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.     

Materializing post-colonial geographies: examining the textural landscapes of migration in the South Asian home

This paper considers the role of visual cultures in understanding the value of landscape to post-colonial migrants living in Britain. The paper also considers these visual cultures as prismatic devices which refract lived landscapes of South Asia and East Africa into British domestic scene. The visual cultures are investigated using a materialist lens. They are positioned as materials that allow embodied connections to landscapes experienced pre-migration, including sensory connections with past homes, natures and family life. These then become artefacts symbolising relationships with past landscapes, made meaningful in their presence in Britain homes. Using this materialist lens, visual cultures in the British Asian home, such as photographs, pictures, and paintings, are given meaning and value beyond their textual content. This paper is an exercise in reading visual cultures in the everyday through a materialist lens which allows for an examination of their place in the process of ‘making home' for South Asian women in Britain. In particular, objects presence the migratory experience of the South Asian community, importing ‘other' landscapes (previously shaped by colonial governance) into Britain, and help to shape environmental values, landscape imaginaries and South Asian landscapes of belonging in the post-colonial period.     

‘When I think home I think family here and there’: Translocal and social ideas of home in narratives of migrant children and young people

This paper offers theoretically informed empirical insights into migrant children’s experiences of mobility and home. Drawing on research into the first-generation children of Polish labour migrants in Scotland, the paper explores the meanings that children attach to home and other specific places. In particular, it focuses on questions of the translocal and social nature of migrant children’s sense of place and construction of home. The spoken narratives, subjective maps and drawings analysed here reflect children’s multiple and intersecting relationships and identifications, with both their country of origin and the host country, in addition to how their notion of home is grounded in social attachments. Emphasising the continuing importance of ‘place’ in migrant children and young people’s everyday experiences, the research concludes that subjective homemaking practices are just as important as objective educational attainment and other traditional social indicators in providing an understanding of the outcomes of migrant settlement. It also suggests that there is an emerging translocal identity among some young Polish migrants, whose changing understanding of home incorporates images and emotions from both their locality of origin and their current place of residence.     

Making risk real: Urban trees and the ontological politics of risk

Over the past several decades, risk has become a distinct field of social inquiry as scholars in a variety of disciplines have developed theories about the ‘nature’ of risk and the role it plays in contemporary society. Collectively, these theories enrich our understanding of the politics of risk, the dynamics of risk perception, and the way risk shapes and is shaped by space, culture, social change, and modes of governing in the neoliberal era. In this paper, however, we argue these theories are helpful but not entirely suited to understanding risk when it becomes the subject of something Whatmore (2009, p. 587, 2013) calls “environmental knowledge controversies”. These controversies are generative events where more-than-human agencies and the political and knowledge making practices of heterogeneous actors reshape our sense of the real. To address this issue, we draw on the concepts of enactment, multiplicity, and ontological politics to explore how different kinds of risk and tree were made more or less real during a contentious debate over the risk posed by a group of urban trees in Newcastle, Australia. This case study suggests we can think of risk and hazardous entities like trees as effects that also affect because they elicit interventions that transform bodies and spaces in more or less enduring ways. Attending to the enactment, multiplicity, and ontological politics of risk, we argue, provides an alternative way to navigate moments of political contestation over the assessment and management of risk that has implications for how these processes are conceived and conducted in the future.     

New housing/new crime? Changes in safety,governance and everyday incivilities for residents relocated from informal to formal housing at Hammond’s Farm,eThekwini

