Search

This paper examines how white rural identities have been historically produced and transformed over time as a result of colonial migration regimes, the racialisation of labour, intra-distinctions of classed whiteness and projects of social mobility. White identities in settler Australia's ethnically diverse rural towns and cities are commonly depicted as reified, homogenous and fixed-in-place. In rural-focused sociological research, any recognition of whiteness is typically in response to classed stigma around "failed" whiteness, or in discussions of a white-centred "rural cosmopolitanism". Yet critical Indigenous studies and critical rural studies scholars have long shown that the very ubiquitous construction of whiteness acts as a framing device in the imagining of Australian "rurality", one which obscures ongoing legacies of power and structures of rural inequality. In this paper I further this agenda by examining how whiteness has been historically produced in one rural, inland city of south-eastern Australia. First, I discuss the colonial projects of race-making and class mobility which were embedded in the region's rural irrigation schemes of the late nineteenth century. Second, I examine how Australia's post-war migration programs, the racialisation of labour and intra-distinctions of class all redefined the boundaries of whiteness over the twentieth century, and consider how this contributed to shaping rural social geographies. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary sources, I show how white rural identities in settler Australia, rather than being reified and immutable, have been historically created under specific social, political and economic conditions. • Examines the historical production of white rural identities in rural settler Australia. • Shows how the production of race and class have contributed to the making of rural place. • Examines how rural white identities have transformed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the disruption caused by the COVID19 pandemic has receded, tourism capitalism continues to be imbricated in multiple and intersecting crises. This paper argues that the roots of such crises and the manner of their unfolding do not merely 'impact' tourism but have been incubated within and shaped by the structural dynamics of tourism capital accumulation itself. This paper draws on a historical materialist epistemology and critical theorization of capitalism to challenge orthodox framings of tourism crises and their deep-rooted structural drivers. The paper reflects on the nature of crises in relation to the mutations of Spanish tourism capitalism and the continual efforts to resolve the crisis-prone nature of tourism. • Crises are misleadingly construed as exogenous disruptions to tourism systems. • Tourism is imbricated in multiple, intersecting crises or polycrisis. • Tourism polycrisis is interrogated from a critical political economy perspective. • The crisis dynamics of tourism are grounded in the contradictions of capitalism. • The epochal nature of tourism polycrisis cannot be resolved through regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Health inequalities continue to grow despite continuous policy intervention. Work, one domain of health inequalities, is often included as a component of social class rather than as a determinant in its own right. Many social class classifications are derived from occupation types, but there are other components within them that mean they may not be useful as proxies for occupation. This paper develops the exposome, a life-course exposure model developed by Wild (2005), into the worksome, allowing for the explicit consideration of both physical and psychosocial exposures and effects derived from work and working conditions. The interactions between and within temporal and geographical scales are strongly emphasised, and the interwoven nature of both psychosocial and physical exposures is highlighted. Individuals within an occupational type can be both affected by and effect upon occupation level characteristics and health measures. By using the worksome, occupation types are separated from value-laden social classifications. This paper will empirically examine whether occupation better predicts health measures from the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS). Logistic regression models using Bayesian MCMC estimation were run for each classification system, for each health measure. Health measures included, for example, whether the respondent felt their work affected their health, their self-rated health, pain in upper or lower limbs, and headaches. Using the Deviance Information Criterion (DIC), a measure of predictive accuracy penalised for model complexity, the models were assessed against one another. The DIC shows empirically which classification system is most suitable for use in modelling. The 2-digit International Standard Classification of Occupations showed the best predictive accuracy for all measures. Therefore, examining the relationship between health and work should be done with classifications specific to occupation or industry rather than socio-economic class classifications. This justifies the worksome, allowing for a conceptual framework to link many forms of work-health research. Highlights • Work is often included as part of social class as a social determinant of health. • This is not always appropriate, as class has an implied hierarchy. • The worksome, a theoretical framework is developed from the exposome. • With Bayesian methods, we show that occupational classifications are more suitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graphical abstract Highlights • There is change in the discourse of maternity leave in the right-of-centre UK press between 1971–1977 and 1997–2001. • The Times and the Daily Mail overused economic terms when discussing maternity leave from 1997 to 2001. • Improvements in maternity leave rights were unquestioned from 1971 to 1977, but presented as unaffordable from 1997 to 2001. • The Times and Daily Mail showed resistance to improvements in maternity leave rights from 1997 to 2001. Abstract This paper analyses the ways in which maternity leave has been reported, within the broader context of economic inequality, in the periods from 1971 to 1977 and from 1997 to 2001, in the right-of-centre British national press. The aim is to answer the following research questions: Has the representation of maternity leave changed in the right-of-centre UK press with the adoption of new policies, particularly in relation to economic matters? If so, in what ways? Discussions of maternity leave in newspapers are identified by uses of the phrase maternity leave. Selected findings are presented from a corpus compiled for this study of news stories (641,996 words) in the Times and the Daily Mail , in the years in which maternity leave policies were changed in the UK (1973, 1975, 1999) plus two years before and after. Combining qualitative with quantitative methods, the analysis shows that maternity leave becomes monetized in the later period, from 1997 to 2001. The economic term that undergoes the most noticeable shift in frequency of use is afford , which is used five-times more frequently in the 1997–2001 period. A close reading of all those stories containing the term afford reveals considerable opposition in these newspapers to the introduction of new entitlements for women with new-borns, a hostility that was not apparent when improvements to maternity leave provisions were first introduced in the 1970s. This paper addresses the representation of maternity leave in the belief that this system benefit (like any other state-backed benefit in the UK system) helps in mitigating wealth inequality. It is part of a larger study exploring changes in the way in which British newspapers have represented wealth inequality in the UK from 1971 to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a substantial switch in approaches to the study of British voting behaviour in recent decades, with much less attention being paid to individual voters' social positions. This paper argues that such approaches can mis-represent the contexts within which voters are socialised and mobilised and are also technically problematic because social positions and attitudes may well be collinear – in which case ‘true’ relationships are difficult to uncover. Further, regression models that include