Search

This paper develops a multi-scalar geography of youth volunteering in Uganda. A growing body of research has explored the geographies of volunteering in the global North and international volunteering and development. However, despite the mainstreaming of volunteers as development actors, less attention has been paid to the unique local and national geographies of volunteering in global South settings. This paper explores how and why different ideas and practices of volunteering take shape and prominence in Uganda and how this impacts patterns of youth inclusion, inequality and opportunity. Analysing data on volunteering by young refugees in Uganda, we develop a multi-scalar geography to situate volunteering at the interface of ‘global’ volunteering policy and knowledges, aid and development architectures, youth unemployment, community institutions and local socio-economic inequalities. Through this, we reveal how programmed and audited forms of youth volunteering oriented to youth skills and employability are privileged. We show how this articulates with local inequalities to create uneven access to volunteering opportunities and practices. Through our approach, we show how a multi-scalar geography of volunteering enables us to build richer, more nuanced conceptualisations of volunteering in the global South that address the different ways global discourses, local histories, community organisations and social inequalities come together across space and time to produce uneven geographies of volunteering in particular places.

Crises do not affect populations equally but expose and exacerbate long-standing vulnerabilities and inequalities. Recovery language such as ‘build back better’, or ‘bounce forward’ has been criticised for neglecting underlying inequalities. This paper reports on the process and early outcomes of an inclusive Community Recovery Planning process for the Falkland Islands, in response to Covid-19. The Falkland Islands is home to a complex community, with close ties and short power distances (due to its small size and remoteness), with differences institutionalised in citizenship statuses and entitlements, and shaped by geopolitical tensions. We aimed to use the ‘pandemic as a portal’, seeking out previously ‘less heard’ voices, to make visible previously hidden impacts, and initiate incremental systemic change to tackle them. Community Impact Assessments evidenced specific areas of vulnerability (e.g., housing and income insecurity) and inequalities, largely shaped by differing citizenship status. In tandem with other government currents, the Community Recovery Planning process has contributed to progressive policy changes in Equalities legislation and Income Support. We offer this paper as a demonstration of our methodology for inclusive recovery planning that could be adapted elsewhere. We argue that the inclusion of previously unheard voices contributed to incremental systemic change to reduce inequalities.

Bronze Age archaeological records from the eastern Mediterranean identify two periods of widespread so-called societal “collapse” between ca. 4.50 – ca. 4.20 cal ka BP and ca. 3.50 – ca. 2.80 cal ka BP respectively, which have been linked to a number of proposed causes, including climate change. However, the role of climate change in the “collapse” of eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age societies has been questioned due to the resolution of climate proxy records. In this paper we present a regional synthesis of the highest resolution palaeoclimate records and compare these to archaeological evidence. By recalibrating radiocarbon dates onto a consistent timescale and using pollen, oxygen and carbon isotopes from both marine and terrestrial deposits, we reconstruct aridity at a 50-year resolution. Our results challenge a simple “climate destroyed society” hypothesis. Instead, we find a more complex record of changing aridity and societal response and provide a nuanced perspective on climate versus non-climate causes of Bronze Age societal “collapse” events. Our results have implications for the generation of palaeoclimate records aimed at exploring links between climate and societal change, emphasising the need for high resolution records proximal to archaeological sites.

We argue that the (mis)treatment of Eastern European migrant workers during the pandemic revealed the existence of a two-tier EU citizenship, despite the political discourse of equality within the EU. We show that this two-tier citizenship system was generated by the combined effect of differentiated rights and of prejudicious practices applied to EE citizens. In terms of differentiated rights, we refer specifically to the implementation of transitional arrangements for up to 7 years following the Eastern enlargements in 2004 and 2007, which restricted access to the labour markets and welfare systems of the incumbent member states, de facto undermining the right to free movement for this group of EU citizens. In terms of prejudicious practices, we refer to the instances of exploitation, abuses, de-skilling, exclusion from public services and use of social rights that EE migrant workers have been well documented to experience. We show that the two-tier citizenship system reflects the unequal power relations between Member States and the internal political, economic and social hierarchy present within the European Union.

How do archives start and who are they for? The Caribbean Social Forum, based in Woolwich in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, London, are currently considering these questions as they look to preserve the stories of over 600 Caribbean members who the media have framed as ‘the Windrush Generation’. The paper argues that co-created projects, where the lead is de-centered away from the university institution itself, might begin to decolonise knowledge paradigms and allow for new forms of knowledge exchange.

While sense of place has been increasingly used in planning literature over the last five decades, its conceptualisation varies by discipline and theoretical orientation, with disjointed elements. This study develops a three-theme conceptual framework articulating individual-community-place interrelationships by critically reviewing the literature on sense of place and place-based constructs of attachment, identity, and satisfaction. Theorising the interactions in-between contributes to theoretical debates on sense of place and developing conceptual clarity to understand the planning context, processes, and outcomes, informing decision- and policy-making. It also facilitates the analysis and synthesis of complex narratives in qualitative studies of people-place relations.

