Stuck in transition? Exploring the spaces of employment training for youth with intellectual disability

This paper is concerned with the experiences of young adults with intellectual disabilities as they transition from high school in search of paid employment. The experiences of people with intellectual disability remain under-researched within geography. We use qualitative techniques to examine the experiences of six young adults with intellectual disabilities. Data are drawn from interviews with the youth themselves, their parents, and employers, as well as from participant observation at an employment training program for the intellectually disabled. While the primary goal of the youth and their parents was to make a transition to competitive paid work, a lack of transition planning, a shortage of appropriate opportunities and other factors meant the youth spent considerable time in ‘transitional spaces’ such as the vocational training centre, sheltered workshop, and supported employment placements. While these spaces are organized around an explicitly economic goal of augmenting the youth’s employability, they can play a critical role as spaces for social interaction and meaningful activity outside the home. Study findings point to the importance of moving beyond paid employment as the core of a successful transition to consider a broader goal of ‘meaningful activity’.     

Globalising initiatives for gender equality and poverty reduction: Exploring ‘failure’ with reference to education and work among urban youth in The Gambia and Ghana

This paper focuses on what observers have perceived to be a failure of development leading to a ‘crisis of youth’ as increasing numbers of young people find it more difficult to gain education, access to health, a job and meet standard of living aspirations. For some, a possible escape is offered by migration to Europe, the United States or Australia, often illegally. For those remaining behind, however, international development agencies offer a ‘globalisation of solutions’ to employment, gender inequality and poverty through the millennium development goals and the programmes to attain them. In this paper we do not take the failures of development at face value but look at local contexts to present a more complex picture of the relation between education, work and social life. Based on fieldwork conducted in urban areas of The Gambia and Ghana, we argue that rather than education as a catch-all solution we need to give more attention to the costs incurred by and for young people in pursuing education and training, to the operation of and actual opportunities in labour markets, and to patterns of gender socialisation which give women limited scope to exercise agency. This paper explores key gender dimensions of work and education among low-income urban youth noting that despite on-going efforts to increase young women’s enrolment in schools and access to employment, gender inequalities have been far from eradicated. Our field interviews reveal how social expectations that women should perform the bulk of reproductive labour in their youth as well as in adulthood and constraints placed on young women’s personal freedom in respect of their social relationships reduce time dedicated to education and establish fewer contacts relevant to securing paid employment. The result is for men to end up with more educational qualifications, more skills, and higher-paying jobs, even if unemployment among young people in general remains a major problem.     

Socio-economic changes,social capital and implications for climate change in a changing rural Nepal

We investigate the use of social capital in the form of social ties in the face of commercialization, urbanization and climate change. While discussions of social capital often focus on whether people possess certain social ties or not our study shows that it is also necessary to consider under what circumstances people can make use of their ties. The use of different kinds of ties varies with context and is not as clear cut as suggested in the literature. For example families closer to the city are in a better position to take advantage of new opportunities. Using a combination of ties people have engaged in high-input agriculture, business and paid employment. Diversification of livelihoods has made many people less sensitive to climate change, but this does not translate into decreased vulnerability for the community. Intensive agriculture and lower community cohesion seems unsustainable in the long run. Thus, decreased vulnerability at the household level may come at the price of increased vulnerability at higher levels and negative consequences for the wider social–ecological system. Evaluating vulnerability and the role of social ties depends on the unit and sector of analysis, and the temporal and spatial scale.     

Sibling caringscapes: Time–space practices of caring within youth-headed households in Tanzania and Uganda

This paper investigates the time–space practices of young people caring for their siblings in youth-headed households affected by AIDS in Tanzania and Uganda. Based on qualitative exploratory research with young people heading households, their siblings, NGO workers and community members, the article develops the notion of sibling ‘caringscapes’ to analyse young people’s everyday practices and caring pathways through time and space. Participatory time-use data reveals that older siblings of both genders regularly undertake substantial caring tasks at the very high end of the caregiving continuum. Drawing on rhythmanalysis, the paper explores how young people negotiate emotional geographies and temporalities of caring. The competing rhythms of bodies, schooling, work and seasonal agricultural production can result in ‘arrhythmia’ and time scarcity, which has detrimental effects on young people’s health, education, future employment prospects and mobility. Young people’s lifecourse transitions are shaped to a large extent by their caring responsibilities, resulting in some young people remaining in a liminal position for considerable periods, unable to make ‘successful’ transitions to adulthood. Despite structural constraints, however, young people are able to exercise some autonomy over their caring pathways and lifecourse transitions. The research sheds light on the ways that individuals embody the practices, routines and rhythms of everyday life and exercise agency within highly restricted broader landscapes of care.     

