A Multivariate Model for Spatio‐temporal Health Outcomes with an Application to Suicide Mortality

This article considers models for multivariate mortality outcomes (e.g., bivariate, trivariate, or higher dimensional) observed over a set of areas and through time. The model outlined here allows for spatially structured and white noise errors and for their intercorrelation. It also includes possible temporal continuity in such types of error via structured temporal effects. An extension to spatially varying regression effects is considered, as well as the option of nonparametric specification of priors for spatial residuals and regression effects. Allowing for spatially correlated intercepts or regression effects may alter inferences regarding the changing impact on mortality of socioeconomic or environmental predictors. The modeling framework is illustrated by an application to male and female suicide mortality in London, focusing on the impact on suicide of deprivation and social fragmentation (“anomie”) in the 33 London boroughs during three periods: 1979–83, 1984–88 and 1989–93. Suicide trends by age group are also considered and show considerable differences in the trends in impacts of deprivation and social fragmentation.     

Climate deterioration and land-use change in the first millennium BC: perspectives from the British palynological record

Climate deterioration at around the time of the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition has for long been argued to have resulted in upland abandonment in northern and western Britain, and recent research has provided evidence that a major climate downturn from 850 cal BC caused settlement abandonment in western Europe and potentially worldwide. It is, however, unclear to what extent only ‘marginal’ sites were affected, due to the lack of any systematic attempt to view the evidence for settlement and land-use change across a range of landscape types with differing sensitivities to environmental change. This paper addresses this issue by an evaluation of 75 pollen sequences spanning the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age in Britain to assess whether climatic deterioration was sufficient to cause widespread land abandonment. The results provide no evidence for wholesale land-use change at this time; the overall picture is one of continuity of land use or even increased agricultural activity. There are, however, hints of regional variability, with a greater tendency to abandonment of upland areas in Wales, and signs of woodland regeneration in agriculturally productive areas of lowland central southern England. The latter pattern may reflect a combination of rising ground-water levels affecting local land-use in the immediate vicinity of the mires which provide the source of the pollen data, against a backdrop of regional-scale social and economic changes at the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition.     

Suicides of German Jews in the Third Reich

This article re-examines Jewish responses towards Nazi racismby studying German-Jewish suicides. Its purpose is twofold.First, it moves beyond the discussion of suicide as a statisticalincidence and asks what motivated German Jews to commit suicide.Statistics, however elaborate, disregard individual fates andcircumstances. While not entirely dismissing suicide statistics,this article is primarily concerned with qualitative questionsof social context and individual motives. It introduces hithertoneglected archival sources, including suicide notes. These sourcesallow us to assess the impact of Nazi racial policies on individualsuicides and to study the emotional effect of Nazi policieson German Jews. This article also takes up the question as tohow far, if at all, German-Jewish suicides can be considereda form of resistance towards Nazism and to what extent theywere an act of despair and hopelessness. The Nazis claimed tobe the arbiters over the lives of Jews once the deportationsstarted in 1941. The vast majority of Jews left in Germany afterNovember 1938 were fairly elderly. They could not be expectedto go into hiding, and their will to live may have been less,as was, undoubtedly, the ability or desire to start a new lifeelsewhere. In this bleak context, the overwhelming majorityof German-Jewish suicides derived from personal despair andthe desire to preserve individual dignity and agency. Nazi racialpolicies coalesced in a condition of anomie, an overturningof normal life and its norms and values that increases the likelihoodof suicide, prompted by the collapse of hope in the possibilityof a future. Emile Durkheim originally developed the conceptof anomic suicide as a way to explain suicide as a social phenomenon.This concept helps us understand the suicides of German Jewsin the Third Reich both in their wider political and privateimplications.     

