Children’s participation in research on sensitive topics: addressing concerns of decision-makers

ABSTRACT

Although there is general agreement about children’s engagement in social research, some researchers continue to experience challenges when seeking approval and support for children’s participation from a range of adult stakeholders, particularly when the research involves a sensitive topic. These challenges may reflect different perspectives, conflicting interests, needs or expectations. This paper explores factors that influence the decision-making of key stakeholder groups, including Human Research Ethics Committees, parents and organisational representatives. Building on the kind of objective, rational reasoning that underpins much ethical decision-making, the findings, from interviews with 42 participants across stakeholder groups, draw attention to influential issues grounded in perceptions of: the institution and researcher undertaking the research; the project itself; children’s characteristics and contexts. Collectively, such issues point to the critically important role of mutually respectful relationships between researchers and stakeholders as the basis for designing and implementing ethical research that gives close attention to stakeholder concerns.     

A space for feminist mentoring: the role of Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) specialty group in higher education

Abstract

Higher education and organizations within academic disciplines are important spaces for mentoring and other forms of networking. These spaces, however, are often situated in environments that limit equitable and inclusive opportunities for early career and underrepresented scholars to effectively engage in mentoring. This paper contributes to critical feminist scholarship that examines how organizations in higher education can offer supportive mentoring spaces for women, early career faculty, and scholars from diverse backgrounds. The analysis focuses on the Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) as a space for faculty, students and other geographers to enhance their professional and personal success. Our analysis draws from the results of an international survey, a focus group discussion, and reflexive participation of feminist geographers aligned with this specialty group. We examine the ways in which this academic organization, and the informal and formal networks it cultivates, attempts to foster an anti-oppressive mentoring community of feminist geographers. We also analyze how these networks are shaped by and embedded in neoliberal institutions in the discipline of geography and higher education as a whole. This discussion offers important insights to growing research and initiatives that support mentoring for women, feminists, and others concerned with building more inclusive and socially just spaces in academia.     

Pre-Columbian treponematosis in medieval Britain

There has been much debate regarding the origins of treponemal disease and, in particular, acquired syphilis. Greater numbers of skeletons with apparently diagnostic bone lesions in the New World than in the Old have given rise to the postulate, particularly advanced by American workers, that the disease originated there prior to AD 1492 and was carried back to the Old World by Columbus's sailors. This paper presents evidence for the presence of treponemal disease in medieval Norwich prior to AD 1492, however. The dating of the site is good and the skeleton concerned comes from a well-sealed context. Others in the group have similar lesions and there are four individuals with evidence of leprosy. All were buried in a communal cemetery. The individual has widespread, bilateral, florid periostitis, especially of the tibiae and fibulae, and the radiographic changes support the diagnosis of treponemal disease. Differential diagnosis and geographical situation suggest that this skeleton displays evidence of syphillis.     

BROGÅRD BACKWARDS: THE HIGH‐END GOLF LANDSCAPE AND THE MORPHOLOGY OF MANORIAL SPACE

When Bro Hof Slott Golf Club – a high‐end, highprofile golf development in Upplands‐Bro, northwest of Stockholm – opened, the Brogård manor house became its clubhouse. Here a recent history of Bro Hof Slott as leisure space intermingles with a much longer history of Brogård as a landscape shaped through 400 years of nobility ownership. In place‐marketing and in short accounts, the estate's history is frequently reduced to merely a succession of names, sometimes combined with an appraisal of the scenic setting manorial ownership produced. The many hands, hooves and struggles historically shaping this landscape thus go missing, necessitating a more sustained focus on landscape morphology. How the estate landscape could be turned into an upmarket golf development is unintelligible without scrutinizing the nobility as a structuring force and the manorial landscape's current place in planning politics. Nobility power translated into extensive control of what could take place in the countryside. Brogård waschaped by crofters, tenant farmers and statare (labourers paid predominantly in kind) subordinate to the will of the estate owner, but also by all those processes resituating the nobility as class. Shaping the countryside, the nobility was in turn shaped by social movements, macro‐economic shifts and political decisions, together resulting in the particularities of the space now handled by municipal planning and appropriated to become Bro Hof Slott Golf Club. Through telling this story, I reconnect to a plea for acknowledging politics and political economy in analysing tourism and its spaces, while focus simultaneously lies on the dialectical entanglement of material landscape and its present‐day valuation.