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Despite legislative reforms over the last 5 years aimed at giving non‐resident parents rights to ‘involvement’ in the lives of their children, the UK has not enacted a presumption of 50‐50 shared care. The UK's emphasis on individual arrangements follows an overall policy trend toward privatization of family disputes. The sparse data that exists suggest that the UK lags behind other Western countries in the number of separated or divorced couples engaging in shared care. This article outlines recent legislative changes, examines the available information on post separation contact and shared care, discusses reasons for the scarcity of data, and concludes with observations on the importance of improved data‐gathering on UK post separation parenting.

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This article explores the present-day zombie economy as the embodiment of the aesthetic of austerity in Anglo-America. It uses the zombie monster metaphor to capture the multi-scalar manifestations of crisis under conditions of enduring austerity in unique ways. The theme of undeath, or living death, connects ‘dead’ economic ideas that are reanimated through the zombie economy to the logic of ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA). Moreover, the zombie monster permits a visceral connection between the harm inflicted on people’s physical and mental health and the underlying set of values perpetuated by austerity. It is the crisis at the scale of the body that manifests as the zombie macroeconomy of austerity. The contribution of this paper is that it articulates the aesthetic of austerity as the troubled boundary between what is alive and what is dead, which in a corporeal form is an absolute binary, but in political-economic terms is currently in flux.

The existence of 'postnatal' or maternal depression (PND) is contested, and subject to various medico-legal and cultural definitions. Mothers remain subject to complex systems of scrutiny and regulation. In medico-legal discourse, postnatal distress is portrayed as a tragic pathology of mysterious (but probably hormonal) origin. A PND diagnosis denotes 'imbalance' in the immediate postnatal period, although women experience increased incidence of depression throughout maternity. Current treatment patterns emphasise medication and tend to elide the perspective of the individual sufferer in favour of a blanket disease model. I emphasise the need for a feminist reassessment of maternal distress and the means available to 'testify' to its forms, and argue for PND to be analysed in biopolitical terms, perhaps as a 'habitus' materialising the low status and pervasive privatisation of Western mothers.