Groundwater governance and social capital

This paper argues that positive social capital underpins the key factors identified by Ostrom (1990) in self-governance systems. The paper discusses the different types of social capital from a social network perspective and empirically analyses social capital in the context of two neighboring aquifers in central Spain. It examines the type of institutional arrangements that foster or hinder the creation of social capital by discussing in turn, bonding and bridging social capital with particular reference to water user groups, taken as classic collective management institutions, illustrating also the role leaders play as linking social capital and catalysts (or obstacles) in the creation and blending of different types of social capital. It concludes that social capital is differentially embedded in social networks and that careful institutional design can help foster strong ‘positive’ social capital, which in turn favors self-governance in groundwater. It also stresses the dynamic nature of social capital through time and its productive aspect in terms of incentivizing social learning and collective action in groundwater management.     

AIDS-affected children,family collectives and the social dynamics of care in Ethiopia

Many programmes for AIDS-affected children pursue resource-intensive and external interventions of care, and often place such children at the receiving end of the care continuum. The aim of this article is to explore from a socio-spatial perspective the capacities of families and children experiencing orphanhood and the policy significance of empowering both to address the growing challenge of orphan care in rural and urban Ethiopia. Drawing on participatory research (involving in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, story writing, photo essays, ranking, observation and household visits), the complex social dynamics of care and spatial diversities in the manifestations of the vulnerabilities, capacities, strengths, and potentials of children and their families are discussed. It is argued that rather than the lack of biological parents it is the combination of the absence of a carer and the presence of acute poverty and economic marginality that explain various forms of vulnerability in orphans and non-orphans. The article further argues that effective and sustainable care needs to be informed by identification and empowerment of ‘family collectives’ as sites of interventions. In doing so, it draws analytical attention to the importance of examining the socio-temporal processes of orphanhood and care, children’s changing circumstances, and family collectives’ variances in the capacity to provide support for them. Strategies for sustainable care should recognise the specific needs of AIDS-affected children and the resourceful ways in which they contribute to enhance the care-giving capacities of family collectives in the light of broader socio-cultural and political–economic contexts.     

Rural diversification in Bulgaria

Agriculture has always been very important for the Bulgarian economy, but during the socialist period there was considerable progress made in the diversification of employment opportunities in rural areas. While many people commuted to non-agricultural jobs in the townships (and there was a large permanent transfer from rural to urban areas), there were additional opportunities in small factories and local services in the villages themselves. The transition has seen these opportunities much reduced, at precisely the time when full-time paid work in agriculture has declined due to market restructuring while complex problems have emerged associated with liquidating the state-run cooperatives and establishing a viable alternative. The paper discusses the general issues and presents a case study from the north-central part of the country. The rebuilding of a cooperative farming system (along with other forms of consolidation) is a positive trend which could increase spending power in the villages and help in the growth of employment in rural industries and services. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

“You have to engage with life,or life will go away”: An intersectional life course analysis of older women’s social participation in a disadvantaged urban area

Social participation in later life has been studied as part of discourses around ‘active ageing’ but the promotion of participation in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods meets with particular challenges. In this paper I argue that in order to effectively promote social participation in later life researchers and practitioners require an understanding of life-long relational practices which are embedded in social norms and places as they intersect with identities such as gender, class and age.The intersectional life course analysis traces complex relationalities between people and place across the life course of two women living in disadvantaged urban areas. It shows the effects of societal and structural changes on individuals’ opportunities for social participation as well as demonstrating how age-related relational practices may lead to spatial segregation of older people in society.     

