Social geographies of rural mental health: experiencing inclusions and exclusions

A dominant urban focus in previous research on the social geographies of mental health has obscured the experiences of people with mental health problems living in rural localities. Critiquing this urban focus, we report on research conducted in the rural and remote Scottish Highlands. Evidence derived from in-depth interviews with over 100 users of psychiatric services in the Highlands is deployed to investigate the complex socio-spatial dynamics of inclusion and exclusion experienced by these users on a daily basis. A discussion of the explanations that users themselves offer of their experiences is accompanied by a theoretical framing of these issues pivoting on relations of proximity–distance and intimacy–repulsion.     

Globalisation and regulation of citizenship—Filipino migrant workers in Japan

This paper examines the state’s contradictory roles in globalising its workforce and transforming its regulatory capacities, and the implications these changes have for the human and citizenship rights of an increasing number of migrant workers. We investigate foreign workers’ protection and rights at both ends of the migration chain by using the specific examples of the Philippines and Japan. The discussion identifies areas for greater activism and mechanisms for the promotion of the rights of migrants from both ‘above’ and ‘below’. First, the highly aggressive role of the state in globalising labour markets is theoretically discussed. The paper then examines the role of the Philippine state in labour export and the implications of its embrace of neo-liberalism for its capacity to strongly pursue migrant worker welfare. The contradictory positions of the state in promoting globalisation, on the one hand, and discourses of human rights for migrant workers, on the other, are highlighted. In the Japanese case we examine the role of the state in both regulating and restructuring its labour market, and the structural dependence placed on the legal and illegal importation of migrant labour. Despite this dependence, we reveal the contradictory positions held within Japan’s state apparatus which result in a deliberate marginalisation of migrant workers. The important role of NGOs in disseminating information to migrant workers about their rights in Japan is highlighted. We explore the relationship between the individual and the state in the context of globalisation through the discussion of citizenship as a negotiated concept. We then examine the changing reality brought about by globalisation processes in terms of responsibility towards the protection of any worker (regardless of passport) but also with regard to activism on behalf of migrant labour. Finally, we emphasise the important future role to be played by NGOs in making the needs and rights of globalised workers more broadly recognised and attended to at both local, national and transnational levels.     

Spaces and Scales of African Student Activism: Senegalese and Zimbabwean University Students at the Intersection of Campus,Nation and Globe

Abstract: African university students have long engaged in political activism, responding to changing political, social and economic circumstances through protest that has at times exerted considerable influence on the national stage. Student activism employs highly spatialised strategies yet has received minimal attention from geographers. Drawing on case studies from Senegal and Zimbabwe, we identify four phases of activism in which students have mobilised distinctive relational spatialities in responding to changes in the spatial expression of dominant political power. In so doing, we highlight the inadequacies of approaches to resistance that give excessive emphasis to a power/resistance dualism or to questions of scale.     

Seeing like an investor: urban development planning,financialisation, and investors’ perceptions of London as an investment space

There is a growing orthodoxy that since the global financial crisis European policy-makers and planning systems have become more dependent on inward investment and the availability of global finance to fund welfare services and projects. This process of financialisation, it is claimed, is driven by the needs of developers and investors, who are focused on maximizing returns and limiting their social and economic liabilities. Planning agencies and traditional territory-based arrangements are viewed with increasing suspicion, as standing in the way of investment and acting as a brake on much needed house-building and regeneration. However, in this paper, drawing on detailed research with investors and developers in London, we argue that there needs to be a stronger focus in academic and policy writing on the multiple, variegated, and diverse calculations and framings that private sector actors take when making investment decisions. Too often their perspectives are caricatured and/or over-simplified. We show that and imaginations of planning and regulation are complex and that many firms have realized that market success results from becoming more deeply embedded in the local political, social, and regulatory environments in which they are investing. A greater understanding of these multiple forms of calculation, in turn, opens up opportunities for the maintenance and/or implementation of more effective forms of territorially-based soft and hard regulation. The paper concludes by outlining a broader research agenda for planning and urban studies.     