variables representing social positions almost invariably look at the main effects only and pay no attention to the interactions among those variables. Using a newly-developed multilevel modelling approach to the analysis of multi-way contingency tables, this paper explores the relationships between respondents' age, sex and qualifications and their voting at three recent general elections in England, using a large data set. It indicates that, contrary to recent work, respondents' social positions are linked – through their attitudes – to their partisan choices, and that exploration of the interactions among those variables identifies important differences in how they voted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how dwellers of the fortified Cape Town market called The Neighbourgoods Market understand, navigate, and experience personal safety. The findings support Hentschel's (2015) claim that concepts such as "fortified enclaves" cannot fully explain how navigations of personal safety unfold in urban South Africa. Market dwellers' sense of safety did not solely result from fortification but was constantly assessed on the affective, corporeal, and emotional plane. The particulars of this undertaking illuminate that market access and belonging is granted those that can behave in a way that market dwellers understand as 'enjoyment'. Therefore, ideas about the 'right' way to enjoy the market form a kind of social and behavioral fortification, in addition to the exterior and architectural one. The findings indicate the importance of further study of how seemingly positive characteristics of space – such as enjoyment - operate social hierarchizing and subsequent spatial exclusion in contemporary cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper seeks to further understanding about children’s experiences and knowledges of home and employment reconciliation. The paper, which draws on empirical research with children living in socio-economically diverse areas of North West England, makes three contributions. Firstly, it argues that children must be included in studies of work-balance, as the strategies parents adopt affect the way children are socialised towards appropriate divisions of domestic, caring and labour force responsibilities. Secondly, it contributes to research which considers the temporal and spatial boundaries between home and paid work to add the verbal dimension; demonstrating that children have varying levels of conversational interaction with their parents about employment in the home sphere. Finally, the paper contends that these distinct approaches to the verbal and spatial boundaries of production and reproduction are influenced by class dispositions, localised parenting cultures and constructions of childhood. This results in some children being shielded from the realities of paid work, whilst others are socialised to cope with labour market instability. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: On the basis of a 2008 survey conducted in the Msunduzi municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal province, the paper begins an exploration of the character of popular politics and citizenship in South Africa. Embracing a ‘citizen-centred’ methodology informed by participation literatures, and sensibilities to the ‘work in progress’ character of African cities from urban studies debates, the paper interrogates the mainstream liberal-participatory model of citizenship in South Africa, and the critiques of current South African politics informed by these notions, specifically the ‘racial census’ and ‘dominant party syndrome’ analyses. Taken together these views can be read as characterising South African politics as a game for individual citizens governed by liberal rules, but played by racial and/or partisan groups in exclusionary ways, thus distorting liberal democratic mechanisms of representation and accountability. The paper also examines evidence for an alternative class-based analysis of one aspect of citizenship, namely, protest against poor local governance. The paper looks to unpack this ‘liberal model versus racialised communitarian practice’ imaginary by, on the one hand, demonstrating the ways in which citizenship is not racialised, or is asymmetrically racialised. Indeed, other than party allegiances and trust in key offices, very little by way of what citizens do, believe or think of themselves follows discrete racial lines. Similar points hold for partisanship too. On the other hand, the paper does not redeem the liberal-democratic model as there is also evidence of trust in government when it is not deserved based on performance, but more importantly, evidence that citizens embrace ‘informal’ means to secure their rights. A good example of this is protestors who are also more likely to vote than non-protestors. Taken together, these findings affirm both the way in which the racial and partisan legacy of the past is being undone by new institutions and practices, and suggest the complex intersection of these with networks of personal relations which characterise the local politics of most African cities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A mobile phone game named “Dragon Legend” is developed based on J2ME technology in this paper. Through designing the plot and requirement of game, the function process is introduced. Then the paper gives a detail introduction to design and implementation of the main class, main program, background class and key control based on J2ME. At last, the key technology and the implementation of the game is described. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Establish the validity and reliability of a measure of rider-to-rider discriminatory attitude. • Examine associations between such attitude and four aspects of ridesharing behavior. • Survey Uber and Lyft users (N = 2041) in the United States in 2016 and 2018. • Such attitudes reduce satisfaction with the ridesharing service. • Such attitudes may persistently discourage sharing. Using online survey data from N = 2041 Uber and Lyft users in the United States collected in 2016 and 2018, this paper establishes the validity, reliability, and invariance of a measure of rider-to-rider race and social class discrimination. This measure is then incorporated into three structural models that investigate associations between rider-to-rider discriminatory attitudes and four aspects of ridesharing behavior. We find no significant relationship between rider-to-rider discriminatory attitudes and whether a TNC user has ever used a ridesharing service (such as uberPOOL or Lyft Line). However, among those who have used ridesharing services before, rider-to-rider discriminatory attitudes are strongly negatively predictive of an individual's level of satisfaction with the sharing option, and marginally negatively predictive of an individual's percentage of shared TNC trips. Furthermore, among those who have not yet used ridesharing services, rider-to-rider discriminatory attitudes are strongly negatively predictive of willingness to consider using uberPOOL or Lyft Line in the future. Together, these findings suggest that rider-to-rider discriminatory attitudes may discourage sustained and frequent use of ridesharing services among TNC users. Further research is required to identify strategies for addressing discriminatory attitudes in the ridesharing context and overcoming reluctance to sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Neighbourhood interventions focused on inclusion can still fail to address oppression for residents. • Language around race, class, and neighbourhood change in equity-focused interventions can be ambiguous. • Institutional support is needed to make neighbourhood interventions consistently inclusive. Abstract This paper explores how one neighbourhood revitalization initiative addresses – or fails to address – intersecting systems of oppression as it seeks to facilitate resident-led change. Unlike many similar initiatives, the Neighbourhood Action Strategy in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada has an explicit focus on grassroots community development and resident leadership, and actors within the strategy have paid significant attention to issues of inclusion. We draw on in-depth interviews with City staff, local service providers, and neighbourhood residents, as well as on observation of neighbourhood meetings and media analysis, to explore