EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY licence. The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the landscape of voluntary action. Some volunteering projects had to be paused, while others were delivered in different ways, but across all four UK nations large numbers of people began volunteering for the first time. This book provides an overview of the constraints and opportunities of mobilising voluntary action across the four UK nations during the pandemic. Sector experts and academics examine the divergent voluntary action policy frameworks adopted, the state and non-state supported volunteer responses, the changes in the profile of volunteers and the plans to sustain their involvement. This book addresses the urgent policy and practice need for evidence-based considerations to support recovery from the pandemic and to prepare for future emergencies.

What is absence? What is presence? How are these two phenomena related? Is absence merely not being present? This book examines these and other questions relating to the role of absence and presence in everyday politics. Absence and presence are used as political tools in global events and everyday life to reinforce ideas about space, society, and belonging. The Politics of Hiding, Invisibility, and Silence contains six empirically-focussed chapters introducing case study locations and contexts from around the world. These studies examine how particular groups' relationships with places and spaces are characterized by experiences that are neither wholly present nor wholly absent. Each author demonstrates the variety of ways in which absence and presence are experienced - through silence, forgetting, concealment, distance, and the virtual - and constituted - through visual, aural, and technological. Such accounts also raise philosophical questions about representation and belonging: what must remain absent, and what is allowed to be present? Who decides, and how? Whose voices are heard? Recognizing the complexity of these questions, The Politics of Hiding, Invisibility, and Silence provides a significant contribution in reconciling theorizations of absence with everyday life. This book was published as a special issue of Space and Polity.

What is absence? What is presence? How are these two phenomena related? Is absence merely not being present? This book examines these and other questions relating to the role of absence and presence in everyday politics. Absence and presence are used as political tools in global events and everyday life to reinforce ideas about space, society, and belonging. The Politics of Hiding, Invisibility, and Silence contains six empirically-focussed chapters introducing case study locations and contexts from around the world. These studies examine how particular groups' relationships with places and spaces are characterized by experiences that are neither wholly present nor wholly absent. Each author demonstrates the variety of ways in which absence and presence are experienced - through silence, forgetting, concealment, distance, and the virtual - and constituted - through visual, aural, and technological. Such accounts also raise philosophical questions about representation and belonging: what must remain absent, and what is allowed to be present? Who decides, and how? Whose voices are heard? Recognizing the complexity of these questions, The Politics of Hiding, Invisibility, and Silence provides a significant contribution in reconciling theorizations of absence with everyday life. This book was published as a special issue of Space and Polity.