The changing geography of the Canadian manufacturing sector in metropolitan and rural regions, 1976–1997

This paper documents the changing geography of the Canadian manufacturing sector over a 22‐year period (1976–1997). It does so by looking at the shifts in employment and differences in production worker wages across different levels of the rural/urban hierarchy—central cities, adjacent suburbs, medium and small cities and rural areas. The analysis demonstrates that the most dramatic shifts in manufacturing employment were from the central cities of large metropolitan regions to their suburbs. Paralleling trends in the United States, rural regions of Canada have increased their share of manufacturing employment. Rising rural employment shares were due to declining employment shares of small cities and, to a lesser degree, large urban regions. Increasing rural employment was particularly prominent in Quebec, where employment shifted away from the Montreal region. The changing fortunes of rural and urban areas were not the result of across‐the‐board shifts in manufacturing employment, but were the net outcome of differing locational patterns across industries. In contrast to the situation in the United States, wages in Canada do not consistently decline, moving down the rural/urban hierarchy from the largest cities to the most rural parts of the country. Only after controlling for the types of manufacturing industries found in rural and urban regions is it apparent that wages decline with the size of place .     

Bladud of Bath: The Archaeology of a Legend

Based on recent Central European research concerning the history of storytelling, this article explores the transformation of apparition stories in Scandinavia and Germany from the late Middle Ages through the Reformation to about 1700. A number of motifs were kept alive throughout the entire period but the stories as a whole changed considerably. This was not only due to a changing social and religious context but also to the specific transmission conditions of these stories.     

The family, love, and suicide in early modern Geneva

Analysis of criminal proceedings and death records for early modern Geneva reveals an explosion in suicides after 1750. New attitudes toward courtship, marriage, and the familly contributed to this dramatic increase, as unprecedented numbers of people took their lives because of family concerns, such as marital breakdown, unhapppy love stories, and deaths of family members. Greater interest in the companionate marriage was central to these changes. After 1750, marriage, even more than parenthood, offered immunity to suicide, as married people were underrepresented among those who took their lives. Although men constituted the large majority of suicides, women and men shared the growing emphasis on conjugal sentiment, which cut across class lines.     

Integration and ethnic spatial concentration: the changing distribution of the Anglo-Jewish community

"This paper identifies the changing locational patterns of the Jewish community in Britain during the past century. Two major trends are identified. At the national level there has been movement out of many small provincial communities to the large urban centres, particularly Greater London and Manchester. Within the city, there has been movement out of the traditional inner city ghettos to the suburbs, thus reflecting the upward socio-economic mobility and integration of what was an immigrant group. Both these trends closely mirror the general patterns of population movement in Britain during the twentieth century." The lack of reliable data for the Jewish population is noted, and a methodology is suggested for identifying the changing locational patterns and intensity of Jewish community life. The method is applied to the case of Greater London.     

Conceptualizing Social Exclusion in Rural Britain

Most studies of living conditions in rural areas have offered essentially static snapshots. Social exclusion is a multi-dimensional, dynamic concept which emphasizes the processes of change through which individuals or groups are excluded from the mainstream of society and their life-chances reduced. This article considers social exclusion in the context of the principal forces operating on and within rural areas of Britain, including global restructuring and the changing role of the State and supra-national institutions. A framework of four systems of social exclusion and inclusion is proposed, following Reimer (personal communication, 1998), according to the means by which resources and status are allocated in society. This is used to structure a presentation of the results of several recent empirical studies which provide evidence of the processes and system failures lying behind social exclusion in rural Britain. A number of research issues are identified concerning how these processes vary between areas, how they connect to the broader forces operating at macro and meso levels, and how local action is associated with attempts to resist social exclusion.     

Re-emergence of Suburbia: The Case of Izmir Turkey

In Turkey, suburbia has become a subject of debates since the 1990s relative to the reconfiguration of urban environments due to transnational economic relations, formation of new upper income groups, social polarization and changing consumption habits. With the help of a case study in the city of Izmir, this paper examines the extent of suburbanization in Turkey in relation to the theoretical works about this subject. The studies have shown that the emergence of suburbia in Izmir goes back to the periods of integration to the capitalist economy during the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxon type suburbia in Izmir has reemerged especially in the recent decades and along the motorways to the city. However, this paper claims that these areas are not fully established in the case of Izmir due to costs of suburban life and lack of social and infrastructural facilities.     

Real wage rigidity in regional labor markets in the U.K., the U.S., and West Germany

"This paper examines the extent to which regional differences in wage rigidity exist and can help explain interregional differences in unemployment trends. Phillips-curve models of manufacturing wage inflation are estimated for the 10 largest states in the U.S., the 10 economic regions in the United Kingdom, and the 11 Lande in the Federal Republic of Germany over the 1971 to 1985 period. There is evidence of significant differences in the responsiveness of wage inflation to unemployment and the rate of change in consumer prices across the regions within each country and across the three nations."     

