Look and tell: using photo-elicitation methods with teenagers

This article reflects on the usefulness of photo elicitation in research with young people. As part of an Economic and Social Research Council-funded project exploring conflict and divisions in contested cities, teenagers living or attending schools in segregated areas of Belfast were presented with 11 photographs depicting the city's traditional ethno religious divisions, the new ‘post conflict’ consumerist city and youth subcultures. In response to each photo, the young people produced individual written comments and their opinions were fleshed out during follow-up focus group interviews. Drawing on these responses, the strengths and weaknesses of using photo elicitation in research with young people and its capacity to generate new insights into teenagers' spatial perceptions and experiences are outlined.     

THE ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE OF POLLUTING PLANTS: A SPATIAL ANALYSIS*

ABSTRACT This paper uses plant‐level EPA and Census data to examine spatial factors affecting environmental performance, as measured by air pollutant emissions and regulatory compliance. We find significant effects for compliance, but not for emissions. Compliance is positively spatially correlated, partly explained by spatial correlations in observed plant characteristics, suggesting influences of industry agglomeration. The use of spatial econometric methods shows only small effects of spatially lagged compliance status, and does not greatly change the estimated contributions of other spatially explicit factors. Regulatory activity has the expected effect of increasing environmental performance, both at the inspected plant and at neighboring plants, but only for plants in the same state, demonstrating the importance of jurisdictional boundaries.     

The Modern Girl around the World: A Research Agenda and Preliminary Findings

Our research collaboration examines how the Modern Girl emerged as a global phenomenon in the first half of the twentieth century. By wearing provocative fashions and pursuing romantic love, Modern Girls everywhere appeared to disregard the roles of dutiful daughter, wife and mother. We develop the Modern Girl as a heuristic category that allows new insights into forces of globalisation and manifestations of gendered modernity. Through a case study of cosmetics advertising in China, India, South Africa, Germany and the United States, we show that the Modern Girl in each locale was shaped through multidirectional citations of elements from elsewhere, through transnational processes of racialisation and through distinct articulations of nationalism.     

Joseph Levenson and the possibility for a dialogic history

In contrast to the criticism that his work represents a Euro-centric view of China, we argue that Joseph Levenson’s understanding of China involves a third dimension – Judaism – at the level of his historical perspective and methodology. Built on in-depth analysis of Levenson’s work, in particular his Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, as well as his unfinished yet profound writings on Judaism and Jewish history, we find that his understanding of Jewish tradition plays a crucial role in his analysis of the history of modern China. We argue that what Levenson practiced was a historical methodology that we name “dialogic history.” We believe that dialogic history provides us a potential answer to the question of how we can understand another culture without being imperialists, essentialists, or Orientalists. Dialogic history is also history in action because when this kind of dialogue is conducted, a new space can be created in which history is no longer a one-sided monologue.     

(RE)PRODUCING A “PERIPHERAL” REGION – NORTHERN SWEDEN IN THE NEWS

Building on theories of internal orientalism, the objective of this study is to show how intra‐national differences are reproduced through influential media representations. By abstracting news representations of Norrland, a large, sparsely populated region in the northernmost part of Sweden, new modes of “internal othering” within Western modernity are put on view. Real and imagined social and economical differences between the “rural North” and the “urban South” are explained in terms of “cultural differences” and “lifestyle” choices. The concept of Norrland is used as an abstract essentialized geographical category and becomes a metonym for a backward and traditional rural space in contrast to equally essentialized urban areas with favoured modern ideals. Specific traits of parts of the region become one with the entire region and the problems of the region become the problems of the people living in the region. I argue that the news representations play a part in the reproduction of a “space of exception”, in that one region is constructed as a traditional and undeveloped space in contrast to an otherwise modern nation. A central argument of this study is that research on identity construction and representations of place is needed to come to grips with issues of uneven regional development within western nations.