New state-subsidised ‘RDP’ housing in South Africa aims to provide former informally-housed residents with a better quality of life, stronger community and decreased levels of crime. Despite the state’s ambitions, this process is highly contradictory, increases in safety occurring alongside rising incivilities and tensions. This paper contributes to an emerging set of debates on the socio-political outcomes of state-led housing interventions in the global South, through an illustration of the limitations of efforts to produce ‘safe neighbourhoods’ in contexts of high unemployment alongside high levels of violence. The conceptual framing of ‘Southern Criminology’ (Carrington et al., 2015), centres the significance of histories of colonial and post-colonial violence, inequality, hybrid governance and justice practices, as well as informal living, and is employed to analyse recently housed residents’ experiences of crime and safety in South Africa, in a north eThekwini settlement, Hammond’s Farm. Recognising these ‘Southern’ factors, the paper argues that movement into new formal housing, is typified by significant material changes at the home and neighbourhood scale which foster privacy and safety, formalised governance practices and (partial) improvements in policing services. These occur in conjunction with access to new leisure activities including alcohol consumption and ‘township life’ which alongside ongoing poverty foster urban incivilities. A ‘Southern Criminology’ perspective frames concluding questions about the nature of crime in contexts of urban change, which are persistently shaped by inequality and wider historical and structural factors, challenging the state’s aspirations to achieve crime reduction through housing.     

“Where is home?” Here and there: transnational experiences of home among Canadian migrants in the United States

Using structured telephone interviews this research focuses on how Canadian migrants living in the United States experience and describe home. We argue that the globalisation of peoples’ lives, transnationalism and the concomitant creation of transnational social spaces have greatly affected the meaning of home for migrants. The understandings of home that result reflect the reality of living in social worlds that span two countries and the development of decentred multiple attachments and feelings of belonging in more than one place. In response to these circumstances Canadian migrants experience home as multi-dimensional, pluri-local, and characterized by regular movement across the U.S.–Canada border. When asked specifically about feeling at home upon re-entry to the U.S. many respondents answered yes. However, many interviewees qualified their answers by describing home in different ways and associating different aspects of their lives with each country. Canada as home was most often described in terms of family, while home in the U.S. was associated with work. Respondents also differentiated between feeling at home once they reached their residence as opposed to feeling unwelcome at the U.S. border.     

Britons abroad or European citizens? The negotiation of (trans)national space and citizenship by British migrants in France

This paper uses the concept of ‘ordinary citizenship’ (Staeheli et al., 2012) to explore the relationship between mobility, citizenship and political space in the European Union. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Britons living in South West France, the paper examines the ways in which citizenship is meaningful to migrants as a complexity of legal frameworks, normative structures and everyday activities. While EU citizenship has been advanced to underpin the formation of a closer Union, we demonstrate that contemporary forms of citizenship among these lifestyle migrants are shaped to a large extent by performances of national belonging, and individual interactions with other people at the local or community level. We argue that a bi-national structure of citizenship, or one based on domicile better accounts for the experiences of these migrants than supranational EU citizenship.     

Urban planning and politics in Ghana

Through an analysis of Ghana’s political and administrative structure, which established the basis of urban planning practice, this paper shows how urban planning has failed to create liveable and functional cities in Ghana. This paper uses semi-structured interviews and agency consultations to supplement document reviews and news paper articles to address the dearth of research on the subject in Ghana. Findings show that dominant political elites, with little or no urban planning background, control and dictate urban planning activities resulting in chaotic scenes and urban blight across Ghanaian cities. Analyses here reinforce the growing recognition that urban planning outcomes in Ghana, and most African countries are not shaped by professional practice and do not reflect the aspirations of the community, but instead political elites. Urban planning agencies are left vulnerable as their activities are interfered, dictated and hindered by both traditional and mainstream political elites. This paper advocates for independence of urban planning agencies in the performance of their duties.     

Sharing as sociomaterial practice: Car sharing and the material reconstitution of automobility

Sharing has become one of the buzzwords of contemporary urban life and scholarship, as cities and social lives are transformed by the share economy and collaborative consumption. This paper advances critical analysis of sharing economies through an investigation of the ways in which objects are mobilized in the practice of sharing. Drawing on an empirical base of 35 interviews conducted with Sydney residents using car sharing as a form of transport, we explicate the material entanglements that constitute car sharing in order to highlight the complex intersections of the object being shared, the constellations of objects brought into the orbit of the practice, and the code that flows through each. Bringing together a material-focused analysis into conversation with the concepts of share economies as both performed and hybrid, we advance the concepts of sharing as a set of socio-material entanglements. We argue that the divergent spatialities and temporalities of objects and humans both hold together and tear apart the experiences of sharing, which in turn underpins car sharing’s implications for the reconstitution of automobility.     

