This article uses Foucault's analysis of bio-politics to explore continuities between childsaving and child rights and the connection of both to the racial governing of childhood. It shows how the birth of the modern idea of childhood coincided with shifts in governance from sovereignty to biopolitics, or a politics of life. This shift was the ground on which new practices of philanthropic concern acted on the child to produce new ideas about the child's special capacities and vulnerabilities. These novel practices of governance generated new forms of resistance and new sites of struggle. One strand of these new forms of resistance was the assertion of rights to health, welfare and life. It is in the context of struggles over these new kinds of rights, rather than an older conception of political rights, that the shift to the figure of the rights-bearing child should be understood. The shift from sovereignty to bio-politics was also central to the production of sex/sexuality and race as the truth of the modern subject, and the child appeared as a key figure in these new discursive constructions.

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This article shows how NGO films deploy melodramatic modes in constructing the narrative arcs of their campaign films and it explores the potential of this mode for generating solidarity between the spectator and the suffering subject. The author analyses how, through the use of music, colour and gesture, a visceral emotional response is evoked that produces an identification of the spectator with the experiences of the suffering subject. She argues that the criticism of melodrama as a mode or genre that substitutes politics with compassion is misplaced; compassion for distant others may be at least as critical to the formation of solidarity as a politically informed understanding of the structural causes of social injury.

In this article we analyse the "talk" of shopkeepers in a multicultural London neighbourhood. These shopkeepers resent the loss of economic prosperity and sense of community that, in their nostalgic recollection, characterized their neighbourhood in an earlier era. They answer the classic question of politics, "who gets what and why" with "they get everything because we get nothing." We identify this stance as a politics of resentment, one that engages with government and media narratives against asylum-seekers to construct a highly exclusionary notion of British identity. In these shopkeepers' discourse being British means being Anglophone, Christian and white, with these signifiers being configured in different ways, depending on the social location of the speaker. They resent local and national government for what they perceive as the unfair distribution of resources, both to "asylum-seekers" below them and to corporate capital above them.