Since the 1990s diasporic communities have increasingly been recognized as agents of development, with states, citizens, and the global development community keen to harness their knowledge, skills, and economic capital. Approaches to the ‘diaspora option’ tend to be rooted in the discourses, practices, and products of neoliberal globalization. Yet the most recent decade of the 21st century has witnessed a backlash against this cosmopolitanism. This paper pushes for a re-orientation of the diaspora-development nexus that looks to respond to the contemporary realities of (and the backlash against) neoliberal globalization: (re)bordering, European and North American ethnonationalism, nativist politics, and anti-migrant discourses. Thinking through a post-diasporic lens foregrounds the interconnected geographies, the complex temporalities, and the (racialized) inequalities within the diaspora–development nexus. The paper concludes that through a post-diasporic lens the diaspora–development nexus can be centred on everyday social, cultural, material, and political circumstances and experiences and feelings of belonging through multiple locales, re-orienting the nexus to advance the everyday socio-economic, cultural, and political liberation of diasporic communities.

This paper aims to explore the experiences of female leaders considering the interplay of gender, religion, and culture. Drawing on an inductive-qualitative study, the paper examines perceptions regarding the role of religion and cultural norms in women’s ascension into leadership positions in Jordan. The results indicated that Jordanian women leaders adopted an Islamic feminist worldview and did not embrace a liberal nor a socialist/Marxist feminist worldview. Women leaders seemed wanting to claim their religion back from those forces that are reportedly holding their aspirations hostage to monolithic interpretations of religious texts. By constantly referring to their religion, female leaders wanted to be granted spaces of trust and responsibility in leadership positions that they did not see contradictory to the way they understood their faith. The paper provides insights into how women leaders understand prejudicial stereotypes and discrimination in their society, explaining how those are linked to patriarchal socio-cultural traditions emphasizing male control.Other Information Published in: Journal of Business Ethics License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0See article on publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05041-0

This article examines the expansion of plague hospitals in early modern France. It shows that the development of these institutions was an urban initiative and that there was only limited involvement from the crown before the mid-seventeenth century. While there is a typically highly negative view of French plague hospitals, with these institutions being seen as death traps where the infected were simply sent to die, they played a vital role in providing the poor with access to specialist care. Plague hospitals were staffed by physicians, surgeons, nurses, and apothecaries, who provided a range of important medical treatments to the infected. Municipal governments developed these specialist hospitals for the plague sick—and only the plague sick—and sought to provide them with the type of environment early modern medical experts believed to be the most conducive for healing. The article situates the development of these hospitals within the wider context of health care provision in early modern France. Overall, it shows that the development of plague hospitals was a key manifestation of the drive toward providing professional medical care to the poor.

The ways in which poaching economies and militarized responses to shut them down intersect with local gender norms and dynamics remain underexamined. We address this by developing a feminist political ecology of wildlife crime by drawing on feminist political ecology and complementing it with insights from feminist criminology. This framework centres local systems of gender norms and their intersection with socio-economic dynamics across scale to offer a fuller understanding of the drivers of participation in poaching economies and their increasingly deadly impacts, a reflection of the expansion of militarized conservation practice. Drawing on fieldwork in the Mozambican borderlands adjacent to South Africa’s Kruger National Park on the illicit rhino horn economy, we show how two stark gendered dynamics emerge. First, long-standing norms of masculinity, in particular caring for family, in one of the poorest regions of Southern Africa motivate men to enter the trade despite the risks. Second, women whose husbands have been killed while hunting rhino embody the indirect human consequences of a violent poaching economy. The loss of their husbands, a broader context of poverty, and gendered norms concerning widows articulate in ways that leave these women and their children to experience more acute and long term vulnerability. We discuss what lessons a feminist political ecology of wildlife crime offers for understanding and addressing poaching conflicts, wildlife crime and illicit resource geographies more broadly.

The paper builds on recent literature on post-phenomenology to understand how politics suffuse the everyday experience of walking on an urban leisure path in Tucson, Arizona (USA). Beginning with non-representational accounts of affect, this paper then shifts to post-phenomenology to make sense of the findings on how walking the path is impacted by at least two other influences: the retail consumption infrastructure of shopping centres and advertising, and the military infrastructure of Air Force bases. Post-phenomenology helps us advance our understanding of how these power centers emit affective atmospheres while also situating their incompleteness and inability to fully control the production of subjectivity. By way of auto-ethnographic reflections, this paper displays (1) how retail spills into leisure space, and (2) how the materiality of warfare spills into civilian life. Post-phenomenology is a helpful approach for understanding a politics of affect in the absence of clear intentionality.

This paper utilises the concept of ‘hate relationships’ in conversation with the literature on geographies of encounter to explore experiences of racism for those entrapped by racist encounters with those who are familiar. In so doing, we attend to the uneven and harmful risks involved in some forms of everyday urban encounter. We draw upon case notes collated by a hate advocacy service in North East England, UK, to illustrate the cumulative damaging force of enduring hate relationships. By drawing parallels with work on domestic violence, we suggest hate relationships evident in our data exhibit distinct temporalities of routinisation, whereby harmful ‘low level’ violence, often under the radar of the criminal justice system, gains force through repeated neighbourhood-based encounters. In so doing, we also highlight both the situated and relational spatialities at work; localised encounters marked by familiarity, racialised territoriality and experiences of fear and immobility, but also relations of entrenched disadvantage and institutional failures that sustain harm. Concerted acts of resistance look to confront and/or escape these relationships, but as forms of resolution, where additional burdens are placed on victim/survivors, these are constrained by the same violent conditions through which such relationships are allowed to take shape.