Work–life reconciliation: Including children in the conversation

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.     

“This is the mess that we are living in”: residents everyday life experiences of living in a stigmatized community

This paper is part of a larger community health study aimed at delineating the determinants of health in Sarnia. The paper specifically investigates Sarnia residents’ daily lived experiences, perceptions of and responses to living within the St. Clair River “Area of Concern” (AOC) as designated by the federal government based on the hypothesis that relatively high levels of environmental pollution in the region are negatively influencing human health. Results from in-depth interviews (N = 27) show that residents of Sarnia are conflicted by the elevation of awareness about environmental health threats by being labelled within an AOC. Residents use their emotional and sensual experiences to adopt appropriate coping strategies to live within a contaminated community. In contextualizing their everyday lived realities, residents argued that living in an AOC demands personal acceptance of the conditions in Sarnia and awareness of “bad air days” to cope with pollution exposure. Yet, residents were not willing to abandon Sarnia because of their cultural, social, and economical attachments to the place they call home. These findings suggest the need for local health policies that incorporate local concerns and perceptions of how environmental pollution affects people’s experiences and well-being. There is a necessity to involve community members as central participants in the process of policy making.     

Becoming “Hispanic” in the “New South”: Central American immigrants’ racialization experiences in Atlanta,GA, USA

For many migrants from Latin America, “Hispanic/Latino(a)” is an identity that they encounter in the United States with which they were unfamiliar in their home countries and must negotiate in their everyday lives in a new context. Specifically, immigrants from Central America are unlikely to see themselves as “Hispanic” or “Latino(a)” prior to living in the United States, more often identifying with their home country, city, town, village, or neighborhood. This paper draws on racialization theory and twenty-seven in-depth interviews with Central American immigrants in Atlanta, GA to examine this process of identity negotiation across the traditionally black/white racialized landscapes of a “New South” city. Interview participants adopt a racialized Hispanic identity through a complex process involving the interplay between how they think of themselves and their perceptions of how native-born Atlantans view them. The interview analysis presented herein demonstrates that although Central American immigrants actively negotiate a Hispanic racialized moniker, they do so within an urban context dominated by native-born residents whose racialized assumptions lump Spanish-speaking, brown skinned individuals into a monolithic “Mexican” category. Thus the ways in which racialized difference is constructed in contemporary Atlanta for recent Central American immigrants is very much bound up in such false presumptions of national identity and cultural group belonging.     

Vancouver’s newest Chinese diaspora: settlers or “immigrant prisoners”?

This study seeks to reground concepts of “diaspora” and “transnationalism” in the realities of everyday life through examining the lived experiences of immigrants. Based on in-depth household interviews and focus groups, it examines the newest Chinese diaspora in Vancouver—skilled immigrants from the People’s Republic of China. It explores the challenges that they face in an unfamiliar city, including employment and language barriers as well as domestic anxieties surrounding childcare, education and marital difficulties. The strategies that they adopt to counter these problems are at times transnational—in the form of astronaut families or transnational childcare—but almost always familial. Ultimately, the settlement challenges that they face, coupled with the available transnational possibilities, raise the question of whether they are settlers or “immigrant prisoners”, temporarily serving their time in Vancouver before a further relocation.     

