Rescaling Migration Studies: Migration Policy-Making and Implementation at the Local Government Level

How ‘the state’ perceives and responds to migration is gaining increasing attention. This analysis seeks to encourage debate on scales of governance in migration studies through a focus on policy-making and implementation on the part of local government officials in Scotland. Contributions include the elucidation of how immigrants are differentiated by individual local state actors and how this relates to the wider practices of local government towards them, and a typology conceptualising the heterogeneity of local state responses to immigration. This analytic emphasis on local state perceptions of, and responses to, migration and migrants hopes to inspire more nuanced and policy relevant understandings of ‘the state’ in migration research.     

Prioritizing Disaster Mapping Tasks for Online Volunteers Based on Information Value Theory

In recent years, online volunteers have played important roles in disaster response. After a major disaster, hundreds of volunteers are often remotely convened by humanitarian organizations to map the affected area based on remote sensing images. Typically, the affected area is divided using a grid‐based tessellation, and each volunteer can select one grid cell to start mapping. While this approach coordinates the efforts of volunteers, it does not differentiate the priorities of different cells. As a result, volunteers may map grid cells in a random order. Due to the spatial heterogeneity, different cells may contain geographic information that is of different value to emergency responders. Ideally, cells that potentially contain more valuable information should be assigned higher priority for mapping. This article presents an analytical framework for prioritizing the mapping of cells based on the values of information contained in these cells. Our objective is to provide guidance for online volunteers so that potentially more important cells are mapped first. We present a method that is based on information value theory and focus on road networks. We apply this method to a number of simulated scenarios and to a real disaster mapping case from the 2015 Nepal earthquake.     

‘Grace for the rebels’: the role of the royal pardon in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381

This article focuses on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 as a means of examining some of the late medieval assumptions about the nature of royal mercy. Rather than adding to the weight of scholarship on the causes and characteristics of the Revolt, this article discusses the views on mercy (‘grace for the rebels’)¹ that were reportedly expressed by all parties during the course of the rebellion. The first section analyses the chronicles and their references to discussion of pardon and mercy during the revolt itself. The second section examines the role of the royal pardon in the subsequent judicial proceedings in the Home Counties — who were the first recipients of pardon, and how were they able to secure royal grace? The final section then discusses the formulation of the pardon in the autumn parliament, and the debate surrounding the course of government policy in the wake of revolt on an unprecedented scale. This article seeks to demonstrate that the Crown and commons shared a common language of pardon, and understood that by framing their discussion in terms of royal grace, they were alluding to a particular kind of idealised relationship between the king and his subjects.