how diversity, inclusion, and equity are understood and managed by different actors within the Strategy. We demonstrate that despite a stated mandate of inclusion, the initiative often struggles to engage significant participation from working-class and racialized people. We argue that this is in part due to complex interpersonal and institutional dynamics informed by race and class, which create significant tensions that ultimately limit the initiative's ability to create meaningful transformation. We conclude with some lessons learned about how to disrupt the racist, classist, and other oppressive discourses that can operate even within the most progressive initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The “new conventional wisdom” of a waning impact of social divisions on political choices has been subject to debate in recent years. This paper addresses the debate by assessing the relevance of parties'' political positions, using a novel approach to analysing it comparatively, based on a combination of data from the Eurobarometer with data of the Comparative Manifestos Project. The findings of this paper lend support to the claim that the decline in the relation between social divisions and voting behaviour, so far as it can be observed at all, is attributable to parties'' changing political positions. Once these changes are taken into account, the diagnosis of a persistent impact of social divisions prevails. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper attempts to offer an alternative framework for assessing education delivery in South Africa. Its purpose is to develop an analytic approach for understanding education delivery in South Africa in the last 11 years and to use this framework to pose a set of strategic questions about how policy might be framed to deal with delivery. The paper begins with a quick review of the country''s achievements and challenges in education and shows that a failure to produce a high quality education system remains the country''s primary challenge. The broad approach that is taken is to suggest that dominant approaches for understanding this lack of performance underplay the specificity of the country''s context and specifically so its apartheid legacy. This legacy, it is argued, continues to be determinative in shaping, and accounting for the character of current social behaviour in the country, including the performance of children in schools. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Following the cultural turn within the social sciences, recent debates on how to conceptualise ‘the rural’ have focused on ‘rurality’ as a phenomenon produced by processes of social construction. This paper presents an empirical account of the outcome of these social construction processes through an analysis of how teenagers in a remote rural area in Norway reflect on the concept of ‘rurality’. What do they perceive as key characteristics of rurality? Contrary to most previous studies in the field, the data presented in this paper are collected from a large sample and through quantitative methods. This enables a more thorough description of the variety of images of the countryside, as well as an assessment of the degree to which they are representative in statistical terms. Importantly, the research design also allows for an analysis of how these images are related to structural variables, such as social class position, gender and migration trajectory. The results indicate that the majority of rural youth keep a view of the countryside that is in accordance with the ‘rural idyll’/‘rural dull’ concepts—these two images of the rural being complementary rather than contradictory. However, there is a huge diversity in the rural youth''s images of the rural, the predominant view being far from hegemonic. To some extent these differences follow structural lines, e.g., those on the top and the bottom of the social ladder have more positive views of the rural than others. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper describes and critiques the income inequality approach to health inequalities. It then presents an alternative class-based model through a focus on the causes and not only the consequences of income inequalities. In this model, the relationship between income inequality and health appears as a special case within a broader causal chain. It is argued that global and national socio-political-economic trends have increased the power of business classes and lowered that of working classes. The neo-liberal policies accompanying these trends led to increased income inequality but also poverty and unequal access to many other health-relevant resources. But international pressures towards neo-liberal doctrines and policies are differentially resisted by various nations because of historically embedded variation in class and institutional structures. Data presented indicates that neo-liberalism is associated with greater poverty and income inequalities, and greater health inequalities within nations. Furthermore, countries with Social Democratic forms of welfare regimes (i.e., those that are less neo-liberal) have better health than do those that are more neo-liberal. The paper concludes with discussion of what further steps are needed to ‘go beyond’ the income inequality hypothesis towards consideration of a broader set of the social determinants of health. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The paper explores the experiences of Indian middle-class and upper-middle-class women managing working motherhood in the context of pandemic-induced remote work. The increased paid and unpaid work during the COVID-19 crisis amplified the tensions between becoming a 'good mother' and an 'ideal worker'. The collapsed boundaries between work and home, resulting from flexible work that gained momentum in the pandemic, threatened the carefully negotiated boundaries by women. Using an interpretive qualitative approach, the present study investigates how women negotiated the meaning of working motherhood in the face of frequent boundary violations. The findings show how classed and neoliberal maternal subjectivities of Indian working women manifested during the crisis. When forced to integrate maternal with professional, working mothers claimed identities that aligned with middle-class values that were appropriately modern and global, at the same time rooted in patriarchy. Concurrently, the findings reveal the classed and gendered nature of remote work, which manifests as an extension of gendered organization and neoliberal ideology within the homes of working mothers, fortifying their role as caregivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experiences of former low-income children that, in the late 1960 s and early 1970 s, were integrated into Saint George's College, an elite private school in Santiago, Chile. Using a primarily qualitative, retrospective case study design, we focus on the experiences and perceptions of former students to explore lessons from this evocative case study of socio-economic integration. Findings point to key situational differences in low-income students' integration experiences and sense of belonging. Heterogenous experiences ranged from negative, such as bullying, discrimination, and experiences that deepened class-based identities, to experiences of support, inclusion, and friendship. Factors affecting the level and nature of integration experiences are considered in relation to contact theory and refinements to the theory are proposed to account for developmental differences in integration experiences. • Recollections of class-based social integration in an elite Chilean school are heterogenous. • Most former low-income students regarded their experiences as net positive. • Age of enrollment appears to mediate the degree of integration and impact long-term outcomes. • Care of peers, priests, parents, and teachers and participation in sports also fosters integration. • Most former low-income students reported transformed aspirations as explaining their higher status attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the work of Bourdieu to theorise smoking and cessation through a class lens, showing that the struggle for distinction created the social gradient in smoking, with smoking stigma operating as a proxy for class stigma. This led to increased policy focus on the health of bystanders and children and later also to concerns about