Integrating the Strands of Victorian Diversity

This roundtable article provides responses to the other contributions, emphasizing the need for connecting various research strands in Victorian Studies, and considering international aspects. The essay ends with a proposal to take inspiration from the method of microhistorical morphology, forcing the scholar to consider many different contexts.     

Human capital sorting: The “when” and “who” of the sorting of educated workers to urban regions

The sorting of high‐ability workers is often advanced as one source of spatial disparities in economic outcomes. There are still few papers that analyze when human capital sorting occurs and whom it involves. Using data on 16 cohorts of university graduates in Sweden, we demonstrate significant sorting to urban regions on high school grades and education levels of parents, i.e., two attributes typically associated with latent abilities that are valued in the labor market. A large part of this sorting has already occurred in deciding where to study, because the top universities in Sweden are predominantly located in urban regions. The largest part of directed sorting on ability indicators occurs in the decision of where to study. Even after controlling for sorting prior to labor market entry, the “best and brightest” are still more likely to start working in urban regions. However, this effect appears to be driven by Sweden's main metropolitan region, Stockholm. We find no influence of our ability indicators on the probability of starting to work in urban regions after graduation when Stockholm is excluded. Studies of human capital sorting need to account for selection processes to and from universities, because neglecting mobility prior to labor market entry is likely to lead to an underestimation of the extent of the sorting to urban regions.     

Picturing the poor: fundraising and the depoliticisation of homelessness

In this paper, we discuss the role images play in attracting charitable donations in an English homeless shelter. Focusing in particular on two image-based projects which feature service-users (one series of black-and-white still photography and one series of film clips posted on YouTube), we draw on interviews with fundraisers and the homeless participants themselves to discuss how they motivated their involvement and what impact they hoped the images would achieve. We conclude by providing some snapshots of how earlier images produced in the shelter have been circulated.     

Structures and Agency: a transnational comparison of the struggle for women's suffrage in the Nordic countries during the long 19th century

This article is a transnational comparison of the struggle for women's suffrage during the long 19th century, mainly around 1900, with an emphasis on the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). The article questions the widespread notion of these countries as similar democratic and peaceful nations, different from the rest of Europe. It points to the timing of women's suffrage and to how the claim for this reform challenged the gendered meaning of political citizenship as well as core elements in the understandings of masculinity and femininity. It proceeds to analyse important structural changes that have been seen as vehicles for women's suffrage: the growth of democracy, the construction of nation states, revolutions and wars, asking if these structures played as important a role in the Nordic countries as elsewhere. Finally, the article concentrates on women's agency, mobilization and organization, looking for similarities and differences among the five Nordic countries.     

WHAT SCALE MATTERS? EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS' SOCIAL POSITION,NEIGHBOURHOOD CONTEXT AND THE SCALE OF NEIGHBOURHOOD

Over the past few years, neighbourhood effects research has received significant attention from the academic world, not only in the US, where that attention has a longer tradition, but also in Western Europe. There is also substantial interest among policy makers. Most policy makers intend to reduce concentrations of poverty by enhancing the social mix of neighbourhoods. Avoiding high immigrant concentrations in particular neighbourhoods is another issue that fuels political debate and policy intervention in many Western European countries, Scandinavian countries included. However, there are clear gaps in the understanding of the relationship between neighbourhood composition and social outcomes. One of these gaps regards the scale of the neighbourhood; if there would be neighbourhood effects, what scale is it relevant to consider? Is mix good or bad for the social prospects of individuals at a level that is very local, for example a few neighbouring streets, or could mix be helpful at a somewhat higher scale? This article will focus on this issue, applying individual longitudinal data in multi‐level models for the entire active population of the three largest metropolitan areas in Sweden. We will explore the degree to which the social and ethnic composition of geographical districts, at a variety of scales (measured at time t), are statistically related to individual employment and earnings for adult metropolitan residents at time t+1, controlling for relevant personal and household characteristics.     

A game of risk: Boat migration and the business of bordering Europe (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Largely in response to irregular migration flows, a Euro‐African border is under construction at the southern edges of Europe. The latest phase in this ‘borderwork’ is a system known as Eurosur, underpinned by a vision of a streamlined surveillance cover of Europe's southern maritime border and the African ‘pre‐frontier’ beyond it. Eurosur and other policing initiatives pull in a range of sectors – from border guards to aid workers – that make the statistically small figure of the irregular border crosser their joint target. To highlight the economic and productive aspects of controlling migratory flows, I call this varied group of interests an ‘illegality industry’. Casting an eye on the Spanish section of the external EU border, this article investigates how the illegality industry conceptualizes migrants as a source of risk to be managed, visualized and controlled. The end result, it is argued, is a ‘double securitization’ of migrant flows, rendering these as both a security threat and a growing source of profits.     

Landscape and Gentrification: The Picturesque and Pastoral in 1980s New York Cinema

In this article I discuss 1980s New York cinema through the conceptual lens of landscape, drawing in particular on the interconnected but separate traditions of the pastoral and the picturesque. While the former mode of representing landscape is idealizing (the shepherd/nymph‐motif), the latter with its origins in the period of the enclosures of the English countryside tends to aestheticize poverty and dispossession. This distinction can productively be deployed in relation to tensions between glamorization and exploitation in 1980s New York cinema, which often dealt with the themes of rent, eviction, and unemployment in postindustrial settings. Focusing in particular on Downtown 81 (Edo Bertoglio, 1981/2000) and Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985), I argue that the current nostalgia for a pre‐gentrified and less regulated New York in popular culture is dependent on these idealizing and aestheticizing tendencies insofar that they conceal or prettify some of the darker aspects of the period.     

Professions,absolutism and the role of widows

This article explores the role of widows in the transfer of occupations from one man to the next. The growing Civil Service is especially focused on, with its conflicts between bureaucratic demands, personal and family considerations, and the absolutist state. Within the Civil Service, as well as within public services connected to private business, succession was modelled after practices in the peasant society and in the urban trades, where a widow could continue in business and hand it over to a new husband, a son-in-law or a son. This solved the problem of support for the widows, by making the next man in office responsible. However, it created other problems, which in turn made the development of public pensions necessary.