Rural mental health and social geographies of caring

This paper contributes to an emerging geographical literature on the social geographies of caring. Drawing on recently undertaken empirical work in the Scottish Highlands, personal accounts about the provision of both formal and informal care for people with mental health problems are evaluated. The notion of ‘community care’ is critiqued, as too are claims about how rural and remote rural locations engender particular configurations of caring roles, practices and relations. It is shown that geographical distance, social proximity, stoic cultures and rural gossip networks all have a part to play in how caring occurs in such places. The paper concludes by suggesting areas of future research.     

Young people,place and devolved politics: perceived scale(s) of political concerns among under 18s living in Wales

Despite clear linkages between conceptualisations and perceptions of politics, society, culture and territorial rescaling, research into young people’s political engagement, participation and representation is underrepresented in the field of social and cultural geography. Here the gap is addressed using perceptions of devolved politics, as a form of territorial rescaling, among young people living in Wales. Specifically, it shows the geographical scales at which young people locate their political concerns and where responsibility for these concerns is perceived to lie, with a focus on the National Assembly for Wales and the Welsh Government. This is a key contribution to our understanding of the role devolution plays in youth political engagement in the light of the following: the relative infancy of the devolved U.K. institutions; their asymmetrical development and increasing divergences; the growing variation in turnout among young people for different types of election and referenda; and the lack of research examining the youth engagement dimension of Welsh devolution as a political, social and cultural process of territorial rescaling in the U.K. The paper concludes with a critique of the notion that devolution poses a ‘politics of hope’ for youth political engagement in Wales, a very different picture to Scotland.     

Heritage,transnational memory and the re-diasporisation of Scotland

For a long time in Scotland, diasporic – and popular – heritage with its imaginary emphasising kinship, stylised images and ritualised practices was either overlooked or discredited. The term ‘diaspora’ itself to define Scotland’s vast overseas population has been scrutinised for its usefulness. However, since devolution, it has gained currency in public discourse and policies and has led to the ‘re-diasporisation’ of Scotland. Yet, the ‘diaspora’ had long been identified as an important niche market in relation to heritage perceived as an economic resource. This article explores the changing perception and place of diasporic heritage in Scotland since the 1970s through two case studies. Focusing on processes of remembrance of nineteenth-century Highland emigration materialised through monuments and museums, it highlights the conflicting and shifting relationships that different communities – home and diasporic – have with their past, place and the meanings ascribed to them. The transnational memories increasingly promoted in Scotland act as a means of re-energising nationhood and initiating revisions and re-reading of popular and diasporic culture.     

The space between: using ‘relational ethics’ and ‘relational space’ to explore relationship-building between care providers and care recipients in the home space

Geographers and other social scientists have a longstanding interest in ‘geographies of aging’ focused on the provision of care to vulnerable older populations and the challenges and experiences of caregivers [Skinner, M. W., Cloutier, D., & Andrews, G. J. (2014). Geographies of ageing: Progress and possibilities after two decades of change. Progress in Human Geography, 1–24]. This qualitative research project explores strategies for relationship-building used by home support workers and older residents according to a ‘relational ethics’ framework, enacted in the ‘relational space’ of the home environment. This framework rests on four principles: engagement, embodiment, mutual respect and environment, and argues that ‘relationships’ between care providers and care recipients must be preserved as the real essence or heart of the health care experience. Two linked conclusions are drawn from the research: that the treatment of the environment can be expanded using a social geographic lens to capture the more active influence of ‘homes’ on relationship-building and second, the relational ethics framework is useful in the home care context to characterize and ground the importance of relationships in the home care domain and the importance of home care to foster aging in place for vulnerable older persons.     

‘The Best-Laid Schemes o’ Mice an’ Men’? Proposals,Planning, Defeat,and Legacy,of Devolution in the 1970s*

The question of whether devolved assemblies should be established for Scotland and Wales dominated considerable parliamentary time in the 1970s and became a key pillar of the Labour government's legislative agenda after the two 1974 general elections. The main building blocks of the government's devolution proposals for Scotland and Wales were in place from 1975 with the publication of the white paper, Our Changing Democracy, which outlined proposals for a primary lawmaking assembly for Scotland and a Scottish executive, operating under a ‘conferred powers model of devolution’. For Wales, the assembly was to be a body corporate (with no split between executive and assembly) exercising only executive functions and able only to pass secondary legislation. With some important modifications (including crucially the requirement for a referendum, which was then further amended to require a Yes tally equating to 40% of the electorates in both nations), these proposals were eventually incorporated into law as the Scotland and Wales Acts 1978. While the political debates surrounding devolution in this period are well known, less attention has been paid to the practical plans undertaken by the civil service for devolution to become a reality. Considerable time was spent drawing up, from an early stage, detailed preparations for devolution, particularly in Scotland. In Wales, planning was more tentative, yet, none the less, was taken seriously by the Welsh Office. These plans never materialised in the way envisaged, with neither Welsh nor Scottish devolution able to pass the referendum thresholds put in place. However, as this article also demonstrates, both the Scotland and Wales Acts had a constitutional legacy when devolution became reality under New Labour in the late 1990s.     

