Councils,consultations and community: rethinking the spaces for children and young people's participation1

The participation of children and young people in decisions that affect them is now mainstream in social and public policy in the UK. Yet for many young people formal participation opportunities are abstracted from everyday lives and concerns. Children may not feel empowered despite the existence of formal structures for participation. This raises questions about how ‘spaces’ for participation are constructed. This paper critiques prevailing models of participation in formal structures and instead, argues for the need to rethink children's participation as a more diverse set of social processes rooted in everyday environments and interactions.     

Picturing the poor: fundraising and the depoliticisation of homelessness

In this paper, we discuss the role images play in attracting charitable donations in an English homeless shelter. Focusing in particular on two image-based projects which feature service-users (one series of black-and-white still photography and one series of film clips posted on YouTube), we draw on interviews with fundraisers and the homeless participants themselves to discuss how they motivated their involvement and what impact they hoped the images would achieve. We conclude by providing some snapshots of how earlier images produced in the shelter have been circulated.     

基于日常生活的消费空间生产:一个消费空间的文化研究框架

回顾消费空间的文化研究与地理研究,指出文化与社会、政治、经济复合的视角成为近年来消费空间研究的特征。提出日常生活的视角能够整合、批判地进行消费空间的文化研究。并结合空间生产理论,建立消费空间的文化研究框架。作者指出,施加于日常的惯习、规训与日常内部的抵抗、诗性构成消费空间生产的核心机制。社会结构、政治经济、生活样式在日常中纽结为消费空间生产的动力源。借助列斐伏尔三元空间概念,指出消费空间生产中的支配与被支配、底部与顶部、文化与资本、地方与全球等一系列辩证过程与机制。     

Drifting Along or Dropping into Homelessness: A Class Analysis of Responses to Homelessness

Abstract: Prominent assumptions about street homelessness and how it should be addressed originate primarily from middle class domiciled worldviews. This article draws on interviews with 58 street homeless people to develop a typology for explaining different forms of homelessness resulting from differences in class of origin. The concepts of social distance and abjection are used to illustrate how class politics manifests in street homelessness and in responses to this issue. Many of our homeless participants referred to two broad groupings of homeless people who display distinct experiences and cultures in their daily lives on the streets. Drifters are people who do not experience homelessness as a sharp disjuncture from their previously housed life. Street homelessness is a continuation of the hardships of their lower class backgrounds. Droppers are people who have “fallen” on hard times and aspire to return to mainstream middle class lifeworlds. Differentiating between these two groups provides a space for defamiliarizing dominant understandings of, and current generic responses to, homelessness and foregrounds the need for reorienting services to better meet the needs of drifters.     

集市:民俗学理解日常生活的新视野

集市是广泛存在于世界各地区各民族的商品交易形式,也是地方社会生活在空间上的浓缩。以流动为特征的集市为地方性知识的生成与表述、民俗关系的搭建与互动提供了场域,是区域性生活实践、文化变迁和社区整合的动力源泉。民俗学对集市中民俗事象、时空特征和实践活动的关注,可在超越村落边界的基础上,透视人群交往、文化交流和物品交换之间的关系,从而拓展民俗学的研究视野,深化对日常生活的理解,提升民俗学理论方法的活力;同时,民俗学的学术关怀可以进一步充实集市研究的生活感、文化性与应用性,丰富有关集市当代转型和乡村社会建设等议题的讨论,体现学科服务社会发展的现实关切。     

The moment when Peking fell to the Japanese: a “horizontal” perspective

ABSTRACT

Due to its equivocal character, the fall of Peking in 1937 was a historical moment that deserves a thorough revisit focusing on the city’s multifaceted structure. As a narrative strategy, “moment” aims at putting various spatial imageries of multiple events in a minimized temporal unit. This article focuses on two moments after the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 7, 1937: July 29, when the Chinese troops withdrew from Peking, and August 8, when the Japanese troops entered the city. It reconstructs these historical scenarios by utilizing the reports of journalists, diary entries, and reminiscences, along with literary works to capture the moment of Peking’s fall. Using a “horizontal” perspective, this paper reveals Peking residents’ communal awareness and attempts to excavate nationalist elements from local experiences.     

Racial vibrations,masculine performances: experiences of homelessness among young men of colour in the Greater Toronto Area

This article explores the connections between race, masculinity and urban space in the lives of Canadian-born young men of colour (aged 17–26) who have experienced homelessness in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). It is based on ethnographic research including 40 interviews and eight ‘Where-I-Live-Tours’ of the city by the author and participants. This study explores the intersections between racial emergences and masculine performances in the lived experiences of homelessness, drawing connections between spatial representations and material experiences. It utilizes the concepts of affect and ‘racial vibrations’ to show how race emerges differently in different areas of the GTA. There exists a constant racial ‘vibe’ in the suburban areas of the GTA, whereas there is a vibrating whiteness that obscures racial events in downtown Toronto spaces. In both cases, the emergence of race contributes to continued oppression based on the intersections of racialized masculinities and homelessness.     