electronic cigarettes. Bourdieu's concept of habitus is deployed to argue that the e-cigarette helps middle-class smokers resolve smoking as a symptom of cleft habitus associated with social mobility or particular subcultures. E-cigarette use is also compatible with family responsibility and sociable hedonism; aspects of working-class habitus which map to the 'practical family quitter' and the 'recreational user' respectively. The effectiveness of class stigma in changing health behaviours is contested, as is the usefulness of youth as a category of analysis and hence the relevance of concerns about young people's e-cigarette use outside a class framework of smoking and cessation. With regard to health inequalities, whilst middle-class smokers have in class disgust a stronger incentive to quit than working-class smokers, there is potential for tobacco control to tap into a working-class ethos of family care and responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research paper, I present findings related to ideology shifts students experienced within a social issues in education course at a conservative Christian research university. I find that ideological transformation occurred through the revelation of self and/or social tensions, the development of cognitive and experiential cross-cultural exchanges, and the recognition/reconsideration of when, where, and why one is and is not privileged. Good faith personal reflections on identity, engagements with course experiences, and willingness to work through ideological dissonance helped ideological self-transformation, clarification of the struggle against alienation, and cultivation of transformational agency. Teacher educators can support transformations by using tools such as social inquiry, and critical dialogue, and helping students apply critical analytical frames to education and society. • The primary and most sacred aspect of pre-service teacher identity tends to frame the ways they approach learning about cultures, identities, and experiences. • Providing course experiences that helps teachers align their values and identities is vital to ideological and conceptual transformation. • Students with less privileged social identities or those with more tangible experiences within marginalized groups do more to transform observed social issues in education than peers. • Social inquiry, critical dialogue, and critical frames of analysis led to increased ideological transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the determinants of price discrimination in the rice market in one neighborhood of Lagos, Nigeria. There has been little empirical study of how ethnicity and class shape economic outcomes in informal market interactions. We conduct an audit experiment—one of the first audit experiments in Africa—seeking to address this gap. We experimentally manipulate class, with confederates presenting as different classes; this may be the first audit study to take this approach. This is also one of the first in-person audits to have multiple transactions for each buyer and seller, thus allowing for the use of buyer and seller fixed effects. We find little evidence that, all else equal, sharing an ethnicity on its own inuences market treatment. Class, however, does have substantial effects, at least for non-coethnics. High-class non-coethnics receive higher prices per unit than low-class non-coethnics. Our findings suggest that the boundaries of group identity appear to be at least partially defined by class in the informal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The space in the process of urbanization is undergoing a great transition from physical space to social space. The relations between society and space become more important and complicated than ever. As a critical social theory, production of space means that urbanization has been reshaped by social factors or forces like capital, power and class, so that the urban space finally becomes their production and process. Based on socio-spatial dialectic, the main methodology of spatial production, urban space (re)shapes social relations and processes. The different spatial scales have and continuously produce the different social relations. In the researches about production of space, little work has been done on the index system to assess the extent of production of space and to analyze middle-scale region. This article designs a set of simple index system to reflect the spatial influences of capital, power as well as class, and chooses Jiangsu Province as a typical case because of its rapid and differential urbanization to indicate the process of spatial production from 2000 to 2015. In this index system, capital is represented by fixed-asset investment, real estate investment and foreign direct investment; power is represented by the index of the constructed urban land area; the index reflecting class is the urban-rural income ratio. Based on the analysis of these changing indexes, this paper finds that urbanization in Jiangsu is hybrid process: the forces from capital and power greatly contribute to rapid urbanization and high urbanization level, however, the gaps among the three sub-regions in the province and rural-urban income inequality have not decreased accordingly. Conversely, these gaps enlarge in some periods. This kind of urbanization pattern is characterized by large-scale spatial expansion, and is driven by capital and power, but there are many latent social risks and spatial inequality. In the process of spatial production, space and society interact, entangle and (re)shape the pattern of urbanization in the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent discussions from the journal of tourism management call for more critical deconstructions of the political and economic structures that shape policy and planning. The present paper takes up this call, using a post-structualist framework to examine Scotland's food tourism landscape. Utilising Foucauldian discourse analysis to deconstruct 2,312 media sources collected through a Factiva database search, we illustrate how policy discourses privilege middle class cultural symbols through official food tourism promotion, marginalising particular foods positioned as working class. We find that this is particularly evident through the example of the deep fried mars bar; where, despite touristic desires, classed media discourses constructed it as global, bad and disgusting, and therefore an embarrassment to official tourism bodies. We conclude by discussing the broader importance of attending to the marginalising and silencing effects tourism policy exerts when the power values and interests involved in its formation are not critically appraised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how, in three villages of Uttar Pradesh, poor Dalits and lower castes sustain their assertion against local power structure by adopting everyday politics. This proves that defiance under uncompromising circumstances need not be quiet, disguised and anonymous; rather, it can be noisy, public and open. The analysis from the field indicates that disadvantaged castes have not been able to bring about a broad structural transformation, as most opportunities are controlled by the local power structure. Despite this, a section of poor labourers has benefited from everyday protests. This transformation is a result of the enhanced politicisation of poor households under the political banner of the Bahujan Samaj Party, which has a strong presence in up villages. This has not only empowered the disadvantaged castes, to confront the powerful dominant castes, but has made them politically and socially aware of their rights, helping them to reconfigure their ties with the powerful, dominant castes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of universal health coverage (UHC) as a global policy endorsed in the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) appears to signal new directions in global health as it introduces a progressive language of inclusion, solidarity and social justice and advocates the right of 'everyone' to access the healthcare they need 'without financial hardship'. Since 2018 the Kenyan government has attempted to widen access to healthcare by experimenting with free health care services and expanding health insurance coverage. Such progressive moves are, however, layered onto histories of healthcare, citizenship and state responsibility that