Health and safety in garment workers’ lives: Setting a new research agenda

Amidst new global initiatives to promote garment workers’ health and safety following a spate of deadly factory disasters across the Global South, this critical review calls for an expanded research agenda that looks beyond the workplace to examine the complex politics, spatialities, and temporalities of garment workers’ health and wellbeing. Drawing on ethnographic research on garment workers across South Asia, we argue against a narrow, technocratic, and depoliticised emphasis on physical infrastructures and building safety, and advocate instead a more holistic and politically-engaged research approach to the everyday health and wellbeing of workers. A conceptual focus on health and wellbeing offers a window onto workers’ employment experiences and reveals how routine work pressures, exhaustion and ill health are shaped by the dynamics of global supply chains, even well after workers have disengaged from these global circuits. Understanding how garment work affects workers’ wellbeing and their prospects for a fulfilling life requires research that moves beyond the workplace and covers the entire life course.     

New friends in new places: Network formation during the migration process among Poles in the UK

This paper contributes to on-going work that seeks to understand the dynamic nature of immigrant social network formation. We explore three propositions, derived from the literature, that might be expected to characterise the ways in which migrant associational ties evolve during and immediately after arrival in their destination country. Evidence is drawn from 42 interviews conducted between January and December 2008 with predominantly Polish migrants to the UK (28) as well as domestic service providers (14). In agreement with the existing literature on immigrant social network formation we find that weak associational ties between migrants are locally dense and rapidly formed. More surprisingly, we also find that the Poles in our sample from lower socio-economic groups tended to rely heavily upon weak associational ties while higher socio-economic group Poles tended to rely on associations made through their employing institutions. This illustrates the importance of socio-economic status in framing co-ethnic migrant network formation. This is significant because we also find that weak associational ties are not unambiguously beneficial to lower socio-economic group migrants who tend to (have to be) more compromising about, and therefore more compromised by, the social ‘friendships’ that result.     

Downslope‐migrating sandwaves and platform‐margin clinoforms in a current‐dominated,distally steepened temperate‐carbonate ramp (Guadix Basin,Southern Spain)

During the Late Tortonian, platform‐margin‐prograding clinoforms developed at the south‐western margin of the Guadix Basin. Large‐scale wedge‐shaped deposits here comprise 26 rhythms of mixed carbonate–siliciclastic bedset packages and marl beds. These sediments were deposited on a shallow‐water, temperate‐carbonate distally steepened ramp. A downslope‐migrating sandwave field developed in this ramp, with sandwaves moving progressively down the ramp to the ramp‐slope, where they destabilized, folded and occasionally collapsed. Downslope sandwave migration was induced by currents flowing basinwards. During the Late Tortonian, the Guadix Basin was open north to the Atlantic Ocean via the Dehesas de Guadix Strait and connected east to the Mediterranean Sea through the Almanzora Corridor. According to the proposed current circulation model for the Guadix Basin for this time, surface marine currents from the Atlantic entered the basin from the northern seaway. These currents moved counter‐clockwise and shifted the sediment on the ramp, forming sandwaves that migrated downslope. The development of platform‐margin prograding clinoforms by the basinward sediment‐transport mechanisms inferred here is known relatively poorly in the ancient sedimentary record. Moreover, these wedge‐shaped geometries are similar to those found in some shelves in the Western Mediterranean Sea and could represent an outcrop analogue to (sub)‐recent, platform‐margin clinoforms revealed by high‐resolution seismic studies.     

Role of women as risk communicators to enhance disaster resilience of Bandung,Indonesia