Governing the Homeless in an Age of Compassion: Homelessness,Citizenship, and the 10‐Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County Washington

Abstract: In 2001, President Bush announced his intention to “end chronic homeless by the year 2012” as part of his broad “Compassion Agenda”. Since then, departmental consolidation, changes in funding allocation, and continued decentralization of services provision have dramatically reshaped the landscape of homeless service provision in the US. In this paper I examine how these roll‐out policies reify and re‐entrench liberal equations of property with rational self‐governance at the local scale. Particularly, I illustrate how tropes of homeless otherness work alongside and through federal neoliberal roll‐out policies to exclude homeless voices from the formation of local social policy. In doing so, I attempt to call attention to the mutually constitutive relationship between the spatial management of homeless bodies, tropes of homeless deviance and dependence, and limits to citizenship in the context of neoliberal urban governance.     

Shopping,social inclusion and the urban geographies of people with intellectual disability

In this paper, we examine the social geographies of people with intellectual disabilities. We focus particular attention on the significance of shopping and spaces of consumption as they relate to questions social inclusion and belonging in the lives of PWID. The focus on consumption offers a useful counterpoint to a prevailing policy emphasis on social inclusion through productive activities. The paper also contributes to the literature on intellectual disability within social and health geography, shedding light on the varied socio-spatial experiences of people beyond the confines of community-care facilities and other separate spaces. Our analysis draws on data collected from a participatory research project in Toronto (Canada). The project involved a small but diverse group of people with intellectual disabilities, who led academic researchers on a series of excursions designed to explore those places and routes that make up their everyday social geographies. Shopping emerged as a significant but often ambivalent theme in the context of these geographies, and the analysis demonstrates the complex interplay of autonomy and control, pleasure and restraint, care and support that shape people’s experiences of consumption. We conclude by discussing the significance of these findings for notions of social inclusion and belonging.     

Consuming and living the corner shop: belonging,remembering, socialising

This paper presents findings from an ethnographic case study in Germany investigating the relationship between shopkeepers and customers of small grocery stores owned by immigrants. The focus is on social practices within the shops and how those engaged in these activities make sense of them. Shops become meaningful through shared practices that revolve around selling and buying. However, this process is complex and not without conflict. Moving through the themes of belonging, remembering and socialising, I will show how the everyday lifeworlds of customers and shopkeepers, including their aspirations, expectations and uncertainties, intersect and how the shop emerges as a meaningful space through negotiation. Rather than looking at cultural differences alone, it is concluded that there can be significant other ways to understand multicultural places by focusing on the multiple ways that consumers engage with so-called ‘ethnic’ enterprises.     

Reconceptualizing Resistance in the Historical Archaeology of the British Isles: An Editorial

The present resonates with the harmonics of past events. Our archaeologies, because they deal with the everyday materiality of life, should not neglect to concern themselves with the domination of past people, since many similar forms of oppression persist. Moreover, we should consider the resistance to such domination. Rather than seeing resistance as simply reactive a problem which has generated much criticism—we can reconceptualize it to encompass a more nuanced understanding of the volition and agency of people in inferior positions of power. This lends new strength to the role of archaeologists in representing historical narratives of resistance.     

Prostitution,variegated homes,and the practice of unhomely life in China

This paper studies a group of female sex workers and their ambivalent experiences of home in Dongguan, China’s so-called sin city, before the local government technically cracked down on the city’s sex industry in 2014. It has two objectives. First, we explore these workers’ life journey: spatially from their rural hometown to Dongguan, socially from domestic migrants to sex workers, and subjectively from poor persons to extravagant spenders. Through this journey-based perspective, we show that the departure from one home opens a door to another home, but the door to the sex industry engulfs our respondents into a perpetual condition of unhomely life. Second, we analyze sex workers’ practices of (un)homely life in various spaces of working (sauna), dwelling (rented apartment), and consumption (shopping center) in Dongguan and their imagination of a new home. We argue that home is a liminal space of ambivalent experiences that revolve around dichotomous distinctions between privacy and publicity, friendship and segregation, marginalization and belonging. This paper contributes to the critical geographies of home by incorporating these ambivalent experiences of home into sex workers’ life journey of leaving and making home in the context of China.     

Toiling in the Vale of Tears: Everyday Life and Resistance in South Uist, Outer Hebrides, 1760-1860

Following the 1745 rebellion, agrarian capitalism rapidly transformed subsistence practices in the Outer Hebrides. Landowners increased rents, enclosed common lands, and replaced crofters and cattle with sheep-ranges. Population growth, the demise of the kelp industry, and crop failures compounded the problems of the peasantry. Widespread emigration commenced in the 1770s and peaked in the 1850s, when entire communities were exiled to British North America—the so-called Highland Clearances. This article traces the development of agrarian capitalism on the Isle of South Uist, explores the agricultural improvements undertaken by successive landlords, and considers modes of resistance adopted by the island's population.     