In recognition of multi-sited and dynamic diaspora formation, this article explores the relationship between significant (yet limited and differentially experienced) political change and emotional geographies for those outside of their country of birth. We do this with reference to the removal of President Robert Mugabe from power, as experienced by first-generation Zimbabwean migrants, asking if and how ‘change’ has been experienced and felt, but also what such responses do through what we call diasporic reorientations. This helps us to think through emotional alignments with/to Zimbabwe, as part of practical trajectories already under formation, but reinforced, exacerbated and in some cases reconfigured. We discuss how participants understood and navigated contested notions of ‘change’ with attention to the ambiguous co-existence of celebration, uncertainty, scepticism and tentative hopefulness. We then highlight the significance, complexity and unevenness of diasporic reorientations, through intentions, desires and experiences of return. In so doing we contribute to debates around the significance of emotional spatialities and temporalities in the re-construction of diasporic subjectivities, through and despite of such ‘change’.

This chapter sets out to review and deliberate upon some of the dominant and reoccurring issues, approaches, and debates within the sociology of sport as they relate to the maintenance and evolution of sport fandom cultures. The treatment encourages readers to visualize all sports fans as both products and constituents of cultures in which consumption is of paramount importance. Much evidence considered demonstrates how fans embody consumption experiences within a “fan habitus” and how they use consumption to gauge the social capital of others within sport fandom groups. Finally, this chapter addresses the fluidity of sport fandom cultures, the role of prosumption, and the potential implications of technological advancements on fan cultures into the future.

Soil Pb concentrations at urban agriculture sites (UAS) commonly exceed recommended safe levels. There is a lack of evidence regarding uptake of Pb by gardeners using such sites for food crops. Our study aimed to elucidate whether gardening in soil with raised Pb levels results in Pb body burdens of concern to health, and to assess confounding factors influencing Pb body burden. Our cross-sectional case study measured Pb in saliva and blood of UAS gardeners (n = 43), soil and produce samples from their UAS, and home tap water. Blood and saliva Pb concentrations were compared with those from non-UAS gardener controls (n = 29). A health risk threshold of 5 µg dL−1 blood Pb level (BLL) was selected in keeping with international guidance. Detailed surveys investigated individuals’ anthropometrics and potential Pb exposures from diet, and historic and everyday activities. Saliva was not found to be a suitable biomarker of adult Pb exposure in this context. Predictors of higher BLLs were being older, being male and eating more root vegetables and shrub fruit. Eating more green vegetables predicted a lower BLL, suggesting a protective effect against Pb uptake. UAS gardeners’ BLLs (geometric mean 1.53; range 0.6–4.1 µg dL−1) were not significantly higher (p = 0.39) than the control group (geometric mean 1.43; range 0.7–2.9 µg dL−1). All BLLs were below 5 µg dL−1 except one resulting from occupational exposure. Having paired the UAS gardeners with closely matched controls, we found Pb in UAS soils (with range 62–1300 mg kg−1from common urban sources) unlikely to pose an additional risk to adult health compared to their neighbours who did not access UAS. As such, other Pb sources may be the dominant factor controlling BLL.

Migrants’ involvement in smuggling increases alongside restricted cross-border movement and violent borders, yet this dynamic is usually examined from migrants’ position as clients. In this article, we move away from migrants and smugglers as two separate roles and question migrants’ aspirations to and experiences of resorting to smuggling networks as workers in the context of EU land borders, where direct violence is used daily to fight cross-border crime. By doing so, we move further the examination of fluid relations in smuggling provisions and the way they are intertwined with care and exploitation, as shaped and circumscribed by violent borders. The article illustrates the intersections between border violence and migrants’ active involvement in smuggling by drawing on the case study of an anonymised Border Town and multi-site, multi-author fieldwork from Serbia and Bosnia. By questioning migrants’ experiences of shifting roles from clients to service providers, and by taking into account their work in smuggling provision, we show that, in a situation of protracted vulnerability orchestrated by border violence, state and law enforcement, the categories – “migrant” and “smugglers” – can blur.

Aim: The aim was to investigate same‐sex mothers’ self‐assessed experiences of forming a family, and the association between heteronormative information, parental support and parenting stress. \ud \ud Design: A quantitative, cross‐sectional study. \ud \ud Methods: In a web survey conducted in Sweden in 2019, same‐sex mothers (N = 146) with a child aged 1–3 years answered questions about their experiences of forming a family through assisted reproduction and questions about parenting stress. Descriptive statistics describes the process of forming a family. Pearson's correlation analyses and independent sample t tests were used to test hypotheses about heteronormative information, parental support and parenting stress. \ud \ud Results: Same‐sex mothers experienced going through assisted reproduction treatment as stressful, and parental groups as not being supportive. Heteronormative information correlated with both lower perceived parental support and higher perceived parenting stress. Non‐birth mothers experienced less acknowledgement and support than birthmothers.

Recent years have witnessed significant increase in numbers of older men imprisoned in England and Wales; a phenomenon experienced across the western world. Those aged fifty and over represent the fastest-growing demographic group in prison in England and Wales. This article summaries explanations for and implications of this increase and the characteristics, needs and lived experiences of this population, before critically reflecting on current policy and practice responses; and how responses highlight definitional and policy ambiguities around older prisoners. The article discusses a multi-agency initiative developed at one prison in northern England that recognised the uniqueness of older prisoners, modified regimes and changed physical environments. Impact is benchmarked against Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons four tests of a healthy prison, followed by discussion of findings and implications for policy and practice. The article argues for expanded collaboration to better manage challenges posed by older prisoners, supported by a national strategy.