‘It’s good but it’s not enough’: the relational geographies of social policy and youth mentoring interventions

Developing a critical analysis of the relational and situated practices of social policy, this paper draws on an evaluation of an early intervention project in Scotland (UK) where volunteer adult mentors supported young people ‘at risk’ of offending or antisocial behaviour. Contributing to ‘enlivened’ accounts of social practice, we explore how practices of mentoring developed through the co-presence of mentor and young person in the often transitory spaces of care which characterized the ‘diversionary activities’ approach in the project. We expand the notion of the relational in social practice beyond the care-recipient dyad to include wider networks of care (families, programme workers, social institutions). The paper explores how such social interventions might both be ‘good’ for the young people involved, and yet recognize critiques that more individualized models of intervention inevitably have limitations which make them ‘not enough’ to deal with structural inequalities and disadvantages. Acknowledging the impacts of neoliberalism, we argue critical attention to diverse situated relational practices points to the excessive nature of engagement in social policy and provides scope for transformative practice where young people’s geographies can be ‘upscaled’ to connect to the realms of social policy and practice.     

The contested meanings of home for women caring for children with long-term care needs in Ontario,Canada

Home as a place of caring is theorized using the literature from geography, sociology, housing and feminist studies. To support our theorization, grounded theory is used to capture and interpret the experiences of women caring for children with long-term care needs in the home. Eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with women in Ontario, Canada uncovered differences in the way the women perceived their homes and highlighted their multiple and complex experiences. The findings revealed three key issues. First, women do not want their homes to be completely defined by long-term care activities as many other types of activities are situated in their homes. Second, long-term care activities and schedules are not segregated but become deeply embedded and enmeshed within the spatial and temporal practices and processes of family life. Third, the meanings, characteristics and ideal of ‘home’ portrayed in popular culture and the academic literature often clashed with what the women experienced on a daily basis. Analysis revealed the tensions surrounding ‘reconstructing spaces in the home’ and ‘the home as a private and public place’ which are indicative of the women's struggles with the disjuncture between the ideal and lived home. The women's experiences challenge us to consider new ways of theorizing the home, and the home when it is a place where long-term care is provided.     

Location or dis-location? Towards a conceptualization of people and place in the care-giving experience

Over the last two decades we have seen an increased interest in informal care within both political and academic communities in the UK. This has stemmed in large part from an increased emphasis on the home-space as the preferred site of care provision and a resultant increase in the complexity of the care-giving relationship. The explicitly spatial dimensions of this caring relationship, however, are vastly under-researched. This paper represents one attempt to redress the gap by examining the importance of place, and its conceptualization, in the care of frail older people. In doing so, the paper focuses, firstly, on the spatial manifestation of care at various scales, identifying some of the processes behind variations in the care-giving experience and, secondly, using the example of dementia care, it considers how Auge´'s concepts of anthropological place and non-space, when applied to domestic and institutional care settings, can facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the importance of people and place in the construction and delivery of care to frail older people.     

Ethics of care,emotional work,and collective action of solidarity: the Patronas in Mexico

In this paper, we examine the mobilization of the Patronas, a group of Mexican women who have fed thousands of Central American migrants over the past two decades. We argue that the Patronas’ work of feeding and caring for migrants goes beyond essentializing these women’s work as just housewives, mothers, and caregivers. Furthermore, we assert that through these care activities, the Patronas exert a feminist ethic of care that is understood as a set of practices based on trust, reciprocity, and solidarity. The Patronas’ praxis of caring for the migrants resonates with people and attracts hundreds of volunteers to join these women’s emotional and nurturing work leading these women and volunteers to participate in a political practice of solidarity. In this paper, we articulate three key findings: (1) the interplay between the Patronas’ emotional work and the ethics of care, (2) the emergence of a collective act of solidarity around the Patronas’ caring work that leads hundreds of volunteers to visit these women and join them, and (3) the kitchen as a place where the collective act of solidarity begins and where the Patronas experience their personal transformation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this study contributes to further our understanding of the interplay between Latin American women’s participation in social movements, emotional work in these movements, and the ethics of care.     

