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This paper probes the function of competition in society through an analysis of the affective landscape that competition creates. Our focus is on education and the connected process of subjectification. We argue that the analysis of competition in human geography needs to advance through abstractions of political economy to the entanglements and relations in which competition is internalised through embodied experience. We conceive competition as a process of organising power relations that work through affective subjectivation and knowledge-production. Those processes are efficiently at work in education, and hence, in young people's everyday lives. It is our suspicion that education is increasingly organised in a way that naturalises competition and marginalises or even closes horizons from other actual and possible modes of social relations and organisational principles. This organising frame links to ideas about learning as an individual endeavour, a linear process that can be pre-planned and measured with representational evidence. To challenge the harmful ethos of personal control and responsibility of young people for their own education and life-paths, we pursue a nonrepresentational analysis of the educational landscape of competition and approach the (learning) human subject as emergent and relationally agentive. Then, also young people's wellbeing needs to be mirrored against the landscape in which it is continually built. As a case for our argument, we discuss two documents linked to Finnish education: an OECD document on education and national competitiveness, and the newly revised curriculum for upper secondary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the view of homeworking as a type of flexible working by employees in organisations aimed at improving work–life balance and job satisfaction, to a type of work that encapsulates significant changes of work towards increased self-employment and casual work, high proportions of which are performed in people's homes. Such changes to work represent a reconfiguration of the spatial separation and relationship between place of work and place of residence. Through homeworking, this paper studies how changing geographies of work and workplaces impact on workers' life satisfaction overall and across various aspects of their lives. Using a large representative longitudinal dataset for the United Kingdom, findings reveal that workers' satisfaction with their job, income and leisure time is significantly shaped by homeworking and that the employment status (employee versus self-employed) and gender are important elements for understanding how homeworking is related to subjective well-being. Homeworking is positively related with leisure time satisfaction of men and women. Job satisfaction advances of homeworking are only observed for employees, but not the self-employed. Men's income satisfaction is decreased when they work as self-employed without employees in their homes. Future policies and research concerning workers' subjective well-being need to pay attention to the continued trend towards individualised work in people's own homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances understandings of relationships between wellbeing and place by exploring one mechanism by which place is mobilised in the pursuit of wellbeing: the cultivation and practice of curiosity. It does so through discussion of projects funded through the Decade of Health and Wellbeing in Liverpool, England. This scheme advances ‘five ways to wellbeing,’ one of which – ‘take notice’ – encourages curiosity in and about places. Three projects – memory boxes for people living with dementia; a community garden in an area experiencing socio-economic deprivation; and an urban photography project involving veterans – form the case studies on which this paper is based. We focus on two related sets of practices and approaches to curiosity: (1) learning to see places differently; (2) focussing on the micro-geographies of place – literally, curiosities – such as found objects. These practices suggest ways in which ordinary places may be a catalyst for curiosity in ways that may benefit both individual and collective forms of wellbeing. This allows us to see and understand place and wellbeing in relational terms. In so doing, this paper contributes to conceptual debates about wellbeing, place and curiosity, and the relationships between these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do people care more about the environment as their income increases? In this paper we use a measure of subjective well-being to directly analyze whether the impact of a number of environmental amenities on self-reported life satisfaction varies with income. We find little empirical support for the marginal effects of environmental amenities being larger for the richest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we connect existing work on rooming houses to literature dealing with the meaningful nature of ‘home’ and its impact on individuals' health and social well-being. We then examine the extent to which rooming houses provide low-income tenants with ‘homes’, drawing from in-depth interviews with rooming-house tenants living in Hamilton, a city of 450000 people in southern Ontario, Canada. Our analysis raises concerns about the capacity of rooming houses to provide affordable and stable accommodation. Poor living conditions and poor relations with rooming-house landlords worked directly against the capacity of rooms to offer private, controllable spaces and a degree of ontological security. Analysis also raised concerns about rooming houses as sites for social relations. Many respondents saw rooming houses as unpredictable and sometimes unhealthy social spaces, forcing them to seek other environments to cultivate and sustain relationships with friends and family. In general, respondents' experiences point to the shortcomings of rooming houses as ‘home’ environments, with implications for the health and social lives of the tenant population. Conceptual and policy implications are discussed in conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The test of a well-functioning housing system is the wellbeing of its occupants. It may therefore seem encouraging that in jurisdictions dominated by mortgage-backed home ownership, owner-occupiers traditionally report better physical and mental health than renters. During the 2000s, however, in an era of financial crisis, wellbeing at the edges of ownership came under strain. Using data from two national panel surveys – the survey of Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia, and the British Household Panel Survey (with its successor, Understanding Society) – we track the wellbeing of households who sustained one or more spells of home ownership in the decade to 2010. We estimate log-log regression models of mental wellbeing for each country, documenting (with an appropriate range of controls) the effects of both tenure transitions (between ownership and renting) and some associated financial transactions (anchored on mortgage debt). We find: a wellbeing premium associated with outright ownership and a debt-effect among mortgagors; a wellbeing deficit among those who drop out of owner-occupation, with partial recovery where exit is enduring; and for leavers especially, a wellbeing cost to equity borrowing. Cross-national differences have an institutional explanation, but similarities relating to the character and regulation of mortgage markets are more striking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]