Girls’ perspectives on the ideal school playground experience: an exploratory study of four Australian primary schools

ABSTRACT

Based on research conducted as part of the Sydney Playground Project, this paper provides an exploratory investigation of the perspectives of girls relating to the ideal school playground experience, and whether their perspectives are influenced by a loose-parts playground intervention. The focus is on the play behaviours of 22 girls aged 8–10 years, from the perspective that school playgrounds are generally designed in ways that are more suited to the play behaviours of boys. The research is based on a qualitative analysis of children’s drawings, interviews and focus groups, exploring meanings associated with desired play experiences. Findings indicate that girls’ views of the ideal school playground are influenced by the geographies of the spaces they play in, and that girls highly valued changes provided by a loose-parts intervention.     

Mobile Modernities: A South Asian family negotiates immigration,gender and class in Canada

For the modern Indian immigrant family ‘modernity’ is not necessarily found in the west. Using qualitative data drawn from in-depth interviews with one immigrant Sikh family, conducted in both Vancouver and the Punjab, we draw attention to the mobile and contradictory modernities family members have faced in their migration, settlement and subsequent transnational activities. We explore how class, gender and sexuality have framed the experiences of the members of this family in differential, partial and sometimes ironic ways. In so doing we construct a theoretical argument about the nature and geography of modernity, and how it relates to immigrant settlement in Canada.     

Seniors’ Long-Term Care in Canada: A Continuum of Soft to Brutal Privatisation

We situate the contemporary crisis of COVID-19 deaths in seniors’ care facilities within the restructuring and privatisation of this sector. Through an ethnographic comparison in a for-profit and nonprofit facility, we explore what we identify as brutal and soft modes of privatisation within publicly subsidised long-term seniors’ care in Vancouver, British Columbia, and their influence on the material and relational conditions of work and care. Workers in both places are explicit that they deliver only bare-bones care to seniors with increasingly complex care needs, and we document the distinct forms and extent to which these precarious workers give gifts of their time, labour and other resources to compensate for the gaps in care that result from state withdrawal and the extraction of profits within the sector. We nonetheless locate more humane and hopeful processes in the nonprofit facility, where a history of cooperative relations between workers, management and families suggest the possibility of re-valuing the essential work of care.     

Valuing Childcare: Troubles in Suburbia

I unravel a complex weave of practices in metropolitan Vancouver that lead to the persistent devaluation of childcare. These include the assumptions that women alone are responsible for paying for childcare, the difficulty that parents have determining how skills and educational qualifications relate to high-quality childcare and the tendency to insert childcare workers into various familial scenarios that cheapen the costs of their own social reproduction. I look closely at outer suburbs, because this is where wages for childcare are lowest and parents experience the most difficulty in arranging dependable care. Although various women doing paid domestic work are positioned differently, they share with each other the effects of gendered assumptions about domestic work.     

A Pre-Lapita Structure at Apalo,Arawe Islands,Papua New Guinea

Stilt structures in the inter-tidal zone or over shallow water on fringing reefs are widely accepted as a feature of settlements of the Lapita cultural complex in Near Oceania. Claims for similar structures in a pre-Lapita context at the Apalo site in the Arawe Islands, New Britain, Papua New Guinea, have been queried on several grounds. Re-evaluation of the Apalo evidence, together with 10 additional AMS radiocarbon dates, establishes human activity associated with some form of structure and possibly with a ground stone axe about 400–500 years before the Lapita pottery occupation. The paucity of occupational refuse suggests a non-residential structure perhaps associated with water transport. Comparisons with the older Dongan midden site in the Sepik-Ramu basin suggest stilt structures were probably used there as well. An apparent shift in depositional processes between the pre-Lapita and Lapita use of Apalo could reflect changed sea conditions arising from increased ENSO activity.