移民的行动抉择与网络依赖--对温州侨乡现象的社会学透视

有关温州侨乡的研究并不多,仅有的少数研究认为,温州侨乡之所以有那么多人不断地涌向海外,是因为那里存在着"炫耀消费"和"相对失落感".本文从社会网络依赖和行动选择两个层面来解释温州侨乡现象,认为温州侨乡之所以持续存在,是因为社会网络对行动路径的影响造成的,而炫耀性消费和相对失落感仅仅是表象.     

Spirit knows: materiality,memory and the recovery of Spiritualist places and practices in Stoke-on-Trent

Abstract

Much has been written about constructing memories of place, yet few speak of the difficulties in dealing with lost, partial and fragmented histories of place. We argue that behind the idea of ‘memory of place’ is an assumption that these memories are recoverable and can build a sense of place. Our research has led us to assume the opposite: not just that the fragments of history cannot build a complete memory of place, but that this understanding of memory and place is itself skewed by its reliance on materiality. This paper stems from a project that explores the place of spirituality in everyday life through insights from Spiritualist churches and their congregations. Whilst evidence of Spiritualist locations can be partially obtained through documentary records, a key challenge has been in understanding practices in the context of Spiritualism’s disassociation with materiality and the centrality of Spirit. The paper concludes that retracing Spiritualism’s past, and capturing its contemporary spiritual practices, uncovers a ‘memory of place’ that is not only in constant transience, but that can only be known through Spirit.     

How environments speak: everyday mobilities,impersonal speech and the geographies of commentary

This paper examines commentary as a mode of speaking that has not received sufficient attention by social and cultural geographers. In contrast to a representational understanding of commentary, where commentary is the expert interpretation of an environment, this paper develops a more passive understanding of commentary where the commentator is a figure through which the affective, material forces that constitute environments become expressed. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Sydney, Australia, the paper examines three modes of everyday commentary related to commuting. The commentaries of reportage, anecdote and autoventriloquy each demonstrate in different ways how the affective, material environments of commuting become spoken. The paper shows, first, how commentary is a constitutive rather than derivative aspect of the experience of commuting. Second, it shows that commentary is an expression of affective, material environments, rather than either the willed self-expression of the speaker, or the manifestation of socially and historically contingent discourses. Third, it shows that commentary can both close down and draw out specific affective, material environments. Fourth, it shows how commentary modulates the powers of existence in the zone of the commute, transforming the affective possibilities immanent to different situations.     

试论博物馆与公众关系的四种研究路径

近年来,公众之于博物馆的重要性持续攀升,甚至开始居于一种主导性的优先地位.博物馆学界相应地出现了 一系列暗含"公众转向"的话语.基于此,博物馆与公众关系成为一个重要的研究议题.博物馆与公众关系有四种路径:公众研究路径聚焦存在于博物馆内外的公众群体,以此分别发现公众之于博物馆和博物馆之于公众的价值;沟通关系路径侧重博物馆...     

The sound of images: peddlers' calls and tunes in Republican Peking

Street peddlers were a common feature of city life in China well into the twentieth century. The presence of these small-scale, often single-good merchants can be traced back to earlier centuries. That they survived until after WWII reflects in part the state of economic development of China, where recent immigrants were prepared to take up the meanest, lowest-paid jobs to make a living. In Peking, thousands of peddlers roamed the streets, and more particularly, the hutongs where most of the population lived. They ceaselessly offered their goods and services to the residents, day and night. In order to attract customers and to entice them out of their walled houses and courtyards, peddlers uttered musical vocal phrases, sometimes in elaborate form, and more interestingly, they sometimes used musical instruments. In this paper I examine who they were, how they operated and what they represented to Peking's urban society. From this sketchy social portrait, I will move into a study of how the peddlers were represented in various settings of the pictorial records. Finally, I argue that peddlers were an integral part of a kind of street theater. This is not just a metaphor. Through their calls, songs, and music, peddlers created a constant flow of live entertainment in the street.     

From Para to Manaos: A trip up the lower Amazon

This paper examines the General Elections of 1983, 1987 and 1992 and argues that not only has the SNP increased its share of the popular vote, but that share has become increasingly evenly distributed across Scotland. Thus, the SNP is becoming a truly ‘national’ party, where once it's support was geographically concentrated in areas of reduced class‐conciousness and strong local leaders. This new distribution is accounted for, in part, through the use of the SNP as a ‘protest’ vote.     

Context and Interpretation: An Archaeology of Cultural Production

This paper examines the construction of modern-world contexts in historical archaeology. To help draw out and understand the social and cultural contexts of capitalism, colonialism, and modernity, and how they may be materially understood, an explanation of the German history of everyday life school (Alltagsgeschichte) is presented. In this approach, the objects of historical study become the everyday cultural interpretations of past people and how these interpretations actively produced and reproduced cultures. This approach is illustrated by a landscape archaeology of the Bordley–Randall site in Annapolis, Maryland.