We contribute a conceptual framework for decolonising PD praxis with the aim of surfacing unsettling agendas. Our framework was developed in response to collaborating with young Bedouin activists in Palestine, where there is a need not only to delink approaches from potential damaging epistemological and ontological ways of knowing and being, but to recognise differently constituted positionalities, the geopolitical specificities of place and the role of INGOs alongside the cultural contexts of ongoing violence. We define our orientations as decolonising in, by and through PD praxis when working on issues of land-based conflict. We argue these multiplicitous orientations allow for negotiations between political struggle and indigenous connection to the land, how INGOs embody conflicting justice agendas and how equity enriches yet complicates community sustainment. In contexts of ongoing indigenous land-based conflict, we detail the framework as an approach for unsettling PD praxis.

The ability for adults to make changes to their home environments as they age to better suit their needs is of increasing importance. It is crucial that the full gamut of impacts from adaptations is understood in order to facilitate comprehensive evaluations which can fully capture their utility. Most previous studies in the field have used a quantitative methodology. Drawing on qualitative interviews, with some informed by wearable camera data, we explore perspectives on the impact of home adaptations from recipients aged 65 and over (n = 30). These are discussed around five themes: restorative outcomes; preventative outcomes; social outcomes; impacts on others; and home perceptions. The research emphasises several under-explored outcomes from adaptations including impacts related to social participation, care provision, relocation, perceptions of the home, service awareness and other household members. We argue that any future evaluation framework needs to comprehensively capture potential outcomes based on the lived experience of recipients in order to fully appreciate both negative and positive impacts from home adaptations.

The importance of mining temporalities and gendered impacts of mining activity are receiving increasing academic attention. This article contributes to these debates by addressing the impacts of large-scale mining activity on women’s sense of place-attachment and landscape, focusing on Cajamarca, Peru, home to the Yanacocha mine since 1993. Using women’s hand-drawn maps representing ‘sites of change’, the article critically examines the various ways in which women communicate mining as deeply affecting their everyday lives in gendered ways. This mapping method tapped into emotional connections to place and local landscapes, and by incorporating stories and maps of both women opposing and supporting further mining expansion in the region, the article goes on to show that both groups share an understanding of the Yanacocha mine as a disruption of time and place.

This special issue of The International Journal of Gender, Sexuality and Law, edited by Laura Graham, Victoria Holt and Mary Laing, brings together a range of voices and knowledges on the issue of Sex Work and the Law: Does the Law Matter? Mirroring global and national sex worker campaigns, official consultations, policy and wider debates over the last two decades, there has been much academic interest in the legal responses to sex work (Scoular and O’Neill, 2007; Graham, 2017; Munro and Della Giusta, 2008). Much of this work has evaluated the varied current legal responses to sex work, how they impact sex workers’ lives, and how the law might be reformed. There is also significant academic and governmental interest in comparative research looking at legal responses across jurisdictions (Armstrong and Abel, 2020; Levy, 2014). This special issue takes a broad, critical approach to the relationship between sex work and the law, inspired by Jane Scoular’s (2010) question: does the law matter in sex work? In doing so, this special issue offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the complex relationship between law and sex work. This issue addresses global trends towards criminalisation of sex work, often predicated upon stopping trafficking, and considers the impact of these trends on sex workers, their rights, their working practices, and their marginalisation. It further examines the law’s response to new and emerging issues, such as COVID-19 and digital sex work, reflecting particularly on the varied impacts of over- and under- regulating sex work spaces. This special issue finally reflects on sex workers’ resistance – to current laws, to the expansion of laws, and to their lack of inclusion in debates around law. Throughout this issue, the voices of sex workers are integrated and prioritised, reflecting a commitment to inclusion of expert knowledges around the world.

The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. Engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on informal housing across the Global North and South, we propose the term ‘digital informalisation’ to examine how digital platforms are engendering new and opaque ways of governing housing, presenting a theoretical and political blind spot. Focusing on rental housing, our paper unpacks the ways in which new forms of digital management of risk control access and filter populations. In contrast to progressive imaginaries of ‘smart’ technological mediation, practices of algorithmic redlining, biased tenant profiling and the management of risk in private tenancies and in housing welfare both introduce and extend discriminatory and exclusionary housing practices. The paper aims to contribute to research on informal housing in the Global North by examining digital mediation and its governance as key overlooked components of housing geographies beyond North and South dichotomies.

The new decade’s tumultuous nature triggered renewed reflection on urban public space. As Covid-19 lockdowns and social distancing measures were implemented in cities around the globe, and protests on city streets from Black Lives Matter and their global supporters erupted, the world’s attention was refocused on urban public spaces. These were spaces to which access was now curtailed: we were newly and differently fearful in them, anger boiled over in them; and amidst limited access, we yearned for them. The pandemic has taken many lives, including that of the urban public space theorist Michael Sorkin, whose decades of work argued for the need for truly accessible, democratic, urban public space; and mourned what he felt was its slow demise. Pushed by these triggers, this Special Issue re/visits urban public space through the lens of the 2020 lockdowns (closures) and the possibilities (openings) that seemed to emerge; in so doing we bring together a collection of global urban snapshots and critical reflections from/in cities around the world - all variations on a theme (Sorkin, 1992).