A love story: for ‘Buddy System’ research in the academy

This article makes a case for a ‘buddy system’ approach to research and scholarship, or a kind of ‘caring with’ our colleagues, as feminist praxis and as an intentional, politicized response to the neoliberalization of the academy. Through autoethnographic writing on our travels together into farmed animal auction yards, we explain the buddy system as a mode of caring, solidarity, and love that differs from collaborative research, focused as it is on caring for and about our colleagues and their research even (or especially) when we have no direct stakes in the research being conducted. We contribute to three feminist conversations with this approach: feminist care ethics in geography; emotional geographies; and critical perspectives on the neoliberalization of the academy. We advocate the buddy system as an extension of feminist care ethics, enriching how feminists think about ‘doing’ research. We draw on feminist geographies of emotion and our own emotions (grief especially) experienced while witnessing processes of nonhuman animal commodification to politicize the act of researching and to develop a more caring way of inhabiting the academy. This is particularly important, we argue, in the context of deepening neoliberal logics that turn the academy into a place where care and love become radical acts of resistance and transformation.     

Brands of youth citizenship and the politics of scale: National Citizen Service in the United Kingdom

This paper explores the politics of scale in the context of youth citizenship. We propose the concept of ‘brands of youth citizenship’ to understand recent shifts in the state promotion of citizenship formations for young people, and demonstrate how scale is crucial to that agenda. As such, we push forward debates on the scaling of citizenship more broadly through an examination of the imaginative and institutional geographies of learning to be a citizen. The paper's empirical focus is a state-funded youth programme in the UK – National Citizen Service – launched in 2011 and now reaching tens of thousands of 15–17 year olds. We demonstrate the ‘branding’ of youth citizenship, cast here in terms of social action and designed to create a particular type of citizen-subject. Original research with key architects, delivery providers and young people demonstrates two key points of interest. First, that the scales of youth citizenship embedded in NCS promote engagement at the local scale, as part of a national collective, whilst the global scale is curiously absent. Second, that discourses of youth citizenship are increasingly mobilised alongside ideas of Britishness yet fractured by the geographies of devolution. Overall, the paper explores the scalar politics and performance of youth citizenship, the tensions therein, and the wider implications of this study for both political geographers and society more broadly at a time of heated debate about youthful politics in the United Kingdom and beyond.     

Grief as method: topographies of grief,care, and fieldwork from Northwest Arkansas to New York and the Marshall Islands

Abstract

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief’s methodological implications using the concept of ‘grief as method,’ an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, ‘grief as method’ also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of ‘caring with’ our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief’s geographical features—its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance—shape ‘grief as method’ profoundly. I examine grief’s spatial implications by building on Katz’s ‘topography’ to theorize a ‘topography of grief’ that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions (‘the field’ vs. ‘the not-field’) and methodological ones (the ‘researcher-self’ vs. the ‘personal-self’). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters—relationships between people—are forged through grief. ‘Grief as method,’ in offering a spatial analysis of grief’s impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place.     

The Debate that Had to Happen But Never Did: The Changing Role of Australian Local Government

The past few decades have witnessed a significant transformation in the composition of Australian local government service provision away from its traditional narrow emphasis on ‘services to property’ towards a broader ‘services to people’ approach. This process has occurred by default in an ad hoc incremental manner with virtually no debate on the changing role of local councils, unlike the New Zealand experience where a similar transition in service delivery generated public debate. In an effort to stimulate a ‘debate that had to happen but never did’, this paper seeks to establish whether a significant shift in the service mix of Australian municipalities has indeed taken place and then evaluates three stylized models of local government that could be adopted in Australia: minimalist councils; optimalist councils; and maximalist councils.     

Place mapping with teenagers: locating their territories and documenting their experience of the public realm

The purpose of this paper is to present, analyse and critique a research method, ‘place mapping’, used to document and understand teenagers' experience, use and perception of public spaces. Researchers in two case study sites, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Sacramento, CA, employed conventional street maps as a basis for eliciting and recording young people's spatial experiences. This method offers an effective mechanism for generating and structuring discussion – through dialogue – by the participants about their dynamic and shared experience of place, geographically recording places and ensuring equitable participation.     

What Is the Benefit of Community Benefits? Exploring Local Perceptions of the Provision of Community Benefits from a Commercial Wind Energy Project

Where community ownership of renewable energy projects is not feasible, there remains potential for residents to profit from locally sited projects through a ‘community benefits’ package from a commercial developer, usually as an annual cash payment to a community organisation. Despite support from policy-makers and developers for community benefit packages, the relationship between the benefit package and acceptance of renewable energy projects is not straightforward. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with local residents and other community actors near a wind development in central Scotland, this paper examines the ‘process’ and ‘outcome’ dimensions of the design and provision of community benefits, and considers how the relationship between these two dimensions affects local perceptions of the benefit of community benefits. Analysis of interviewees’ perceptions of the community engagement ‘process’ at the planning stage and the community benefit package ‘outcome’ reveals how a poorly defined engagement process, combined with a benefits package that is not deemed suitable for the needs of the community, can lead to negative perceptions of the project, even when these were initially positive. These findings have implications for renewable energy policy in Scotland, particularly as there is currently no legal obligation for developers to consult communities on community benefit arrangements.     