Citizenship and the embodied practice of wheelchair use

Citizenship has been associated with members of a community that engage in paid work (Painter and Philo, 1995; Desforges et al., 2005). This idea constructs remunerated work as a key determinant of citizenship (Brown and Patrick, 2012). The outcome in terms of mobility is the provision of infrastructure and technologies that potentially privilege the movement of those considered to be ‘productive bodies’ between their workplaces and homes at specific times, while disadvantaging disabled people and their everyday mobility practices (Imrie, 2000). This paper explores the ways in which the formation of citizenship and movement, as embodied and sensory practices, and wheelchair use may be constrained by infrastructures, means of transport and social practices that are often insensitive to the needs of disabled people. In particular, the paper contributes to fleshing out the notion of ‘embodied citizenship’ in relation to women wheelchair users and the role played by their devices and other mobility technologies in their citizenship struggles. The paper is divided into three sections. First, I set out a framework for exploring the relationships between citizenship, mobility and disability with a focus on wheelchair users. Second, drawing on original qualitative research data, the paper concentrates on the embodied mobility practices of women wheelchair users who live in Greater London and Leicestershire, United Kingdom. Here I highlight the prejudices, barriers, discrimination and exclusions that they face, which, potentially, impact on their claims to citizenship. Finally, the paper concludes that an approach based on the subjective experience of the wheelchair user in context is useful in revealing the complexities of citizenship.     

Boundary management and the discursive sphere – Negotiating ‘realities’ in Khorezm,Uzbekistan

With independence in 1991, Uzbekistan, as most of Central Asia, entered into a phase of socio-economic transformation. In agriculture, this state-driven restructuring of the former system has concentrated on the ‘formal’ sphere of land and water governance.This paper assesses water management in Khorezm, Uzbekistan, taking a social constructivist and boundary work-inspired perspective. Several limitations to effective water management in Khorezm exist. We argue that three types of practices are widely employed to manage these and assure water access: formal, strategic, and discursive practices. The discrepancy between the formal water management institutions, manifested and regulated through formal practices and the informal, widely pursued through strategic practices and acts of deviation, is overcome through discursive practices. Verbal references to formal institutions therefore hamper the formalizing of informal practices. The institutionalized employment of all three types of practices fosters the production and reproduction of boundaries demarcating two, largely separate, spheres of reality in Khorezm’s water management. Consequently, a high degree of resistance to the integration of informal water management realities into the formal regulatory environment prevails, preventing mutual learning and thus the locally informed restructuring towards more efficient and sustainable water management in Khorezm.     

Sharing and neoliberal discourse: The economic function of sharing in the digital on-demand economy

In this paper I offer a critical analysis of ‘sharing’ as a discursive formation in the emerging on-demand economy or, as its more commonly known, ‘sharing’ economy. The set of firms and digital platforms that constitute the on-demand economy evade precise definition, though in popular commentary include Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Couchsurfing, and Yelp, among others. I argue that sharing is a discursive formation that is produced through neoliberal economic practices and contributes to their constitution and performance, connoting the embeddedness and inter-determination of the economic with the social. I analyze interview material with software developers and others working for on-demand economy firms in San Francisco to underscore how the sharing discourse is produced, and to examine the possible relationship between the sharing discourse and working practices in the on-demand economy. I explore how sharing, though a fragile and contested discourse, has been used by some proponents of the on-demand economy in an attempt to justify and normalize flexible and precarious work through an ambiguous association between capitalist exchange and altruistic social values. This ambiguity is productive insofar as sharing has become associated variously with transactional platforms, digital peer review via surveillant and punitive ratings systems, and algorithmically mediated, precarious, and ‘entrepreneurial’ contract work, while retaining affective associations with community, inclusion, and participation.     

Conducting sensitive research in the present and past tense: Recounting the stories of current and former child domestic workers

In recent years, scholarship on children’s work has increasingly incorporated the perspectives of working children. Although laudable, this shift toward children’s inclusion in research has concentrated on those employed at the time of data collection. Former child workers have largely been overlooked as a source of information. This paper reflects on research conducted with current and former child domestic workers in Tanzania. The child domestic working experiences reported by those two groups diverged markedly: those who had already ceased employment reported far higher rates of dissatisfaction with child domestic work, and far more experiences of exploitation and abuse, than those who were still employed in the sector. This paper explores issues of memory, identity, representation and performance to propose explanations for such dissonance. It concludes that the (near) exclusive focus of the literature on children who are currently employed is of some considerable concern, as scholars often make practical and policy-oriented recommendations about children’s work on the basis of their findings. This paper makes a case that all ‘versions’ of a phenomenon offer (at best) partial insights into lived experiences and that researchers investigating sensitive issues, whether with adults or children, may benefit from conducting research in both the past and present tense.     