Studying buildings can be a rich entry point into emerging cultural geographies. The archipelago of Chiloé in southern Chile is experiencing rapid change since the country’s extreme turn toward neoliberal governance in the 1970s. Once a rural, communal, and sea-faring region, it has been transformed by industrial aquaculture in recent decades which has driven a new urban landscapes and consumer-oriented lifestyles. This paper offers findings from an ethnographic study of changing consumption geographies, from iconic tourist sites linked to the region’s rich heritage geographies, to the new corporate retailers and shopping malls. Specifically, the new shopping mall clashes with the heritage and tourist landscape of colonial era churches and other unique heritage architectures that have captured the attention of tourists and investors. We glimpse a dynamic architectural geography in flux, as an array of buildings pulls the population in multiple directions at once, making it an ideal case study of the competing forces of what Deleuze and Guattari called de- and re-territorialization, an appropriate analytic for understanding the powerful forces of commodification.

This article contributes to the growing literature concerning Disability Hate Studies. The study employs the concept of intersectionality and examines experiences of hate crimes recorded as racist or homophobic but where the victims/survivors also have a disability or mental health condition. The data was derived from 33 case-studies. Although very few hate incidents/crimes were conceptualised as disablist, disability played a significant role in the experiences of victims/survivors. The article proposes that criminal justice agencies should move away from understanding hate crime as a singular interaction to conceptualising the possibility that this can become a harmful hate relationship that progresses overtime. Points of interest The study examines cases of hate incidents/crimes that affect disabled people within the North-East of England. The research suggests that hate incidents/crimes are not always motivated by prejudices towards disability, but are often due to racist or homophobic bigotries. The findings demonstrate that the process of defining a particular type of hate as either racist-, homophobic- or transphobic-motivated crime often masks the fact that many of these victims are also disabled people. The study indicates that hate crimes are often not a one-off event, but can be the accumulation of many hate incidents that result in cumulative negative impacts and can escalate into more severe offences over a prolonged period. The article concludes by suggesting that to develop an effective hate crime intervention, social services and criminal justice agencies must consider the possibility of a power relationship, i.e. a hate relationship, between the perpetrator(s) and the victim(s).

A convergence between vulnerability, radicalisation and children has been framed as an emergent category of abuse: “childhood radicalisation”. Focusing on the UK PREVENT programme, this paper explores the ways children have become interrelated with counter-radicalisation. While PREVENT engages with people of all ages, Home Office data indicates children are a target group. This approach has been consolidated through the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act which legislates PREVENT as safeguarding. Inspired by Ernst Bloch’s “ontology-of-the-not-yet”, this article draws upon critical geographies of “hope” as a theoretical tool to unpack PREVENT. I explore the productive power of PREVENT in catalysing “hopeful” forms of subjectivity; specifically, the pedagogy of PREVENT, and de-radicalisation through Channel. The article then extends Bloch’s original apparatus to examine the ways hope acts as an assemblage of affects to enact practices of control. It is the reciprocal influence of hope, fear and anticipatory security that helps illuminate how PREVENT makes visible, and thus regulates, processes of becoming. The article traverses disciplines encompassing criminology, critical geography, critical international relations, and critical terrorism studies. This inter-disciplinary approach usefully captures PREVENT in terms of performativity, anticipatory security and the figuration of the child.

Exploring the future mobility of older people is imperative for maintaining wellbeing and quality of life in an ageing society. The forthcoming level 3 automated vehicle may potentially benefit older people. In a level 3 automated vehicle, the driver can be completely disengaged from driving while, under some circumstances, being expected to take over the control occasionally. Existing research into older people and level 3 automated vehicles considers older people to be a homogeneous group, but it is not clear if different sub-groups of old people have different performance and perceptions when interacting with automated vehicles. To fill this research gap, a driving simulator investigation was conducted. We adopted a between-subjects experimental design with subgroup of old age as the independent variable. The differences in performance, behaviour, and perception towards level 3 automated vehicles between the younger old group (60–69 years old) and older old group (70 years old and over) was investigated. 15 subjects from the younger old group (mean age = 64.87 years, SD = 3.46 years) and 24 from the older old group (mean age = 75.13 years, SD = 3.35 years) participated in the study. The findings indicate that older people should not be regarded as a homogeneous group when interacting with automated vehicle. Compared to the younger old people, the older old people took over the control of the vehicle more slowly, and their takeover was less stable and more critical. However, both groups exhibited positive perceptions towards level 3 automation, and the of older old people’s perceptions were significantly more positive. This study demonstrated the importance of recognising older people as a heterogeneous group in terms of their performance, capabilities, needs and requirements when interacting with automated vehicles. This may have implications in the design of such systems and also understanding the market for autonomous mobility.

Cooperative housing is experiencing a resurgence of interest worldwide. As a more democratic and affordable alternative to dominant housing provision, it is often heralded as a blueprint for ‘housing commons’. Despite its long history, however, cooperative housing has rarely gone beyond a ‘niche’ in the housing market. Recent critical housing scholarship is beginning to address this marginalisation and understand how a more widespread development of the sector can be supported. In times and places where cooperative housing has expanded beyond a ‘niche’ solution, the role of the state, through policy making at national, regional and municipal scale, stands out as an important enabling factor. Drawing on ten international cases, this study presents a framework for a rigorous and politically meaningful comparative approach to public-cooperative policy mechanisms for ‘housing commons’. Three key phases in the housing process (production, access and management, and maintenance of the model in time) are identified and discussed through concrete examples of policy areas and mechanisms. The article contributes to scholarship on cooperative housing policy making and ‘housing commons’ and argues for a shift in attention to questions of accessibility over time, and the thorny issue of permanent decommodification.