Parental death as a vital conjuncture? Intergenerational care and responsibility following bereavement in Senegal

This article explores the ways that parental death represents a ‘vital conjuncture’ for Serer young people that reconfigures and potentially transforms intergenerational caring responsibilities in different spatial and temporal contexts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with young people (aged 15–27 years), family members, religious and community leaders and professionals in rural and urban Senegal, I explore young people's responses to parental death. ‘Continuing bonds’ with the deceased were expressed through memories evoked in homespace, shared family practices and gendered responsibilities to ‘take care of’ bereaved family members, to cultivate inherited farmland and to fulfil the wishes of the deceased. Parental death could reconfigure intergenerational care and lead to shifts in power dynamics, as eldest sons asserted their position of authority. While care-giving roles were associated with agency, the low social status accorded to young women's paid and unpaid domestic work undermined their efforts. The research contributes to understandings of gendered nuances in the experience of bereavement and continuing bonds and provides insight into intra-household decision-making processes, ownership and control of assets. Analysis of the culturally specific meanings of relationships and a young person's social location within hierarchies of gender, age, sibling birth order and wider socio-cultural norms and practices is needed.     

Geographies of Swimming Pool Provision: Lessons from Glasgow 1804–2014

Swimming is a popular form of recreation and exercise in the UK and US. Swimming can take place outdoors but, particularly in the UK, largely takes place in designated indoor pools. Existing research tends to focus on ‘public’ or ‘municipal’ pools leaving broader spatial geographies of swimming pool provision under explored. In response to concern about swimming pool closures, this paper draws from extensive archival research into all swimming pools in the City of Glasgow, Scotland, since the first opened in 1804. Formal and informal programmes of pool building and closure were revealed. Rather than decreasing, public provision has remained constant for the last 100?years but become progressively more spread out in relation to the city’s changing size. Broadening exploration beyond the ‘public’ category exposed a vast drop in school pool numbers around the year 2000 due to a Private Finance Initiative project that consolidated the secondary school estate and outsourced school building management. The lessons: researching all types of swimming pool through time greatly enriches understandings of the changing meaning and extent of public service provision.     

In what sense ‘spaces of neoliberalism’? The new localism,the new politics of scale,and town twinning

This paper draws on a study of town twinning in Britain since 1945 to engage with narratives of ‘the new localism’ and ‘the new politics of scale’. It argues that town twinning is often used in technical assistance programmes such as the UK Government's Know How Fund and various schemes of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum. ‘Fast policy’ is a concept that can be usefully applied to these programmes and the broader field of interurban networking, urban policy mobility, and policy transfer. Town twinning plays an active yet overlooked role in fast policy. The paper also argues that town twinning is part of a longer history of bottom-up localism that includes the political arguments of John Stuart Mill, at least two moments of twentieth-century municipal internationalism, the municipal foreign policy movement of the 1980s, and the community development movement of the last three decades. This longer history suggests sources of localism other than statecraft, and problematises the conceptualisation of power and periodisation of history found in regulation theories of devolution.     

Troubling meanings of family and competing moral imperatives in the family lives of young people with a parent who is at the end of life

ABSTRACT

This article draws on a narrative study of young people with a parent who is at the end of life to examine how family lives are troubled by life-limiting parental illness. Young people struggled to reconcile the physical and emotional absence of family members with meanings of ‘family’; the extent to which young people could rely on family to ‘be there’ in these troubling circumstances was of practical, emotional and moral significance. Our discussion is situated in the context of an English end of life care policy predicated on the ideal of a good death as one that takes place at home accompanied by family members. We explore how the shift away from family as a site for nurturing children towards family as a space to care for the dying is experienced by young people, and consider how these competing moral imperatives are negotiated through relational practices of care.     

Introduction: The gendered geographies of ‘bodies across borders’

This paper introduces the articles that comprise the themed section ‘bodies across borders’ which investigates how the social and spatial dynamics of healthcare provision are being transformed by both neo-liberalization and globalization. The articles demonstrate how the central tenets of neoliberalism: the promotion of individual autonomy as realized through the instrument of consumer choice, the privatization, outsourcing and off-shoring of core competencies and service provision, the production of highly ‘flexible’ labour are at work in re-shaping access to, and delivery of, services in the domains of reproductive health, organ donation and globalized healthcare. In paying special attention to the ways in which these practices are cut across by class, gender and ethnicity, these accounts will hopefully encourage us to reject totalizing and homogeneous narratives of medical travel in favour of those that offer more nuanced understandings of the positionality of the individuals at the heart of them.