Saving the Other: Exploring the social in social enterprise

Social enterprise is increasingly viewed by governments worldwide as a promising means of promoting development. In South Africa, too, this sector is identified as a strategic growth area. Although there is no final consensus on the definition of social enterprise, certain characteristics are generally agreed. These include the idea that social enterprise prioritises social needs over profit maximisation, and involves marginalised people within viable businesses that have socially beneficial outcomes. Academic research on social enterprise has largely come from business studies, focusing on the internal functioning of social enterprise organisations, the figure of the social entrepreneur, the relationship between the social enterprise sector and the state, and on what the sector needs to flourish commercially. Social issues, especially analyses of power within the sector, have been relatively neglected. This paper addresses that gap, drawing on a wider development studies literature on the social economy to inform an examination of power relationships in the craft industry in South Africa, where narratives of social enterprise are pervasive. I argue that although empowerment is an explicit aim of many craft organisations, the most prominent discourses within the industry often rely on and perpetuate objectifying constructions of producers. These manifest particularly through notions of ’saving’, shaping a moral economy that entrenches difference along lines of black–white, north–south, and healthy-diseased. Such discourses run counter to the aims of empowerment that are central to the ethos of social enterprise, and should challenge both policymakers and academics to think carefully about how power works within the sector.     

Aggregating dispersed workers: Union organizing in the “care” industries

This paper analyzes recent union efforts to organize low-wage workers in the home- and community-based segments of homecare, childcare, and services to people with developmental disabilities in the US. In these sectors, consumer demand has combined with privatization to create an army of “flexible”, part-time, poverty-wage workers, most of them women, people of color, and immigrants. This workforce is profoundly fragmented due to the preponderance of small nonprofit employers, widespread self-employment, and spatially atomized labor performed within myriad private homes. However, service sector unions have adapted creatively to these opportunities and constraints by implementing two interlinked scale-jumping strategies to overcome care workers’ spatial and organizational atomization. One is state-by-state policy advocacy to raise labor (and service) standards industry-wide and to aggregate employment through various organizational and legal interventions. The other is coalition building with consumers and advocates at the local, state, and national level to generate essential political support for these measures. We find that the success of this strategy has been shaped in large part by the political landscape of region and the political economy of distinct care industry segments. Finally, the resulting care industry unionism constitutes a distinct strand of an emergent public services unionism—in which consumers and workers struggle to define care labor as a socially necessary public good, and workers pushed into the nebulous zone between state and market struggle to define themselves as public workers.     

Nature and culture in social science: the demarcation of domains of being in eighteenth century and modern discourses

Modern social science is concerned with policing the ‘boundary’ between nature and culture, with limiting and excluding phenomena which threaten to challenge its account of the social determination of the attributes of human beings. The paper argues that this boundary defence is an unusually touchy and difficult matter because social science has inherited an Enlightenment conception of man as ‘unique’. Human culture is regarded as different in quality from any possible form of animal association or attainment. At the same time as supporting this ontology it supposes the ‘boundary’ is in some sense a matter of empirical science, capable of specification by reference to evidence. We try to show the confusions these two contradictory circumstances produce by considering two debates: those concerning the possibility of ‘feral’ children and those concerning the uniqueness of language to human beings. It is demonstrated that the modern debates develop theories, issues and lines of dispute which appeared in the eighteenth century.     

Voluntarism,defensive localism and spaces of resistance to health care restructuring

This paper examines the evolving role of volunteers and the voluntary sector in shaping community responses to structural change in health care systems. It contributes to the emerging understanding of the different forms voluntarism can take within and among places, including as a space of resistance to contemporary restructuring initiatives such as regionalization. Within the geographies of voluntarism literature, however, little attention has been directed towards interrogating the local dynamics of such voluntarism, especially as it is reflected in public discourse. We address this deficiency through a media-based case study of public reaction to the recent implementation of Ontario’s Local Health Integration Networks (a type of regional health authority). Specifically, we examine a decade of newspaper coverage in a mid-size Canadian city region to document and characterize how the activities of volunteers and voluntary sector organizations in the community are portrayed in light of the structural imperatives to integrate health care services and regionalize health care governance. The media findings reveal a suite of public concerns and related activities, with the voluntary sector called upon in various ways to defend the autonomy of the community against the perceived threats to local services, employment and vulnerable populations. We interpret the evident complexity of voluntary sector resistance as a form of ‘defensive localism’ and discuss implications for developing informed policy on health care restructuring and for advancing knowledge on the local geographies of voluntarism.     