This study addresses the need for women risk communication and highlights the potential role of Women Welfare Associations (WWAs) of Bandung, Indonesia, as risk communicators. A risk communication framework is modeled for women’s risk communication process. A set of indicators in social, institutional, and economic resilience activities (SIERAs), with a scope of 45 activities covering three different disaster periods, were developed to characterize the delivery process of risk information by women in WWAs through their activities at sub-district and ward levels. The data were collected through a questionnaire survey method using the risk communication SIERA approach. Women’s leaders at wards were surveyed concerning their perceptions on these 45 scopes of SIERA, ongoing activities, and their risk information source and dissemination process. Correlation analysis was applied to determine the relationship between the variables such as periods of disaster, types of activities (social, institutional, economic), and attributing factors (location, population, and education institution) in finding variations in risk communication activity that functions for women and communities. Five risk communication processes of WWAs are identified and implemented that work for women in Bandung. When their perceptions and ongoing activities are compared, activities such as dissemination of disaster risk information, conveying early warnings to their peers, and involvement of the local government have been confirmed to match the risk communication plans and implementation of WWAs. These indicate that WWAs’ activities in Bandung implement a certain degree of risk communication that is embedded in their activities. The results confirm that women through their social networks can become active agents of change and thus act beyond their usual domestic roles and responsibilities in order to contribute to the overall enhancement of community resilience.

     

The indigenous ecotourism and social development in Taroko National Park area and San-Chan tribe, Taiwan

This paper explores the socio-cultural influence of the newly established ecotourism, which integrates cultural revitalization, ecological conservation and social development, in both Taroko National Park area and San-Chan aboriginal community. Many cases in different parts of the world indicate that the Indigenous peoples have developed patterns of resource use and management practices that reflect detailed knowledge of local geography and ecosystem, and contribute to the natural conservation through their living practices. The guidelines of Indigenous knowledge and culture lay the base for the development of ecotourism. A critical evaluation of the conceptualization of Indigenous knowledge is therefore, essential to the success of an alternative strategy to development for aboriginal communities. Participatory observation in the field of ecotourism activities and brief interviews are the major study methods, with several workshops conducted to supplement data collection for the two case studies. The Taroko area came into contact with tourists in a relative early era due to its famous natural features and national park. Its growing ecotourism is the result of cooperation among local residents, environmentalists, and academics, each with very different concepts of ecotourism operation. The national park and public sectors have also played significant role in shaping the content of ecotourism. In San-Chan community, due to the negative impacts generated by the unregulated mass tourism expansion, the local Indigenous people decide to close the public access to the attractive creek for 3?years, while at the same time promote ecotourism for poverty alleviation. These two cases embrace the ??Nature?? as an important element in their construction of new place identity and community development. However, their spatial location in- or outside the national park produces significant differences and sociopolitical implications on the operations of ecotourism.     

Nature and cosmic integrity a search in Hindu geographical thought

The roots of Hindu geographic thought can be traced to the remote past, going back at least to c. 3500 BC. Formerly the unity of Nature and Man was expressed in the context of religious activities. The idea of nature and human integrity in Hindu thought depends upon ways in which people see and experience themselves, their sense of attachment to nature, and their ways of maintaining this. It is through symbolism, the main expression of mythological understanding, that one can gain insight into the relationships of humanity to Nature. Creation and incarnation myths describe the origin of organic life and of its five basic elements. The integrity of dwelling in space is expressed through the notion of home. Religion plays a vital role in the Hindu quest for harmony between nature and humanity.Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both (Capra 1976, p. 297).     

Is better to be a kayayei than to be unemployed: reflecting on the role of head portering in ghana’s informal economy

The implementation of neoliberal economic reforms with its resultant effects on rural agricultural economies has facilitated the migration of young girls from northern to southern Ghana to seek for alternative livelihoods in the urban informal economy as head porters (Kayayei). Using semi-structured questionnaires and interviews with 45 Kayayei in Makola and Agbogbloshie Markets, Accra, this study examines how migration as a livelihood strategy contributes to an improvement in the living conditions of young girls and their families. The paper also looks more closely into the pathways through which the livelihoods of these young female migrants may contribute to local economic development. The study highlights that Kayayei contribute to local economic development through market exchange and revenue generation, also there is significant perceived positive impact of head portering on standard of living of these young girls through improved access to income, health care and asset accumulation while their families benefit from remittances. The study concludes by advocating for the need to provide access to credit and skills training in enhancing the livelihood of Kayayei.