A safer city centre for all? Senses of `community safety' in Newcastle upon Tyne

In recent years, many city authorities in Europe and North America have sought to attract people back to city centres for leisure, shopping, business and residence. The planning measures commonly adopted take explicit account of issues of crime and safety. The concept of `community safety' as applied to the city centre is problematic, however, as users have diverse lifestyles, interests and values which impact on their own and others' safety. This paper reports on a study of the experiences and perceptions of safety of different groups of city centre users in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. While social identities and roles shaped the extent of concern and subsequent impacts on people's use of the city centre space, the research suggested that many concerns are genuinely shared. The paper investigates the congruence of a range of planning strategies with city centre users' safety concerns. Situational measures were viewed with scepticism, as fear centres on the presence and behaviour of others.     

Interviewing in 'place': the socio-spatial construction of interview data

The intersubjective dialogic exercise through which identities and knowledge are constructed exists in a dialectic relation with the 'place' of the interview. The in situ nature of interviewing should not be overlooked. Two case studies of interviews conducted with older people in Britain about their social network and support are used to illuminate two aspects of the socio-spatial construction of interview data. First, interview sites can yield important information about the way participants construct their individual and social identities. Second, such identities can influence interviewer–interviewee dynamics.     

Getting Personal: Reflexivity,Positionality, and Feminist Research*

Feminist and poststructural challenges to objectivist social science demand greater reflection by the researcher with the aim of producing more inclusive methods sensitive to the power relations in fieldwork. Following a discussion of contrasting approaches to these power relations, I present a reflexive examination of a research project on sexual identities. My reflections highlight some of the key ethical questions that face researchers conducting fieldwork, especially with regard to the relationship between the researcher and those being researched. My discussion of these dilemmas reflect the situated and partial nature of our understanding of “others.” I argue that the researcher's positionality and biography directly affect fieldwork and that fieldwork is a dialogical process which is structured by the researcher and the participants.     

Centralized power and divided space: `Fractured regions' in the Israeli `ethnocracy'

This paper uses a critical political-geographical perspective to account for the high centrality of power found in Israel. It suggests that the concentration of power have not been solely caused by national solidarity and integration or by metropolitan development, as commonly explained, but also by the territorial `fracturing' of the main social and ethnic groups in Israel/Palestine. This has prevented the emergence of effective pressure for regional devolution. Israel's character as a settler and settling state, and its central project of Judaizing contested territories, enabled the Israeli `ethnocracy' and its (mainly Ashkenazi and secular) elites to create a political geography of `fractured ethnic and social regions'. Dispersing minorities and legitimizing segregation and inequality, all in the name of the `national interest', achieved this. The Israeli political landscape is therefore organized as `fractured regions', each representing a distinct and interconnected, yet geographically dispersed, set of localities, and resembling a `chain of beads'. The logic of dispersal and segregation, in turn, has also influenced patterns of development and residential separation within Israel's main urban areas. Thus, ethnic and social fragmentation and conflict, and not a putative process of national or metropolitan integration, can explain much of Israel's highly centralized power structure.     

Exploring Chile: Identities and Their Relation with the Environment through the Film Football Stories

Cinema can be considered a useful tool for understanding different geographic concepts, showing physical and human factors and the interactions between them. Andres Wood's film Football Stories explores the Chilean territory allowing the observation of the differences between the north and south of the country. Geographic components such as landscapes, architectures, the impact of anthropogenic activities, social inequalities, ways of life, and city and countryside differences are analyzed, as well as the importance of location, the spatial environment, and cinematic narration. The study of geography through films could contribute to understanding of our world and to spatial knowledge.     

Contesting Domestic Ideals: queering the Australian home

The Australian home is a crucial site for both normalising and contesting acceptable modes of sexual identity, desire and behaviour. Social norms and government policies have imbricated the detached suburban dwelling with the heterosexual nuclear family form, consequently heterosexualising the ideal Australian home. But this discourse is simultaneously challenged by the domestic practices of gay men and lesbians, who use their homes to consolidate gay/lesbian identities, relationships and communities. As such, they unsettle the normative heterosexuality underpinning dominant, ideal conceptions of home. In this paper I present four vignettes which illustrate how some gay men and lesbians queer the ideal Australian home, generating domestic spaces which affirm sexual difference. In doing so, I highlight two key ways in which this process of ‘queering home’ works. First, through certain uses of home—activities taking place within domestic space. Second, through changes to the materiality of domestic space itself wrought by some homemaking practices, effectively embedding gay/lesbian identities and relationships within the physical environment of the home.     

一些组合恒等式的概率方法证明

本文通过Stirling数等特殊组合数的概率表示,结合着已有的基本恒等式,演化得到了若干新的关于常见组合变量的恒等式及递推关系,同时对一些已有的组合恒等式及递推关系给出了新的概率的证明。     

(RE-)Creating the Community: South Asian Transnationalism on Chicago's Devon Avenue

As one of the largest South Asian business districts in North America, Chicago's Devon Avenue is reproduced through the transnational connections of South Asian migrants. These ties encompass the diaspora as well as the more commonly theorized links between "home" and "host" societies. Based on fieldwork consisting of interviews and participant observation on Devon Avenue, this study considers how Devon Avenue functions as a transnational site, and therefore suggests the ways in which it reconceptualizes national and urban spaces. An examination of the transnational linkages that produced Devon Avenue, alongside its promotion as an "international marketplace" and the daily interactions among merchants, laborers, and residents, also considers the ways in which expressions of difference are marked by multiplicity and contingency.     

CULTURAL VALUES OF WETLANDS IN BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION IN NEPAL

Traditional culture bears a dynamic,cosmologi-cal vision in the wetland ecology and its biodiversityconservation in Nepal.The role of culture and rela-tionship in wetland biodiversity protection and wiseuse has not well been documented yet.Wetlands likeri…