in their student bodies if we are to produce digitally aware and responsible graduates.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rise in conspiracy theories underpinned by misinformation and “fake news,” much of which is propagated from online sources and disseminated by both real users and bots intent on destabilization. As a result of both the pandemic and the use of scientific information to justify policy choices, some of which impact on civil liberties, the pandemic has also seen a rise in the mistrust of scientific inquiry and the role of evidence in decision making. Within higher education, there is evidence that students will often form opinions based upon fake news and misinformation, particularly when a true understanding of a situation requires detailed technical or scientific information. We have a need to remould digital literacy into the need for evidence and critically reviewed information sources, which also consider the source itself. Critical digital literacy is a crucial skill for all in the global connected society.

The Momo Challenge, an entirely fake online phenomenon that exploded into public consciousness in early 2019, was what we might view as a perfect social media storm. The tabloid press endeavoured to raise awareness of the Challenge, which purported to infect young children’s videos on YouTube with upsetting images that then instructed the child to perform acts of self-harm, echoing the hysteria around the (also fictitious) Blue Whale Challenge in 2018. However, these attempts failed to cause a social media storm until the combined forces of the media, authority figures and, crucially, celebrities created a mass public awareness in late February 2019 and became, for a very short period of time, the key online safeguarding issue affecting young people in primary settings and a moral panic upon which everyone had a view, which they often shared on social media. The storm allows us to reflect upon the nature of online safeguarding training and the accountabilities of professionals and stakeholders with caring responsibilities as we can show, rather than keeping young people safe from harm, the response of many adults directly causes them to search for Momo and become upset at what they found.

Starting our trajectory through educational settings, this chapter considers the first social media storm discussed in this volume, which garnered public attention on an early year’s organisation and nursery education in the UK. Vanessa George, a mother of two, was charged with seven offences in 2009, including two of sexual assault by penetration and two of sexual assault by touching and producing 124 indecent images of children. She was also charged with making, possessing and distributing indecent images of children. Such behaviours are hard to comprehend, and public outcry and horror related to the case is evident across many social media platforms with hundreds of people sharing their views on the case and her subsequent release from prison. Littered with words such as ‘scum of the earth’; ‘pervert’; ‘monster’; depraved’; ‘repugnant’; ‘heinous’; and ‘evil’, the social media storm that surrounds ‘Britain’s worst female paedophile’ is a fascinating example of the public’s view on the lack of justice for the children she abused.