Geographies of crisis in Greece: A social well-being approach

The most prominent ‘victim’ of the global financial crisis in 2007/2008 has been Greece, which is, even now, in the middle of an economic and social storm that is threatening its economic and social cohesion and its membership of the Eurozone. Using the social well-being conceptual framework as a benchmark and exploiting the literature of composite indicators, the paper aims to assess and measure the regional impact of the crisis in a systematic and comprehensive way. Differing from most of previous studies, both at national and international levels, this study is based on the assumption that the effects of the crisis go far beyond economics and create a social crisis strongly associated with significant human and social costs that might transform Greece’s regional status and threaten its regional well-being, probably in a very unequal way. The main finding of the analysis is that although all regions were severely affected by the dynamics and intensity of the crisis, some regions were more affected than others, leading to ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. From a policy point of view, the results of this study have serious implications for crisis management, recovery policy actions and a country’s social cohesion, especially in Greece where austerity policy measures not only imposed considerable cutbacks in regional development policies but also ignored the spatial dimension of the crisis.     

Socioeconomic transformation in rural Romania through the eyes of experts: Demographic and social issues

There is no standard model of transformation for post- socialist countries and each country encounters specific problems rooted in the geographical characteristics of the areas concerned. The human resources are of the greatest importance because it really matters how people (especially the decision-makers) perceive system change and continually reformulate their expectations and strategies; so investigations into the views of people caught up in the transformation can provide a deeper understanding of the background to structural change. Working the national, regional level and local levels in Romania, experts were asked to consider the advantages and disadvantages arising out of the transformation, the most important problems and constraints for future rural development and the policies needed. The paper examines the responses on demographic and social issues. It emerges the most detailed responses were supplied by local-level representatives while respondents at the regional level steered a middle course between the need to address local problems and the prime importance of stimulating the Romanian economy so as to generate resources for welfare programmes (with the latter issue the overriding concern of interviewees at national level). There was general agreement on the importance of foreign investment and European integration for economic development, with local actors taking only small steps in line with the existing opportunities. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Tackling social exclusion in European neighbourhoods: experiences and lessons from the NEHOM project

Disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods with their complex social, economic and physical situations have increasingly become the focus of governmental policies in the EU. The emphasis has shifted from improving physical qualities to building opportunities for social groups in these areas. While physical upgrade is easier to achieve, at least in the short run, initiatives often fail in outcomes on communities and local participation. This paper aims to improve understanding on how to tackle area-based social exclusion and create socially coherent communities. Building on the results of the NEHOM project, the focus is on examining how various interventions have impacted local communities and their opportunities for better inclusion. A comparison between neighbourhoods shows that mixing social groups to a certain degree is likely to be a necessary step towards opening long-term opportunities for a disadvantaged neighbourhood. The planned initiatives should at the same time directly benefit local communities, and the involvement of local groups in the planning and implementation process helps to guarantee that the overall changes are accepted by the local community. However, the proposed guidelines do not provide a universal recipe for a successful renewal suiting each neighbourhood—the contextual matters should always be a starting point when planning an initiative.     

Struggles over work take place at home: Women’s decisions,choices and constraints in the Tiruppur textile industry,India

Examining women’s choices around paid work in south India, this article shows the need to pay greater attention to the sphere of reproduction, and in particular the way that women endeavour to fit their productive work around their reproductive roles and responsibilities. Focussing on the region of the Tiruppur garment cluster in Tamil Nadu, India, it outlines the opportunities available to rural women, shedding light first on women’s decisions whether to work or not, and second, on how women choose between particular types of work available to them. The article demonstrates the primacy of the reproductive economy in shaping women’s movements in and out of paid work, particularly the importance of stage in life course, household composition and patriarchal control to women’s decisions. Main findings of the article are that most women work, but their particular job choices reflect multiple social and reproductive constraints, while those who withdraw from work have been subjected to new expressions of patriarchy. The article advances understandings in feminist geographies of work by drawing on ethnographic insights to highlight the mutual embeddedness of the reproductive and productive economies.