Non-destructive PXRF analysis of museum-curated obsidian from the Near East

Non-destructive pXRF has the potential to expand sample populations of archaeological provenancing studies by facilitating access to museum collections of artefacts. In this study, we use museum-curated obsidian for the sites of Tell Brak, Mersin-Yümüktepe and Tell Arpachiyah and geological obsidian samples from central Turkey to demonstrate that non-destructive pXRF is comparable to other techniques in differentiating between Near Eastern obsidian sources. Secondly, we use multivariate analysis to evaluate whether non-destructive pXRF is sufficiently accurate and precise to enable comparison with legacy datasets from previous analysis using PIXE and ICP-MS. Multivariate analyses show that instrumental offsets between the results from pXRF and other analytic techniques are less than source-to-source variation typical for most Anatolian obsidian outcrops and pXRF-identified geochemical groups are directly comparable to legacy datasets. Non-destructive pXRF analysis indicates that during the Chalcolithic, East Göllü da? and Nenezi da? continued to be the major sources of obsidian to communities in central Anatolia and the Bingöl range and mountains surrounding Lake Van supplied sites east of the Levant. Variations in the analysed assemblages suggest a number of obsidian exchange networks existed during this period.     

Non-destructive pXRF of mafic stone tools

Archaeological use of non-destructive pXRF has been most systematically applied to the classification and provenancing of volcanic glass (obsidian) artefacts. Comparable work has yet to be developed for non-vitreous artefacts. We report results of pXRF analysis for a sample of grey to black (mafic) aboriginal hatchets from Sydney and adjacent coastal regions to the north and south. The study shows both broad and detailed classification is achievable depending on rock type and degree of elemental depletion or enrichment of the samples. PXRF analysis reveals not only distinct patterns of resource use between the three regions of this study but also enables a high degree of geographic resolution in the case of the basalt artefacts of our sample. We conclude that non-destructive pXRF is effective for reliable characterisation of non-vitreous stone artefacts that have a sufficiently complex and enriched compositional signature (i.e., unaltered basalts); with ∼50% of the basalt hatchets in our sample matched with spatially and geologically specific sources.     

Fears for the future: the incommensurability of securitisation and in/securities among southern African youth

Abstract

Over the past two decades, southern Africa has experienced both exceptionally high AIDS prevalence and recurrent food shortages. International institutions have responded to these challenges by framing them as security concerns that demand urgent intervention. Young people are implicated in both crises and drawn into the securitisation discourse as agents (of risk and protection) and as (potential) victims. However, the concepts of security deployed by global institutions and translated into national policy do not reflect the ways in/security is experienced ‘on the ground’ as a subjective and embodied orientation to the future. This paper brings work on youth temporalities to bear on social and cultural geographies of in/security and securitisation. It reports on research that explored insecurities among young people in Lesotho and Malawi. It concludes that, by focusing on ‘threats’ in isolation, and seeking to protect ‘society’ as an abstract aggregate of people, global securitisation discourses fail either to engage with the complex contextualised ways in which marginalised people experience insecurity or to proffer the political responses that are needed if those felt insecurities are to be addressed. However, while securitisation is problematic, in/security is nonetheless an important element in young people’s orientation to the future.     

Troubling meanings of family and competing moral imperatives in the family lives of young people with a parent who is at the end of life

ABSTRACT

This article draws on a narrative study of young people with a parent who is at the end of life to examine how family lives are troubled by life-limiting parental illness. Young people struggled to reconcile the physical and emotional absence of family members with meanings of ‘family’; the extent to which young people could rely on family to ‘be there’ in these troubling circumstances was of practical, emotional and moral significance. Our discussion is situated in the context of an English end of life care policy predicated on the ideal of a good death as one that takes place at home accompanied by family members. We explore how the shift away from family as a site for nurturing children towards family as a space to care for the dying is experienced by young people, and consider how these competing moral imperatives are negotiated through relational practices of care.