IntroductionDuring military service, many household costs for both married and single service personnel are subsidised, and transition can leave veterans unprepared for the financial demands of civilian life. Armed Forces organisations such as Sailor, Soldier, Air Force Association (SSAFA) play a central role in understanding the financial challenges that UK veterans face and provide an insight into the financial hardship experienced by veterans. The aim of this study was to use SSAFA beneficiary data as a proxy to identify the nature of financial benefit, the spatial distribution of financial hardship in the Scottish SSAFA beneficiary community and explore factors that might predict where those recipients are located.MethodsUsing an anonymised data set of Scottish SSAFA financial beneficiaries between 2014 and 2019, this study used a geographical methodology to identify the geospatial distribution of SSAFA benefit recipients and exploratory regression analysis to explore factors to explain where SSAFA beneficiaries are located.ResultsOver half of benefit applicants (n=10 735) were concentrated in only 50 postcode districts, showing evidence of a clustered pattern, and modelling demonstrates association with area-level deprivation. The findings highlight strong association between older injured veterans and need for SSAFA beneficiary assistance.ConclusionThe findings demonstrate that beneficiaries were statistically clustered into areas of high deprivation, experiencing similar challenges to that of the wider population in these areas. Military service injury or disability was strongly associated with areas of high SSAFA benefit use and in those areas high unemployment was also a significant factor to consider.

This article explores British newspaper descriptions of the impact of climate change across three time periods. It shows a reduction in representing the consequences of climate change as ‘out of human control’. It also shows a decrease in adopting alarming and uncertain descriptions within the centre-left group, whereas mocking the effects of climate change is a peculiarity of right-leaning narratives. The complexity of climate narratives produces a variety of representations of the consequences of climate change, which in turn might increase ‘uncertainty’ in public understanding of climate change.

This article recognises the contributions of workers and more broadly the significance of work within economic geography. It considers how engaging with labour experiences provides an accessible vantage point to consider much wider debates and issues. By doing so, the article suggests that the increasingly well-established sub-field of labour geography has much to offer for geographers to consider wider economic processes as experienced ‘from below’. The article considers recent UK examples of worker action and emerging community union practices as a model developed by trade unions to counter trends in their membership and respond to changes in their role. As such, the article provides a valuable perspective for assessing geographical themes and scholarly interests, not least for a further expanding of approaches towards ‘changing places’ and understanding economic change and social inequalities.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an evolving urban crisis. This research paper assesses impacts of the lockdown on food security and associated coping mechanisms in two small cities in Bangladesh (Mongla and Noapara) during March to May 2020. Due to restrictions during the prolonged lockdown, residents (in particular low-income groups) had limited access to livelihood opportunities and experienced significant or complete loss of income. This affected both the quantity and quality of food consumed. Coping strategies reported include curtailing consumption, relying on inexpensive starchy staples, increasing the share of total expenditure allocated to food, taking out loans and accessing relief. The pandemic has exacerbated the precariousness of existing food and nutrition security in these cities, although residents with guaranteed incomes and adequate savings did not suffer significantly during lockdown. While coping strategies and the importance of social capital are similar in small and large cities, food procurement and relationships with local governments show differences.

This paper will consider the enduring acts of care, support and activism associated with unemployment in the North East and Midlands regions of England. It will draw upon literature relating to unemployment, labour geography and feminist economic geography to illuminate different forms of agency and resourcefulness found within the examples considered. The paper engages with Unemployed Workers’ Centres in Newcastle upon Tyne and Chesterfield, focusing mostly upon their activities in response to UK austerity policies. These centres provide advice and support for unemployed people, particularly those who may be facing difficulties, such as work capability assessments, tribunals and debt. This supporting role is complimented by the campaigning activities of volunteers within these groups that actively contest related issues, including campaigns relating to zero-hour contracts, organising against austerity policies and wider educational projects as part of a relationship with Unite Community. The paper suggests that the associated organising practices indicate a varied and sustained form of unemployed political agency that articulates and contests multiple unemployed grievances. This engagement with a wider political realm, alongside the intimate acts of support and care found within the centres, suggests a more nuanced and agentic understanding of unemployed resistance within an austerity context.

