Changing tides of industrial democracy: Red Clydeside and the UCS work-in as political heritage

ABSTRACT

Drawing on labour history, critical heritage studies and sociological literature on the entrepreneurial city, this article focuses on the cultural legacy of the famous 1971/72 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in apropos Glasgow’s historical reputation as ‘Red Clydeside’. In doing so, the article considers the dispute’s continuing importance as a political resource for present-day debates about workers’ rights, Glasgow’s post-industrial identity, the rise of populist demagoguery and the future of Britain’s industry more generally.     

Care as mundane politics: contested familial refugee lives in Finland

Refugees often find themselves in challenging positions regarding their familial relations while seeking asylum. Whereas transnational human rights agreements and institutions identify families as units of protection and sources of care with variable compositions, many immigration policies and humanitarian practices regard familial relations also problematic and interpret refugees’ rights to family life narrowly. This leaves refugees’ attempts to draw from and manage their transnational family lives poorly recognized and supported. In result, refugees may end up in paradoxical subject positions of having to give up and take responsibility for their families, with their own experiences and understanding of familial life remaining secondary. These contradictions are heightened when familial concerns are among the reasons for seeking asylum, involving caring and uncaring relations. In this article, we analyze familiality as a form of mundane care politics in refugee situations, based on our study with asylum seekers and refugees in Finland.     

Of public houses and private lives: female hotelkeepers as domestic entrepreneurs

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, women played a key role in the control and management of the Australian hotel industry. Their importance as publicans has often been overlooked by historians of drinking culture and the liquor trade, due to the representation of the pub as a male domain to which women were either socially peripheral or actively opposed. Rather, the complex spatial arrangements of the public house, where domestic and commercial activities were deeply interconnected, allowed many women the opportunity to earn a respectable and prominent living as hotelkeepers.     

Chasing shadows: lives of ancient Greek statues as lived by writers1

This paper is both an essay and a critique. It questions whether the ancient Greeks responded to heroic or devotional sculpture in any significantly different way than people in later ages, including our own, do. Questioned, too, is whether ancient sculpture or sculpture at any time as to its coming into being can be explained by linguistics, such as, in this case, by Roman Jakobson's notion that all linguistic models are based on one of two models: either on similarity (metaphoric) or on contiguity (metonymic: the name of one thing used in place of another associated with or suggested by it).     

Fluid lives: subjectivities,gender and water in rural Bangladesh

This article seeks to contribute to the emerging debates in gender–water and gender–nature literatures by looking at the ways that gendered subjectivities are simultaneously (re)produced by societal, spatial and natural/ecological factors, as well as materialities of the body and of heterogeneous waterscapes. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Bangladesh on arsenic contamination of drinking water, the article looks at the ways that gender relations are influenced by not just direct resource use/control/access and the implications of different types of waters, but also by the ideological constructs of masculinity/femininity, which can work in iterative ways to influence how people relate to different kinds of water. Conflicts and struggles over water inflect gendered identities and sense of self, where both men and women participate in reproducing and challenging prevailing norms and practices. As a result, multiple social and ecological factors interact in complex and interlinked ways to complicate gender–water relations, whereby socio-spatial subjectivities are re/produced in water management and end up reinforcing existing inequities. The article demonstrates that gender–water relations are not just intersected by social axes, as generally argued by feminist scholars, but also by ecological change and spatial relations vis-à-vis water, where simultaneously socialized, ecologized, spatialized and embodied subjectivities are produced and negotiated in everyday practices.     

Commuter lives: a review symposium on David Bissell's Transit Life

This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities, published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in—depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine—grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking about urban transportation radically different from that used by mainstream transport planners and geographers. Geographical Research asked six researchers—Tim Edensor, Michele Lobo, Debbie Hopkins, Helen Fitt, Juliana Mansvelt, and Donald McNeill—to reflect on what kind of research vistas might be opened up bring the tools of cultural geography and mobility research to the world of commuting. Here are their responses, rounded out by a reply by David Bissell, Transit Life's author.     

Transnationalism and identity: a tale of two faces and multiple lives

Transnational ties add new complexities to the continuous and dynamic processes of identity formation. Based on self‐reflexive narratives, this paper examines the authors' identity transformations associated with their respective transnational experiences. We are two Asian women from India and China, respectively, who are international students pursuing doctoral degrees in Canada. Although we share similar demographic and economic backgrounds, we perform distinct transnational acts. Focusing specifically on social and cultural linkages, we have identified reasons that have influenced our cross‐border involvements. Based on our findings, we present an emergent conceptual framework that highlights interactive psychological, sociocultural and economic processes that influence the formation of individual transnational identities. We also share with our readers some methodological lessons learnt along our path of self‐expression, analysis and representation .     

Blue planet,Black lives: Matter,memory, and the temporalities of political geography

This article considers how the ontological challenges posed by the ocean's materiality and the porous boundaries of marine ecologies and economies aligns with scholarship emanating from Black and Caribbean thought to rethink the linear histories and unitary identities that underpin modernist narratives. Focusing on the debate in Bristol, England in 2020 and 2021 concerning the disposition of the toppled statue of slave trader Edward Colston, the article engages postcolonial Caribbean theory and art to problematise the linear temporalities associated with solid land and the singular histories that are narrated through fixed memorialisations. As an alternative, the temporality of the ocean is called upon, because of its specific role in the histories of Colston, Bristol, and British imperialism, but also because of the ways in which oceanic ontologies complicate accepted divisions between past, present, and future, between scales of experience and explanation, between rootedness and connection, and between life and death.     

Restructuring of a metropolitan industrial park: case study in Herzeliyya, Israel

The nature and magnitude of the restructuring processes are unveiled in Herzeliyya Industrial Park, a satellite park of metropolitan Tel Aviv. The processes are explored in the context of Israel's recent entry into the post-industrial age and its swift integration into the global economy, using survey data of a sample of 104 firms. Since the mid-1980s the park has experienced functional upgrading in a process of invasion and succession. Upgrading has been accompanied by high mortality rates of firms, and by large-scale renewal. Among the attributes reflecting the functional upgrading are the extended spatial reach of firms for clients and joint venturers, and of their organizational affiliations, expanding far beyond the metropolis into the world at large. The newly arriving firms tend to reveal a different set of locational factors than do the veteran ones. Future research avenues are set out.     

山西省稷山县农村公共卫生事业述评(1949～1984年)——以太阳村(公社)为重点考察对象

山西省稷山县太阳村(公社)是集体化时代闻名全国的卫生红旗单位,其公共卫生工作及合作医疗制度建设成绩斐然,具有明显的典型意义和时代特征。不过,这种农村公共卫生事业是建立在计划经济体制和高度集中的政治体制以及较低医疗保障水平基础上的,并与历次政治运动关系密切。改革开放后,经济体制逐渐向市场经济过渡,稷山县公共卫生事业因难以适应新的社会经济体制而最终走向了衰落,但其经验和教训可为今后创新农村公共卫生事业、建立新型合作医疗体系提供有益的借鉴。