Does geographical location matter for ethnic wage gaps?

This paper analyzes ethnic wage gaps in Great Britain by comparing minorities to majority workers in the same local labor market and focuses on the variation of wage gaps across areas. As wage gaps vary across areas, using one single national measure may be misleading. Higher wage gaps across groups are associated with higher occupational segregation and ethnic diversity, while higher wage gaps within groups are associated with higher regional specialization and proportion of co-ethnics. Policies could help by improving job location and selection into occupations across groups.     

Complexity,strategy and the national interest

British strategy‐making has been subject to a sustained critique in recent years, from parliamentarians, retired members of the armed forces and scholars of strategic studies. This article examines the nature of this critique and the evolving character of strategic practice in Britain. It argues that the criticisms of British strategymaking are often misplaced, for two main reasons. First, many base their critique on a reductionist notion of unitary ‘national interest’ that fails to capture systemic patterns of complexity and contestation in the wider security environment and in Britain. Second, they underestimate or ignore the extent to which the UK strategic community is itself innovating in response to these themes, particularly since the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review. This is not to argue that considerable challenges do not remain for strategy‐making in Britain. Most notably, these include: how to translate strategic innovation in departments and elsewhere into a coherent national strategic agenda; how to do this while maintaining institutional coordination and a shared sense of strategic purpose across government (and beyond); how to sustain and consolidate institutional expertise and experience in a rapidly changing civil service and at a time of continuing public austerity; and how to articulate and legitimate security policy decisions among a general public that is both disengaged from elite strategic discourse and sceptical of the efficacy of military force. Even so, the article concludes by arguing that it is possible to see the outline of an emergent and distinctive theory of action in contemporary British strategic practice, characterized by principles of adaptivity, anticipation, self‐organisation and nascent cross‐governmentalism.     

ROCK PHYSICS AND THE NEOLITHIC AXE TRADE IN GREAT BRITAIN*

This paper is concerned with the products of a number of Neolithic quarries in highland Britain. It investigates the claim that the scale of axe distribution was partly the result of social factors which resulted in these artefacts gaining an added value in areas remote from their sources. One case study considers the sequence of production in Cumbria, in relation to the tensile strength of the rock quarried in different parts of the region. It shows that these considerations had only a limited influence over the choice of stone source and the scale on which it was worked. A second study compares the tensile strength of the main raw materials used for making non-flint axes with the extent to which these sources were actually exploited. Again there is only a limited relationship between the two, suggesting that social factors may indeed have been important.     

The elderly population of Great Britain: locational trends and policy implications

"The distribution in 1981 and trends during the 1970s of the pensionable age population, of those aged 75 years or more and of pensioners living alone in Great Britain are examined by counties, by county districts and at the intra-metropolitan scale. A pause in the tendency towards the spatial dissociation of the elderly from the remainder of the population is revealed. Many large retirement resorts now have declining elderly populations although rapid growth continues in their suburbs and adjacent rural areas. Rapid increases of the elderly population during the 1970s were seen in several inland rural areas and to a lesser extent in well established new towns and large city suburbs."     

Hope,Cynicism, and Complicity: Worldly Resistance in Reinhold Niebuhr's Criticism of Karl Barth

This paper seeks to investigate the relationship between hope, cynicism, and despair in the stakes of a well-known dispute between Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr accuses Barth, and those who adopt Barth's central doctrinal and political positions, of quietism: in the name of religious perfectionism, such Barthians are not disposed toward incremental but necessary social reforms. For Niebuhr, this is a sure sign of “Barthian pessimism,” the despair that results from a conscience oversensitive to the absolute demands of God's righteousness. This paper seeks to show that a certain form of Barthian political theology is defensible as an ethical disposition since it need not fall victim to the helpless despair that Niebuhr fears, and simultaneously that a defensible account of what I call “total complicity” reflects the self-awareness and self-criticism that often become deformed into cynical despair and reshapes them toward repentant engagement with the world.     