Ambient and indoor air pollution results in an estimated 7 million premature deaths globally each year, representing a major contemporary public health challenge, but one poorly quantified from a toxicological and source perspective. Indoor exposure represents possibly the greatest potential overall exposure, yet our indoor environments are still poorly understood, modelled and characterized. In rapidly growing cities, such as Lagos, Nigeria, environmental monitoring can play an important role in establishing baseline data, monitoring urban pollution trends and in environmental education. Classroom dust samples were collected from 40 locations from across the twenty local government areas (LGAs) of Lagos, in June 2019. The aim of the study was to assess the potential hazard posed by PTE in indoor dusts and to develop a suitable risk communication strategy to inform and educate the public, promoting environmental health literacy. Concentrations of total PTE in indoor dusts were assessed using Energy Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence (ED-XRF) spectrometry. Oral bioaccessibility determinations using the unified BARGE method, and analysis by Inductively Coupled Plasma Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-OES) were also performed on the dust samples to determine the fraction available for absorption in the gastrointestinal tract. Results showed that the indoor dust samples were largely uncontaminated, with only few exceptions (2 samples). Enrichment factor pollution trend for the total PTE concentrations was in the order of Pb > Zn > U > Cr > Cu > Ba > Mn > V > As > Cd > Ni > Al. Source apportionment studies using factor analysis suggests concentrations of Al, As, Fe, Mn, Ni, and U may be influenced largely by lithogenic factors, while Cd, Cu and Pb originated principally from anthropogenic sources. Chromium, V and Zn appear to originate from mixed sources of both lithogenic and anthropogenic origin. Our oral bioaccessibility determinations indicate that the assumption of 100% bioavailability based on pseudototal or total concentrations would overestimate the hazard potential of PTE in these indoor dusts. Zinc was the most bioaccessible PTE (mean of 88%), with Mn (57%), Pb (48%), Ba (48%), Al (41%), As (37%), Cu (36%), Ni (28%), Cr (10%) and Fe (7%) the least bioaccessible. Human health risk assessment, for both children and adults using the bioaccessible fraction, showed values to be within acceptable risk levels.

Many scholars have examined the museum as a site of politics. This paper reviews recent research on museums and puts forward “soft combat” as a device for understanding how museums operate as geopolitical entities today. Soft combat includes (a) enrolling the visitor in affective atmospheres, (b) engaging with violence and trauma, and (c) embodied persuasion. We examine a military museum in the U.S.A to substantiate soft combat as a kind of biopolitics.

There is much interest in economic citizenship schemes, yet little attention has been paid to the quotidian impacts of such schemes on local communities, environments and notions of citizenship. This paper responds to this lacuna by reviewing the existing literature on economic citizenship and considering what an ‘everyday geographical’ lens would add to existing theorisations. ‘Everyday geographies’ are integral to thinking about how economic citizenship regimes shape local economies, societies and environs, providing insights into the ways in which the lives of ‘ordinary citizens’ intersect with flows of capital, the growth of an (im)mobile super-rich and shifts in migration management.

This article explores the phenomenon whereby disabled people’s homes are being occupied (i.e. cuckooed) by local perpetrators and/or county lines organised criminal groups. This study employs a qualitative biographical methodology that collects data from disabled people who have been victimised this way and practitioners who have worked with them. The findings illustrate that social isolation, loneliness and a lack of community services can create a space where the exploitation of disabled people can flourish. We conclude by demonstrating that cuckooing predominantly occurs at a local level, perpetrated by local people, rather than by county lines organised criminal groups; that, in fact, local cuckooing can predate county lines takeovers.

The literature on a ‘sense of place’ often sidelines the voices of children. Consequently, little is known about how children can be encouraged to develop a sense of place. This matters because a sense of place involves feelings of belonging and attachment, and can contribute to children’s wellbeing and identity. Informed by the research of Bartos and Severcan, we deploy data from a qualitative research project in a primary school in a former coalfield area in the north-east of England to argue that children’s experiences of learning about their urban local history and heritage can help to develop their sense of place. Placing children’s voices centrally in our research, we explore how they engage with learning about local mining history, and the impact of place-based pedagogy. Emphasising the possibilities and importance of their deep involvement with their urban heritage, we show, firstly, the ways in which children’s sense of place is strengthened when they develop a feeling of ownership over their own history. Secondly, we explore how children develop a sense of place through engaging their emotions and physicality, and, thirdly, their senses. We conclude that learning about local history through place-based pedagogy allows children to create and interpret historical events and develop a sense of place. Taking ownership of their history makes the children active participants in telling the story of their place. Children can then develop new ways of seeing themselves in places, as they make connections between the past, present and future.

This article presents findings from a community-based participatory research project undertaken with sex workers in North East England. The research included peer-led interviews with 26 women who sell sex in public spaces and/or from private flats or online. Community stakeholders were also interviewed. Focusing on local service provision and interactions with the police and the criminal justice system, this article documents how stigma frames sex worker’s experiences of local service provision and interactions with local criminal justice agencies. Although those selling sex in public and private spaces described different interactions with, and experiences of, local service providers, stigma remained a pervasive and dominant feature of all sex worker’s experiences. In the research, those selling sex ‘on street’ describe the impact of public stigmatisation while those selling sex ‘off street’ describe employing strategies of identity management to avoid the social consequences of sex work stigma. In this article, we explore how service provision is constructed through the current governance of sex work in England and Wales, and how sex work stigma could be challenged through service provision designed by sex workers, for sex workers.

Objectives Prior studies have examined sleep during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, but have few compared sleep measured both during and prior to COVID. We examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on subjective sleep quality in general and separately by gender and age (

Background Although play is viewed as a childhood occupation that is spontaneous, it can be limited in children with HIV/AIDS. This study explored the perspectives of caregivers from Zimbabwe on the play of children with HIV/AIDS. Methodology A descriptive qualitative research approach was used to explore the perceptions of caregivers on play of children living with HIV/AIDS. Fifteen caregivers of children aged 4–9 years diagnosed with HIV/AIDS were purposively sampled. Two interviews were carried out with each of the caregivers. Findings were analysed thematically. Findings Four major themes were generated from the study: ‘Ubuntu is no more’, ‘Survival is primary (chikuru kurarama)’, ‘Play affirms that my child is still like other children’ and ‘More is required for this child’. Although issues of survival were paramount, caregivers were able to highlight the importance of play in affirming childhood, identifying the specific needs for play of children with HIV/AIDS. Conclusion and Significance Play, like all other human occupation, is contextually situated. Poverty and health status are key in shaping how families prioritise play. However, the ability to play for a child with HIV/AIDS also seems to mitigate stigma and may disrupt the ‘HIV is death’ narrative.

