Social media sites, according to Carrie A. Rentschler, can become both “aggregators of online misogyny” as well as key spaces for feminist education and activism. They are spaces where “rape culture,” in particular, is both performed and resisted, and where a feminist counterpublic can be formed (Michael Salter 2013 Salter, Michael . 2013. “Justice and Revenge in Online Counter-Publics: Emerging Responses to Sexual Violence in the Age of Social Media.” Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal 9 (3): 225–242. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] ). In this New Zealand study, we interviewed seventeen young people who were critical of rape culture about their exposure and responses to it on social media and beyond. Participants described a “matrix of sexism” in which elements of rape culture formed a taken-for-granted backdrop to their everyday lives. They readily discussed examples they had witnessed, including victim-blaming, “slut-shaming,” rape jokes, the celebration of male sexual conquest, and demeaning sexualized representations of women. While participants described this material as distressing, they also described how online spaces offered inspiration, education, and solidarity that legitimated their discomfort with rape culture. Social media provided safe spaces that served as a buffer against the negative effects of sexism, and allowed participation in a feminist counterpublic that directly contests rape culture.

The perception of impairments often relies on dominant, ableist presumptions about what disability ‘looks like’. This article builds from in-depth research with 35 young people who are Deaf or blind or have vision, hearing or mobility impairments and their parents, all of whom navigated ableist interactional dynamics in one form or another. In conversation with scholarship across disability studies, sociology and social psychology, this article explores how the perception of differences and disabilities influences everyday interactions. Our analysis teases out a series of relationships between the (non-)perception of participants’ impairments and the form and frequency of ableist intrusions they experienced. We focus, in particular, on the medicalised, diagnostic tenor of everyday encounters, wherein participants are routinely stared at, questioned, assisted and challenged by strangers. Our analysis points to the medicalised, ocularcentric nature of everyday ableism, demonstrating how these encounters function to sustain the interactional and social privileges of able-bodied people.

Children have as much “right” to the city as adult citizens, yet they lose out in the urban spatial justice stakes. Built environments prioritizing motor vehicles, a default urban planning position that sees children as belonging in child-designated areas, and safety discourses, combine to restrict children’s presence and opportunities for play, rendering them out of place in public space. In this context, children’s everyday appropriations of public spaces for their “playful imaginings” can be seen as a reclamation of their democratic right to the city: a prefigurative politics of play enacted by citizen kids. In this article, we draw on data collected with 265 children in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, to consider how children’s playful practices challenge adult hegemony of the public domain and prefigure the possibilities of a more equal, child-friendly, and playful city.

Participation in community life is vital for health and wellbeing, promoting a sense of belonging, networks of social support and opportunities for physical activity. Disabled young people have lower levels of mobility and participation in recreational activities (physical, social and cultural), education and employment, than their peers without disabilities. This has implications for their health and wellbeing and life course opportunities. Previous research on the participation levels of disabled young people has primarily relied on parent/caregiver reports and been oriented to home and school environments. This study investigates how physical and social environmental factors cohere to support or restrict the everyday mobility and participation of disabled young people. The study is located in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ). Participants comprise 35 young people aged 12–25 years with mobility, vision or hearing impairments. A mixed-methods research design combines objective (global positioning systems, accelerometers, geographical information systems) and self-report measures (travel diaries, and questionnaires) to assess young people’s mobility and levels of participation in leisure/educational and employment activities with in-depth interviews exploring their everyday experiences of inclusion/exclusion, and factors enabling or constraining community participation. Parents/caregivers and disability sector key informant viewpoints on the community participation of disabled young people have also been gathered through in-depth interviews. Follow-up workshops with young people and parents/caregivers will identify pathways to increase participation and challenge current disabling practices. This study looks beyond barriers in the physical environment to the interplay of personal, social and physical factors that enable or constrain the community participation of disabled young people. In keeping with the study’s overarching goal of increasing opportunities for effective community participation and full citizenship of disabled young people, research methods were applied flexibily – negotiated and adapted to maximise each young person’s participation in light of their abilities and preferences.

It is a decade and a half since Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell's (2001) “Jekyll and Hyde: Men's constructions of feminism and feminists” called scholarly attention to men's discursive splitting of feminism and feminists into good and monstrous variants. In this article, we ask whether this double vision persists and how it operates in a cultural moment when feminism and feminist issues are (re)entering the mainstream. We draw from data collected in the course of a New Zealand study exploring how young people were making sense of sexism, feminism and gender (in)equality. Our analysis of participants' accounts suggests a binary discursive formulation of feminism is alive and well: “unreasonable feminism” damns and dismisses feminism, while “fair feminism” affirms it, aligning it with equality. Where previous research has shown how such pejorative and affirming accounts are worked together in ways that dilute or depoliticise feminism, we explore how teenagers who explicitly adopted a feminist identity drew on these discourses to justify a more politicised feminist position. Many participants adopted a practice of “reasonable feminism”, embodying and evidencing feminist reasonableness through their rhetorical and performative devices.