Beautiful face,beautiful place: relational geographies and gender in cosmetic surgery tourism websites

Cosmetic surgery tourism is a significant and growing area of medical tourism. This article explores the gendered construction of cosmetic surgery tourism in different geographical locations through an analysis of destination websites in Spain, the Czech Republic and Thailand. We examine the ways in which gender and other intersections of identity interact with notions of space, place and travel to construct particular locations and cosmetic surgery tourist experiences. The relational geographies of skill, regulation and hygiene in discourses of cosmetic surgery risk are also explored. We conclude that accounts producing cosmetic surgery tourism as undifferentiated experience of ‘non-place’ fail to acknowledge the complex constructions of specific destinations in promotional materials targeting international consumers in a global marketplace.     

Digitisation,digital interaction and social media: embedded barriers to democratic heritage

Abstract

The democratisation of heritage through digital access is a well-documented aspiration. It has included innovative ways to manage interpretation, express heritage values, and create experiences through the ‘decoding’ of heritage. This decoding of heritage becomes democratised, more polyvocal than didactic exhibitions, and less dependent on experts. However, the decision of what ‘heritage’ is and what is commissioned for digitisation (the encoding) is not necessarily a part of this democratisation. This paper will consider how digitisation reinforces the Authorised Heritage Discourse through the lens of Stephen Lukes’ three (increasingly subtle) dimensions of power: conflict resolution, control of expression and shaping of preferences. All three dimensions have an impact on how public values are represented in heritage contexts, but the introduction of digitisation requires more resources, expertise and training within established professional discourse. Social media may have a positive impact on the first two dimensions, but can reinforce hegemony. Alternatives are subject to epistemic populism. The role of digitisation and social media in the democratisation of heritage needs to be better understood. Questions regarding the nature and process of digital interaction, in terms of whose heritage is accessible, affect the very issues of democratisation digitisation appears to promote.     

Connecting to food: cultivating children in the school garden

School gardens are widely celebrated as spaces to promote health and sustainability by connecting children with their food. While scholars have assessed the effects of gardening in practice, media discourses play a key role in constituting this site. This paper examines how the school garden is discursively constituted within American and Canadian newspaper coverage. The analysis reveals specific forms of connection that are said to flourish in the school garden: between food production and consumption, between bodies and knowledge, and between the urban child and nature. While all children are said to benefit from connecting with their food, these connections are articulated differently in relation to particular bodies and spaces, evident in racialized and classed narratives of stewardship and salvation. As children’s relationship to food is invested with the hopes and fears of collective futures, the discursive construction of the school garden provides crucial insights into contemporary understandings of childhood.     

The role of waterways in the spread of the Neolithic

The causes and implications of the regional variations in the spread of the incipient agriculture in Europe remain poorly understood. We use population dynamics models to study the dispersal of the Neolithic in Europe from a localised area in the Near East, solving the two-dimensional reaction-diffusion equation on a spherical surface. We focus on the role of major river paths and coastlines in the advance of farming, to model the rapid advances of the Linear Pottery (LBK) and the Impressed Ware traditions along the Danube–Rhine corridor and the Mediterranean coastline, respectively. We argue that the random walk of individuals, which results in diffusion of the population, can be anisotropic in those areas and hence lead to an effective advection. The standard reaction-diffusion equation is thus supplemented with an advection term, confined to the proximity of major rivers and coastlines. The model allows for the spatial variation in both the human mobility (diffusivity) and the carrying capacity, reflecting the local altitude and latitude. This approach can easily be generalised to include other environmental factors, such as the bioproductivity of landscapes. Our model successfully accounts for the regional variations in the spread of the Neolithic, consistent with the radiocarbon data, and reproduces a time delay in the spread of farming to the Eastern Europe, Britain and Scandinavia.     

Professional Politicians as the Subjects of Moral Panic

The media, the public and politicians themselves often express a fear that Australian political life is increasingly dominated by ‘professional politicians’, who are seen as careerist, lacking in commitment and disconnected from the reality of ordinary lives. The article analyses the meanings given to the term ‘professional politicians’ and their relationship to other definitions and characteristics of professionalism. It also uses the concept of moral panic to analyse the concerns expressed about ‘professional politicians’. This concept, first formulated in 1972 in Cohen's study of alleged youth violence in a small town in the United Kingdom, is most often associated with studies of social deviance. This article demonstrates how, in a later period, it can be extended to apply to politicians, a group traditionally more often identified as a perpetrator of moral panics than the subject of them.     

Imaging Humanitarianism: NGO Identity and the Iconography of Childhood

Abstract: This paper asks how images of children are used by prominent signatories to NGO codes of conduct. The answer is that images of childhood and shared codes of conduct are both means through which development and relief NGOs produce themselves as rights‐based organisations. The iconography of childhood expresses institutional ideals and the key humanitarian values of humanity, neutrality and impartiality, and solidarity. Images of children are useful for NGOs in reinforcing the legitimacy of their ‘emergency’ interventions as well as the very idea of development itself. But the dominant iconography is also inherently paradoxical, as the child image can be read as both a colonial metaphor for the majority world and as a signifier of humanitarian identity. The question then for NGOs using this image in social justice campaigns is whether overtly political accompanying texts can nullify the contradictory subliminal messages that emanate from the iconography of childhood.     

A Mona effect: How place discourse constitutes culture‐led change

The arrival of the Museum and Old and New Art (Mona) in the disadvantaged municipality of Glenorchy was heralded as the beginning of significant social change in Australia's island state of Tasmania. These expectations were premised on a local place discourse known as the “Tasmanian gothic,” and, in this article, our aim is to illustrate the importance of place specifications in culture‐led change, including in relation to how place discourse constitutes such change. To do this work, we illustrate a Mona effect that comprises a critical account of the Tasmanian gothic informed by an empiric of tourist movement to and from Mona. We demonstrate that tourist movements follow existing socio‐spatial patterns, with tourists from higher socio‐economic backgrounds bypassing Glenorchy and those from lower socio‐economic backgrounds more likely to stop in this disadvantaged municipality. This socio‐spatial account unsettles the characterisation of Tasmania and Tasmanians provided by the Tasmanian gothic and we conclude by observing (1) a lack of significant social change resulting from Mona, in part explained by well‐established socio‐economic patterns; (2) signs of more subtle change that warrant further investigation; and (3) how local place discourse can act to curtail culture‐led change by reinforcing existing socio‐economic patterns.