THE THERAPEUTIC STATE

State subsidy for the arts in Britain has been determined by a variety of political and social factors over the last two hundred years. This article examines the recent emergence of a therapeutic ethos that has come to shape arts policy in the United Kingdom. It begins with a survey of existing literature describing a shift in Britain’s arts policy since the 1970s. It examines the limitations of existing explanations and suggests another explanatory factor – the growing valorisation of the arts as a therapeutic tool to address social problems. This can be seen in two historically convergent trends: the challenge to cultural authority through the emergence of a therapeutic understanding of creativity, and the reorientation of political activism around issues of culture and wellbeing. Finally, the article considers how and why these ideas became institutionalised in Britain’s main arts policy body – the Arts Council.     

Too many Scotlands? Place,the SNP,and the future of nationalist mobilization

Scottish nationalism has always had a ‘geographical problem’ in the sense that support for its central goal, the independence of Scotland from the United Kingdom, has had much more backing in some regions and localities than it has had in others. In the 1970s and 1980s the geographical pattern to this support, at least as expressed in votes for the Scottish National Party (SNP), seemed very clear. Suddenly the picture changed between 2011 and 2016, to the extent that the whole of Scotland, notwithstanding the overall ‘No’ vote on Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum, seemed to be lining up to some degree or another in the ‘nationalist column.’ As quickly, this proved ephemeral. As of 2017, the future of the central goal of Scottish nationalism is once more in doubt because of a new geography of support and disaffection that seems to reflect a number of recent trends in attitudes towards voting for the SNP. The article maps the course of the older and newer geographies of Scottish nationalism in terms of the overall political economy of the country, given its proponents’ heavy emphasis on economic themes, and the ways this is refracted through place-to-place social and economic differences across the country.     

The Pre-Roman Iron Age in Britain and Ireland (ca. 800 B.C. to A.D. 100): An overview

Those communities that lived in Britain and Ireland ca. 800 B.C. to A.D. 100 represent particularly well-researched examples of the complex agrarian, nonurban, societies with high population densities that characterize the Pre-Roman Iron Age across temperate Europe. This paper provides a critical introduction to the extensive recent literature on the Pre-Roman Iron Age in Britain and Ireland. Evidence from the large number of salvage excavations and surveys, the application of a wide range of analytical techniques, and important changes in interpretative frameworks are transforming understandings of this period. After reviewing these developments, a chronological account of the period is outlined which attempts to integrate these new results. This suggests that current interpretations of social processes across Iron Age Europe in terms of state formation, urbanization, and core-periphery relations with Mediterranean civilization need revision.     

The Historical Snow Survey of Great Britain: Digitised Data for Scotland

Abstract

Mountain snowline is important as it is an easily observable measure of the phase state of water in the landscape. Changes in seasonal snowline elevation can indicate long-term trends in temperature or other climate variables. Snow-cover influences local flora and fauna, and knowledge of snowline can inform management of water and associated risks. Between 1945 and 2007 voluntary observers collected a subjective record of snow cover across Great Britain called the Snow Survey of Great Britain (SSGB). The original paper copy SSGB data is held by the Met Office. This article details the digitisation of the Scottish SSGB data, its spatial and temporal extents, and a brief example comparison of Met Office snow-lying gridded data. The digitised SSGB data are available from the Met Office authors.     

Storytelling and co-authorship in feminist alliance work: reflections from a journey

If all writing is fundamentally tied to the production of meanings and texts, then feminist research that blurs the borders of academia and activism is necessarily about the labor and politics of mobilizing experience for particular ends. Co-authoring stories is a chief tool by which feminists working in alliances across borders mobilize experience to write against relations of power that produce social violence, and to imagine and enact their own visions and ethics of social change. Such work demands a serious engagement with the complexities of identity, representation, and political imagination as well as a rethinking of the assumptions and possibilities associated with engagement and expertise. This article draws upon 16 years of partnership with activists in India and with academic co-authors in the USA to reflect on how storytelling across social, geographical, and institutional borders can enhance critical engagement with questions of violence and struggles for social change, while also troubling dominant discourses and methodologies inside and outside of the academy. In offering five ‘truths’ about co-authoring stories through alliance work, it reflects on the labor process, assumptions, possibilities, and risks associated with co-authorship as a tool for mobilizing intellectual spaces in which stories from multiple locations in an alliance can speak with one another and evolve into more nuanced critical interventions.