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While critical political economy (CPE) has yet to play a prominent role in eco-social policy research, this paper argues that a deeper engagement with CPE and a better understanding of the global political economy can enhance eco-social policy debates. CPE can help us to see the contradictions in and impediments to integrating environmental and social policies, and particularly why both of these categories continue to be mediated and shaped by economic logics. In order to develop these arguments, we analyse recent international discourses on agricultural subsidies promoted by key policy actors such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. By examining agriculture as a nodal point between diverse scales and domains such as the local, global, environmental, social, and economic spheres, we explore how certain positions are prioritised over others. We argue that the discourse on 'repurposing subsidies' in global agricultural policy expresses a 'new critical orthodoxy' that recognises the need for transformation but fails to address the structural conditions of the global political economy responsible for environmental and social crises. Instead, the proposed solutions rely on existing institutions and capitalist logics to resolve current crises, even if the latter are underpinned by these logics. Our analysis underlines the need for eco-social policy scholarship to be cognizant of how environmental and social policy integration is always embedded within a particular global political economy that reproduces certain inequalities and is not a neutral policy terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One hundred years that shook the world. This is one way of receiving History and Class Consciousness by György Lukács, a text that is considered by many to be one of the most important in Marxist philosophy and dialectics since its first appearance in 1923. However, in approaching its centenary, how does the focus on dialectics that is at the text's centre travel to address contemporary interdisciplinary concerns in political economy and radical geography? This article delivers a fresh reading of dialectics in and beyond History and Class Consciousness to distil the relevance of Lukács for contemporary political economists and radical geographers that, it is argued, necessarily lies in engaging with his method and understanding of totality. The focus dwells on totality and the 'life-nerve' of the dialectic, referring to the process of interiorising theory and practice in constituting a relational approach to analysing the metabolism of socio-nature. By so doing, the possibilities and limits of both totality and dialectics are revealed to political economists and radical geographers interested in furthering the case for methodological relationalism in their conceptions of the production of space and socio-nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: Diabetic retinopathy; screening EN Diabetic retinopathy screening 218 221 4 03/08/23 20230301 NES 230301 Introduction Diabetes mellitus (DM) affects 11.1% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults, more than double the rate of the overall Australian population.[1] Diabetic retinopathy (DR), occurring in up to a third of patients with diabetes, is one of the three leading causes of preventable bilateral vision loss in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (5.2%).[2] Although the recommended rates of annual testing are rarely achieved, DR screening rates have improved in recent years with relative success in meeting 3-yearly testing targets.[1] The majority of DR screening is currently delivered by optometrists and general practitioners (GP), with further referral to ophthalmologists for management.[3] Rural communities are either serviced by a small regional hospital with a visiting ophthalmology service or a rural community health centre with rotating GPs and visiting optometrists and ophthalmologists. The number of DR screens performed were compared as a percentage to the total eligible Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population with DM in each health district. Despite this decline in retinal photography, the DR screening rate still showed an increasing trend as the drop was buffered by Optometry screening. [Extracted from the article]

By the end of 2013, the Republic of Ireland had exited the bailout and was entering a period of economic recovery. Yet by 2015 the largest collective protest since independence emerged, challenging the proposed introduction of water charges. Since water, multiple successful social movements organising primarily on the terrain of social reproduction have developed. In this article, I argue that this period of reproductive unrest sharpened inherent contradictions in the way that capital accumulation, social reproduction and the Irish state are articulated to one another. Moreover, these contradictions are not unique to Ireland, but rather emblematic of neoliberal states more broadly. The article intervenes into debates on neoliberal crisis management since the 2007 Global Financial Crisis, as well as demonstrates the value of using social struggles as a lens through which to understand potential fractures in the global political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global water crisis is framed as a problem of global scarcity. However, struggles over water are over more than access or availability, they are struggling over what water is, which captures contradictions inherent to capitalist accumulation in neoliberal capitalism. Using an incorporated comparison, I bring into relation the Irish anti-water charges protests and struggles against the unconventional gas industry in Australia. In each case, the boundaries between nature, social reproduction, and production systems were reconfigured, re-defining who or what can survive, and in what form. Each struggle unpicked the political project behind the commodification of water, and as social relations and logics once taken as given became denaturalized, water as the embodiment of these socio-power relations also came to figure differently. What became clear was that it was not water that was in crisis but rather the social relations and processes that reduced it to a commodity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Irish and Portuguese protesters' perceptions of the EU in the decade since the European debt crisis. Building on EU politics, social movement and protest literatures, we ask how domestic protesters in both countries perceive the EU during its age of crisis protest timescape. We find that critical Europeanism, which rejects technocratic and neoliberal Europe and works towards an alternative, social Europe, has travelled beyond austerity/bailout protests into women's rights and housing protests in both countries, although to varying degrees. We suggest that the expansion of critical European perceptions in these traditionally Europhile member states forms part of the social and political legacy of the European debt crisis, but also contributes to the continued Europeanization of the European social movement space. It could have positive impacts on the EU's legitimacy deficit if EU institutions engaged meaningfully with critical European voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]