in Kenya have been dominated by forms of exclusion, differentiation, a politics of patronage, and class inequality, all of which work against universal access. In this paper, we follow recent attempts to increase access to healthcare, paying particular attention to how a language of rights and inclusion circulated among "ordinary citizens" as well as among the health workers and government officials tasked with implementing reforms. Despite being clothed in a language of universalism, solidarity and inclusion, Kenya's UHC reforms feed into an already fragmented and struggling healthcare system, reinforcing differentiated, limited and uneven access to healthcare services and reproducing inequity and exclusions. In this context, reforms for universal health coverage that promise a form of substantial citizenship are in tension with Kenyans' experiences of accessing healthcare. We explore how, amid vocal concerns about healthcare costs and state neglect, the promises and expectations surrounding universal health coverage reforms shaped the claims people made to accessing care. While our informants were cynical about these promises, they were also hopeful. The language of universality and inclusion drew people's attention to entrenched forms of inequality and difference, the limits of solidarity and the gaps between promises and realities, but it also generated expectations and a sense of new possibilities. • UHC is a progressive policy engendering aspirations for inclusive or substantive citizenship • However in Kenya UHC enters a fragmented and stratified health system • In this context, health care reforms produce an experience of differentiated citizenship • UHC reforms put a language of universality and inclusion into circulation • They also draw attention to continued inequality and exclusion along socio-economic lines [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to propose an augmented framework for verifying and validating the static aspect of safety critical systems by analysing the UML class diagrams and the relationship between them. Since UML is a semi formal language which is provn to ambiguities due to its various graphical notations, hence Formal analysis of UML class diagram is required. Moreover, class diagram play an important role in system designing phase especially in safety critical systems. Any ambiguity or inconsistency in design can result in potential failure. Formal methods are the mathematical tools and methodology which are sandwiched at various stages of software development process to ensure the correctness, consistency and completeness of software artifacts such as requirement specifications, design etc. In this article, Z notation is used for the purpose of analysis formally and later on verified by the Z/EVES tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential for regulatory measures to address escalating rates of obesity is widely acknowledged in public health circles. Many advocates support regulations for their potential to reduce health inequalities, in light of the well-documented social gradient in obesity. This paper examines how different social groups understand the role of regulations and other public health interventions in addressing obesity. Drawing upon focus group data from a metropolitan city in southern Australia, we argue that implementing obesity regulations without attention to the ways in which disadvantaged communities problematise obesity may lead to further stigmatisation of this key target population. Tuana's work on the politics of ignorance, and broader literature on classed asymmetries of power, provides a theoretical framework to demonstrate how middle class understandings of obesity align with dominant ‘obesity epidemic’ discourses. These position obese people as lacking knowledge; underpinning support for food labelling and mandatory nutrition education for welfare recipients as well as food taxes. In contrast, disadvantaged groups emphasised the potential for a different set of interventions to improve material circumstances that constrain their ability to act upon existing health promotion messages, while also describing priorities of everyday living that are not oriented to improving health status. Findings demonstrate how ignorance is produced as an explanation for obesity, widely replicated in political settings and mainstream public health agendas. This politics of ignorance and its logical reparation serve to reproduce power relations in which particular groups are constructed as lacking capacity to act on knowledge, whilst maintaining others in privileged positions of knowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions assumptions about the relationship between class formation, sustainability and patterns of consumption. The empirical elements of the research are based upon qualitative and quantitative time-series research into food self-provisioning and ‘quiet sustainability’ in post socialist Central and Eastern Europe (Poland and the Czech Republic). It considers sustainable practices that are often considered to be taking place ‘in the wrong place and the wrong time’, i.e. they appear anomalous in terms of western expectations of patterns of development. We offer evidence of comparatively very high levels of food self-provisioning and sharing of the resulting produce amongst middle class Poles and Czechs. This evidence questions widely held assumptions about class, development and consumption. This evidence may be of significance for consideration of a much wider set of household practices/behaviours that are associated with the middle classes. Our explorations of the reasons for food self-provisioning throw new light on discussions of ethical consumption: ethics is lightly worn, even unacknowledged, amongst practitioners, but the commitments are widespread and robust. Our empirical findings, and the theoretical arguments we seek to test on the basis of them, are of particular significance in the context of rapid processes of rural and urban change in emerging economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the complex impact of climate change on gender relations and associated vulnerability on the Eastern Gangetic Plains of Nepal and India. Field research has identified that gendered vulnerability to climate change is intricately connected to local and macro level political economic processes. Rather than being a single driver of change, climate is one among several stresses on agriculture, alongside a broader set of non-climatic processes. While these pressures are linked to large scale political–economic processes, the response on the ground is mediated by the local level relations of class and caste, creating stratified patterns of vulnerability. The primary form of gendered vulnerability in the context of agrarian stress emerges from male out-migration, which has affected the distribution of labour and resources. While migration occurs amongst all socio-economic groups, women from marginal farmer and tenant households are most vulnerable. While the causes of migration are only indirectly associated with climate change, migration itself is rendering women who are left behind from marginal households, more vulnerable to ecological shocks such as droughts due to the sporadic flow of income and their reduced capacity for investment in off-farm activities. It is clear that policies and initiatives to address climate change in stratified social formations such as the Eastern Gangetic Plains, will be ineffective without addressing the deeper structural intersections between class, caste and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through extending feminist insights in the studies of nationalism and boundary work theory this paper asks how the state responds when women cross ethno-national boundaries and act as the enemy's human shield and classifies and discipline citizens who cross ethno-national boundaries according to its internal hierarchy of belonging. By analyzing the state's practices of inclusion and exclusion the aim is to contribute to the understanding of the specific kinds of “state-work” and how the state acts to encourage or codify certain categories of inclusion and exclusions, with regards to gender, ethnicity and class. I apply the case of three Jewish Israeli women, Neta Golan, Angelica Yusupov and Tali Fahima who during the second intifada (2000–2005) used their privileged Jewish body as a human shield to protect Palestinian militant men against the Israeli military. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using a sociology of diagnosis approach, this paper discusses the implication of high cholesterol being promoted as a disease rather than a risk factor for cardiovascular diseases. Drawing on data collected during the spring/summer of 2012 from 49 in-depth interviews with women over the age of forty concerned with high cholesterol in Ontario, Canada, I explore participants' understanding of the issue of high cholesterol as a disease. More specifically, I examine where blame and responsibility for high cholesterol are placed and if they vary by women's class background. My findings reveal that all the participants believed in and internalized the diagnosis of high cholesterol. However, the disease is blamed on ‘lifestyle choices’, and individual responsibilities, while women's awareness of the social determinants of health varies by class. I argue the sense of urgency surrounding high cholesterol is worrisome and the sole focus on lifestyle choice as both the cause and solution to high cholesterol is problematic for three reasons: it assumes that individual responsibility is adequate; it minimizes the socioeconomic constraints women face on a daily basis; and it reinforces the idea that individuals can be blamed for their health problems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Grounded in intersubjective participatory action research, the people and dancefloors project has sought to produce a space for the co-creation of knowledge about dancefloors and drug taking, building a platform for developing insights from the positionality of current drug users. Through film, it provides hermeneutic insight while legitimising their voices. In this paper, we share some reflections as researchers/users/activists arising from our involvement in the project. To begin with, we reflect on the motivations for the project, and the epistemic suppositions that animated it. This is followed by conversational style interviews where we re-evaluate our position in light of the project, with a particular focus on the tensions that drug use introduces between professional, personal and political domains in our lives. These reflections are useful to people who use drugs and hold privilege by nature of their social and cultural position. While questioning the silencing of personal experiences in relation to drug use, we also react to some of the traditional tendencies of academia, including institutionalised individualism, which isolates researchers and discourages them from finding political collectivity, and the subjectivist/objectivist dichotomy, which supports a tendency to objectify research participants while removing the self from the equation. Despite the challenges that arise from disentangling our multiple experiences and identities, our intersubjective dialogue inspires deeper learning about ourselves and each other, encouraging us towards a more openly political stance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Informed by intersectionality theory, a tradition that theorizes intersecting power relations of racism, patriarchy, classism and heterosexism, this paper investigates the degree to which race, gender, class and sexuality manifest distinct and interconnected associations with self-reported hypertension in nationally-representative survey data from Canada. Binary logistic regression is used to model the main effects of, and interactions between, race, gender, education, household income and sexual orientation on hypertension, controlling for age, using data from the 2003 Canadian Community Health Survey (n = 90,310). From a main effects (‘additive’) perspective, Black respondents, respondents with less than high school and poorer respondents were significantly more likely than White respondents, university-educated Canadians and wealthier Canadians, respectively, to report hypertension. However, the interactive models indicate that the additive models were poor predictors of hypertension for wealthy Black men, wealthy South Asian women, women with less than a high school diploma and wealthy bisexual respondents, who were more likely than expected to report hypertension, and for poor Black men, poor South Asian women, poor South Asian men and women with a university degree, who were less likely than expected to report hypertension. It appears that, with regard to blood pressure at least, Canadians experience the health effects of education differently by their genders and the health effects of income differently by their identities defined at the intersection of race and gender. This study provides empirical support for the intersectional approach to cardiovascular health inequalities by demonstrating that race, gender, class and sexuality cannot be disentangled from one another as predictors of hypertension. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Structural theories of stratification predict that groups with low positions in social hierarchies experience high rates of mental health problems. Extensions of this approach such as a triple jeopardy hypotheses claim that groups that are subordinate in multiple stratification systems such as gender, race and class are at especially high risk. Multiple minority statuses affect mental health in paradoxical ways, however, that refute triple jeopardy approaches. This paper presents a theoretical perspective based in cultural as well as structural theories that offers an alternative to triple jeopardy. I predict that certain relational schemas are jointly shaped by gender, race, and class and help explain their anomalous effects on mental health. These schemas of self-salience refer to beliefs about the relative importance of the self and others in social relations; they affect mental health by forming subjective alternative hierarchies to larger societal stratification systems. I use secondary analyses of two U.S. data sets to investigate this perspective. Results of regression analysis show that self-salience helps explain the paradoxical patterns of mental health by gender, race, and social class. The findings underscore the importance of using an intersectional approach and integrating cultural and structural factors to understand how stratification shapes mental health. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Software size is an important attribute in software project planning. Functional Size is defined as a size of software derived by quantifying the Functional User Requirements. Function Point Analysis (FPA) is a standard Functional Size Measurement method. This paper presents a measuring process from Use Case Diagram, Sequence Diagram, and Class Diagram based on FPA. Size metrics for Class Diagram are mainly discussed based classes and relationships. And also an example is given to illustrate this metrics procedure. Finally, a method for only Class Diagram is proposed according to class complexity [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The growth of intensive export-oriented Pangasius catfish production in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta is unparalleled in terms of rapidity and scale by any other agricultural sector, with production climbing from a low base to more than 1million tons in a single decade. This paper examines the effects of this remarkable change on the rural class structure in locations where catfish farming has boomed, and analyses the role of local state-society relations in mediating outcomes resulting from the integration of local actors into the global value chain. We conclude that private economic activity is deeply embedded in informal relations with the state bureaucracy in Vietnam, with the result that the expansion of catfish aquaculture has generally acted to reproduce and entrench existing class relations rather leading to a radical reconfiguration of the rural class structure. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This article explores the celebrated film The Hunters (Swedish title: Jägarna) within the context of the discourse of Internal Orientalism. By juxtaposing a contemporary Swedish film with historical accounts and contemporary news media, I demonstrate how the film reworks and (re)produces representations of the rural North (Norrland), constructing stereotypes enmeshed with familiar and global genre-specific stereotypes of a traditional and intransigent population positioned in rural areas and a modern and progressive population in urban areas. This paper shows how the representation in popular culture becomes enmeshed with the representation in news media and politics and how this helps obscure geography, gender, ethnicity and class by way of positioning representations of the middle class in urban spaces and white male working class in rural spaces, and by way of constructing class as a choice of lifestyle or culture. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The interrelationship between gender and class in rural spaces has received little attention. While rural scholars have focused on the implications for class from processes of gentrification and agricultural and rural restructuring, these analyses have remained largely ungendered. Similarly, feminist rural studies have rarely explored subjectivity as gendered and classed. This paper contributes to rural theories of class and gender by drawing on the work of contemporary feminist class theorists to explore class as gendered and inscribed through personal memory, community narrative and through everyday values and interactions associated with work, leisure and family. To explore intersections of gender, class and rurality, the article draws on data from interviews from two separate Australian studies of farming families. Narratives highlighted the ambiguity of class, the gendered and classed nature of voluntary organisations in rural spaces, and moral values and signifiers associated with what it is to be a ‘good’ farmer and a ‘good’ community member. The data indicate how values of moral worth are gendered and classed and inscribed on farming women and men. This qualitative examination of gender and class in rural spaces draws attention to class as being more than a ranking on an occupational scale, property ownership or degrees of engagement in consumption. Rather, it reveals class as emotionally inscribed in ways that are gendered, economic and moral, and represented through symbolic signifiers and cultural narratives. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the United Kingdom (UK), daily circulation figures for tabloid newspapers are as much as ten times higher than broadsheet sources. Nonetheless, studies of media representations of climate change in the UK to date have focused on broadsheet newspapers. Moreover, readership patterns correlate with socio-economic status; the majority of readers of tabloids are in ‘working class’ demographics. With a growing need to engage wider constituencies in awareness and potential behavioral change, it is important to examine how these influential sources represent climate change for a heretofore understudied segment of citizenry. This paper links political geographies with cultural issues of identity and discourse, through claims and frames on climate change in four daily ‘working class’ tabloid newspapers in UK--The Sun (and News of the World), Daily Mail (and Mail on Sunday), the Daily Express (and Sunday Express), and the Mirror (and Sunday Mirror). Through triangulated Critical Discourse Analysis, investigations of framing and semi-structured interviews, this project examines representations of climate change in these newspapers from 2000 through 2006. Data show that news articles on climate change were predominantly framed through weather events, charismatic megafauna and the movements of political actors and rhetoric, while few stories focused on climate justice and risk. In addition, headlines with tones of fear, misery and doom were most prevalent. These analyses then enable discussions of how these representations may influence ongoing climate science and governance interactions as well as political geographies, and (re)shape the contemporary cultural politics of climate change discourse. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Since the 1970s, Tamworth has become well known as Australia''s ‘country music capital’. Its annual Country and Western Music Festival has become the leading event of its type in Australia, attracting over 60,000 visitors every year. The festival, and country music more generally, have become central to the town''s identity and tourism marketing strategies. This article discusses the social constructions that have surrounded Tamworth''s transition to ‘country music capital’—of the ‘rural’, and of ‘country’—within the context of debates about the politics of place marketing. Textual analysis of promotional material and built landscapes reveals representations of rurality (or ‘senses of the rural’). In their most commercial form, representations of rurality converge on a dominant notion of ‘country’, quite different from the ‘countryside’ and ‘rural idyll’ in England. This dominant, or normative ‘country’ forms the basis of imagery for the festival, the Town''s marketing strategy, and associated advertising campaigns by major sponsors. It is predominantly masculine, white, working class and nationalist. But links between musical style and discourses of place are complex. Colonial British histories, Celtic musical traditions and North American popular culture all inform ‘country’ in Tamworth, dissipating nationalist interpretations. Normative constructions also contrast with other, heterogeneous ruralities in Australia, that include the lived experiences of rural Australians, and on stage—in country music—where multiple ‘ruralised’ identities are performed. Even those who stand to benefit from place promotion have been uncertain about country music and ‘the country’, because of associated discourses of Tamworth as ‘hick’ and ‘redneck’. In the final section of the paper, reactions of residents to constructions of Tamworth as country music capital are discussed, via the results of a simple resident survey. In contrast to previous studies of the disempowering politics of place marketing, Tamworth residents were on the whole supportive of the new associations and images for the town, despite ‘hick’ connotations, as it has become a centre for ‘country’, and for country music. Reasons for this are explored, and resistances discussed. The result is a complex and entangled politics of national identity, gender, race and class, where meanings for place are variously interpreted and negotiated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines an increasingly international, work-centred process of welfare restructuring through its effects on ideas and practices of social reproduction. The effects of intensified welfare restructuring on social reproduction are argued to be a neglected aspect of globalisation debates, connected to a posited ‘labour metaphysic’ within mainstream leftist politics. Analysis of relations between welfare restructuring and neoliberal globalisation suggests a crisis of support for practices of social reproduction, exemplified in US welfare-to-work programmes. The need for leftist politics to reconstruct ‘labour imaginaries’ in relation to issues of social reproduction is argued through an examination of welfare reform programmes in Texas. Welfare-to-workers are shown to live their class through painful and shameful ‘classifying practices’, which deny the class basis of their poverty, negate the value of their motherhood, and aim to construct individualised, psychologised and evangelised subjectivities for labour market participation. The struggle of programme participants for material and psychological survival is argued to be a class struggle, which presents a major challenge to the thinking and practice of leftist politics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper explores how entrepreneurial family background impacts upon the development of social and human capital resources and demonstrates how these affect the profitability and growth of new enterprise. Through a qualitative approach, we found that those entrepreneurs from higher socio-economic groupings had high endowments of human capital. Significantly, their businesses were characterised by greater profitability and growth potential. Those entrepreneurs also had social networks characterised by high endowments of human capital. Consequently entrepreneurs from higher socio-economic class had access to highly effective business support, and these networks provided a ‘platform’ from which opportunities could be both recognised and realised. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The resurgence of social epidemiology has yet to induce corresponding research into basic measurement issues. This paper aims to motivate investigators to refocus attention on the measurement of socioeconomic status (SES). With a primarily American focus, we document striking paucity of basic research in SES, review the history of SES measurement, highlight the central limitations of current measurement approaches, sketch a new theoretical perspective, present new pilot results, and outline areas for future research. We argue (1) that lack of conceptual clarity and the bypassing of standard psychometric techniques have retarded SES measurement. And (2) social epidemiologists should revisit the measurement of SES and consider whether a richer, psychometrically induced, approach would be more useful. Our pilot study suggests a great deal of uniformity between existing SES measures and that a new approach may be worthy of pursuit. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Drawing on a study of 106 personal homepages, this paper presents a theoretical model of how citizens’ potentials as Web publishers are being compromised by the leadership of institutional discourses. Adapting model of synthetic personalization, I propose an analogous process of synthetic institutionalization, in which personal homepage publishers affect institutional poses. Institutional poses, with their commercial and bureaucratic discourses, enable homepage publishers to construct seemingly viable public positions and to maintain seemingly viable public relations. In an environment that hosts both citizen and institutional classes, synthetic institutionalization is theorized to undermine the potential for citizens’ distinctive Web agency. However, such a problematic environment, according to Fairclough, can also stimulate creatively restructured discourses, discourses which have indeed been emerging from among the Web’s citizenry. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Social prescribing, characterised by a link worker connecting patients with local groups and services, is currently being widely implemented in the UK. Taking clients' experiences of a social prescribing intervention in the North of England between November 2019 and July 2020 as its focus, this paper employs ethnographic methods to explore the complex social contexts in which social prescribing is delivered. Building on Bourdieusian approaches to class, we concentrate on four case studies to offer a theoretically-grounded analysis which attends to the relationship between everyday contexts and the classed processes by which health capital may be accrued. By following clients' experiences and trajectories through shifting positions across time - often entailing moments of tension and disjuncture - we explore how processes of classed inequality relate to engagement in the social prescribing intervention. Our results show how structural contexts, and relatedly the possession of capital, shape clients' priorities to invest in the cultural health capital offered by the intervention. Importantly, while inequalities shaped participants' capacity to engage with the intervention, all participants recognised the value of the health capital on offer. We conclude by arguing that inequalities cannot be tackled through focusing on the individual in the delivery of personalised care and therefore offer a counter narrative to socio-political assumptions that social prescribing reduces health inequalities. Crucially, we argue that such assumptions wrongly presuppose that people are homogenously disposed to engaging in their future health. • An ethnographic exploration of experiences of social prescribing. • A Bourdieusian analysis shows how class shapes engagement with a local intervention. • Personal histories and present contexts shape responses to social prescribing. • Claims about the ability of social prescribing to reduce inequality are misplaced. • Inherent individualism in the personalised care agenda has moralising consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, the Pahela Baishakh (Bengali New Year) celebrations in Bangladesh were marred by incidents of mass sexual assaults. This incident generated widespread public discussion, and many survivors took to the digital realm to disclose their own experiences. Break the Silence Bangladesh was a Facebook page established to provide a space for shared disclosure, support and consciousness-raising. In this paper, we analyse 61 submissions made to the page, which provide vital insights into experiences of sexual violence in Bangladesh outside of the dominant frame of domestic and intimate partner violence. Findings point to the diverse range of contexts in which sexual violence occurs, the roles of class and space in shaping this violence, and the ongoing impact of cultures of shame and stigma in preventing disclosure and bystander intervention. This work highlights the need to expand the scope of contemporary research and policy responses to sexual violence in Bangladesh. • Examines "everyday" experiences of sexual violence in Bangladesh, using innovative online methods. • Participants experienced sexual violence across diverse spatial and relationship contexts. • Findings highlight the centrality of class in shaping experiences and contexts of sexual violence. • Responses of bystanders and disclosure recipients was typically poor, and suggests a need for widespread educational efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Food companies use purity as a rhetorical device to sell their products. • Purity is played up by food companies for the ultimate goal of profit. • They give physical, mental, spiritual and environmental connotations to purity. • A sociohistorical approach to social semiotics ensures archival-grounded analyses. • It uncovers sociocultural meanings, historical rules and institutional powers. This paper explores the marketisation of 'pure' from the late nineteenth century to modern-day using examples of food packaging and advertising. Adopting a sociohistorical approach to the theoretical perspective of social semiotics, it draws attention to the arbitrariness of the term and demonstrates how, over time, advertisers have constructed a particular discourse that equates the purity of a food product with a physical, mental or spiritual type of purity. In doing so, they invest food with a moral authority and legitimacy that leads consumers to understand commodities through marketing discourses and buy into the lifestyle and cultural value that the product promises, although it may not be true. In emphasising how purity has historically been used as a rhetorical device to sell products, the study hopes to encourage consumers to challenge food advertising and be aware of the myths that it can create in order to become empowered and make informed choices about supposedly healthy products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the consequences of political, economic and social change in mid-twentieth century China for patterns of assortative mating by both education and class. Traditionally in China, marriages were arranged by parents, and ideally matched families of similar socioeconomic status. However, the Marriage Law passed by the People's Republic of China in 1950 promoted free choice and forbade arranged marriage and other interference by families in the marriage decisions of their children. Later, Land Reform, Collectivization and other movements had profound impacts on rural household organization and social relations. We investigate their effects on assortative mating by using novel linked administrative data compiled in rural Shanxi Province in North China in the mid-1960s. These data record the education and family class labels (jiating chushen) of spouses for 1459 couples in 30 villages. The class labels were assigned in the 1950s based on family landholding before the Land Reform and became hereditary. We find that class label had effects above and beyond those of education, suggesting that assortative mating studies that only consider education overlook an important dimension of social status in marriage patterns, and thereby overstate the overall permeability of boundaries between social groups. Furthermore, by comparing couples according to whether they married before or after 1949, we find that patterns of homogamy and hypergamy remained highly stable in the face of substantial social transformation after 1949. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]