This paper stems from cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration between community music and human geography which sought to interrogate and understand claims of social sustainability and social change often cited in evaluation reports of community music projects. The lead authors (Parks and Cassidy) took this dialogue forward by organising a geography conference session which incorporated an instant choir workshop to test how we might ‘do’ social sustainability through practice. Drawing upon ideas from both disciplines, the paper synthesises the reflections of nine participants in the session to explore the capacity of creative, embodied, geographical practice to transform hegemonic experiences of academic conferences, and to create a sustainable and inclusive community of practice.

Potts, Deborah. 2020: Broken Cities: Inside the Global Housing Crisis. Zed Press. 319 pp. £70.00 hardcover, £18.99 paperback. ISBN: 1786990547.

Over half of Syrian refugee households in Lebanon are food insecure with some reliant on an electronic voucher (e-voucher) system for food aid. The interplay between the digitisation of food aid, within the socio-technical context of refugees, and community collaborative practices is yet to be investigated. Through design engagements and interviews with refugees and shop owners we explore the experiences of a Syrian refugee community in Lebanon using the e-voucher system. We provide insights into the socio-technical environment in which the e-voucher system is dispensing aid, the information and power asymmetries experienced, refugee collaborative coping practices and how they interplay with the e-voucher system. We highlight the need for: (1) expanding refugee digital capabilities to encompass understandings of aid technologies and identifying trusted intermediaries and (2) for technologies to support in upholding humanitarian principles and mitigating power and information asymmetries. Lastly, we call for CSCW researchers and humanitarian innovators to consider how humanitarian technologies can enable refugee collaborative practices and adopt everyday security as a lens for designing aid technologies. The paper contributes to CSCW knowledge regarding the interplay between aid technologies and refugees? socio-technical contexts and practices that provides a basis for future technological designs for collaborative technologies for refugee food security.

This paper contributes to the growing literature on the uneven geography of second homes in three ways. First, the heterogeneous nature of second homes in a rural, mountainous area of the European periphery is identified. Second, a conceptual model is developed, relating this heterogeneity to different types of population mobility. Third, a category of property, termed ‘residual’ is shown to be a part of the second home typology within the study area, albeit with a varied and ambiguous role. The spatial patterns of different types of second home are analysed and their implications for the local impact of rural development policies discussed.

Low‐income municipal housing and its inhabitants have increasingly been construed as disposable within wider global dynamics of real estate speculation, leading to heightened housing insecurity, displacement and forced evictions. In Western cities urban regeneration programmes have long provided the framework for partial or wholesale demolition of public housing, drawing new frontiers of gentrification and accumulation by dispossession. Before and beyond the material loss of home, the dispossession of low‐income housing involves a deeper unmaking of the relations that constitute residents’ emplacement and political legitimacy. In this article, I present a thick ethnographic account of multiple registers of dispossession and their implications for resistance through a situated reflection on the process of ‘decanting’—as resident rehousing is colloquially known—in a South London council estate, The Heygate. Drawing on participation in an anti‐gentrification archive as a scholar‐activist, I move beyond issues of displacement and grief to analyse three key mechanisms that make becoming dispossessed possible: disowning, disavowal and the administration of differential disposability. Within a resurgent interest in municipal solutions to housing crises, there is an urgent need for understanding municipal dispossession and the role of residents and engaged scholarship in resisting and expanding imaginaries of housing justice.

This article explores the effects of international remittances on the expenditure patterns of households in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article focuses on five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, which are some of the destinations that account for the highest receipt of international remittances. We analyse both aggregate and distributional effects of international remittances on household’s expenditure patterns. To investigate the distributional effect of international remittances, we adopt the instrumental variable quantile regression framework that allows us to simultaneously address the endogeneity of international remittances and possible heterogeneity in the impact of international remittances on household’s expenditure patterns. We instrument for international remittances by using the economic conditions in migrants’ countries as instrument for international remittances. Our results show that the receipt of international remittances increases expenditures on food, durables, education and health. Using the instrumental variable quantile regression, we find the effects of international remittances on household expenditure on food, durables, education, and health increases across the different expenditure quantiles.

In this paper, we analyze the use of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods in the field of rural studies by means of a content analysis of the leading journals. We begin with a short discussion of the pros and cons of mixed methods research in rural studies. We then move on to the empirical portion. We use a classification of published articles for the years 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 in the leading journals in the field: Sociologia Ruralis, Rural Sociology, and Journal of Rural Studies. We found striking differences in the publication policy of the three journals regarding methods applied. Sociologia Ruralis primarily accepts articles of a qualitative nature, and this has scarcely changed over the years. Rural Sociology, on the other hand, accepts mostly quantitative articles, and this has also been quite stable over time. The Journal of Rural Studies has traditionally been oriented towards qualitative research, but, in recent years, mixed method approaches play a visible role (around 20% in 2016). JRS is also the only journal that shows a sharp increase in papers of non-Western origin, with an emphasis on quantitative methods but not on mixed methods. The overall conclusion is that the rural research context offers considerable scope for a broader and increased application of mixed methods, and this merits greater attention among rural journals.