Home and away: constructing family and childhood in the context of working parenthood

Little is known about children's views and experiences of their parents’ work?life reconciliation and how these are negotiated in everyday family practices. This article examines families' experiences of work?life reconciliation from both children's and parents' perspectives, drawing on a qualitative longitudinal study with 14 families in Scotland. Such experiences have implications for the spatial and temporal construction of family and childhood in the UK, where working parenthood is increasingly the norm.     

Staging the Interior: The Public and Private Intimacies of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's Domestic Lives

‘Home’ is one of the most evocative and comforting words in the English language. It produces, at least in its idealized form, notions of safety, comfort, privacy, individuality and communion with family and friends. The supposed autonomy or permanence of home, however, is undermined frequently throughout one's life course revealing instead spaces of interactionism, public disturbance, discomfort, conflict, labour, stress and even violence. Reading Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's voluminous letters one reads the emotional and psychological importance of ‘home’ and the vital necessity of the ideal world apart. The middle-class home was meant to stage a domesticated and comfortable private haven, withdrawn from public view and distant from the imperatives of the economy and politics, however, the house was also the physical representation, the outward ‘sign’, of the Carlyles' public identity. How the House looked and functioned – externally and internally – represented the Carlyles to the outside world. Home was, as Walter Benjamin alluded, like a sheltered theater box from which the occupants looked at the stage of the outside world and also the stage upon which the outside world cast its own critical eye on the action within. The necessities of life and the public fascination with the interior signify that private and public are largely mutable concepts. Any clear distinction between inside and outside, private and public are complicated as we look at the intimacies of the Carlyles' lives.     

Revolution and the Jews

Taking the public demonstrations in France after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo as its starting point, the essay considers the active role Jews played in shaping the relationship between religion and politics in modern Europe to argue that this history can allow us to think more expansively about the position of Islam in current discussions of theo-politics in France and Europe more broadly.     

Knowing scale: intelle©tual property rights,knowledge spaces and the production of the global

In this article, I am concerned with the importance of knowledge spaces to the construction and politics of scale. I draw together literatures on re-scaling with feminist critiques of knowledge to show how struggles over the scale at which knowledge claims are represented and legitimized are an important, and under-recognized, element of rescaling. I draw from Neil Smith's (1984) concept of scale-jumping to see the construction of the global space of knowledge as a scale-jump in which one particular situated knowledge, Western folk belief, is redefined as global and universal. What distinguishes it from other forms of local/anecdotal/unrecognizable knowledges is its relation to power and its capacity to achieve a scale-jump in which it is defined as global knowledge. I contrast the social, economic and power relations associated with knowledge in the village of Puno in the Philippines with those of technoscientific knowledge, as manifested by regimes of intellectual property, to show that knowledges are not a natural way of understanding a separate, pre-existing world but inform how that world is experienced. I build upon David Turnbull's (1997) concept of knowledge spaces to reveal all knowledges as not only arising from a particular context but also as creating that context.

Connaître l'échelle: les droits relatifs à la propriété intellectuelle, les espaces de savoir et la production du mondial

Dans cet article, je me penche sur l'importance des espaces de savoir dans la construction et les politiques d'échelle. Je marrie les corpus sur les transformations d'échelle et les critiques féministes du savoir pour montrer comment les débats qui entourent l'échelle à partir de laquelle les prétentions au savoir sont représentées et admises comme légitimes sont une dimension importante et peu connue des transformations d'échelle. Le concept de saut d'échelle proposé par Neil Smith (1984 Smith, N. 1984. Uneven Development, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.  [Google Scholar]) me sert de point d'appui pour mieux situer la construction d'un espace mondial du savoir en tant que saut d'échelle par lequel un savoir contextualisé, en l'occurrence les croyances folkloriques occidentales, est redéfini en fonction du mondial et de l'universel. Ce savoir se démarque des autres formes de connaissances locales/anecdotiques/indiscernables par son rapport au pouvoir et par sa capacité d'opérer un saut d'échelle vers un savoir mondial. Je compare les relations sociales, économiques et de pouvoir liées au savoir dans le village de Puno aux Philippines avec celles qui relèvent du savoir technoscientifique, telle qu'elles se manifestent dans des régimes de propriété intellectuelle, pour montrer que ces connaissances ne sont pas un moyen naturel de comprendre un monde distinct et préexistant, mais représentent plutôt une source d'informations sur la manière dont le monde est connu. Je prolonge le concept des espaces de savoir de David Turnbull (1997 Turnbull, D. 1997. Reframing science and other local knowledge traditions. Futures, 29: 551–563. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) afin de démontrer que toutes les connaissances proviennent non seulement d'un contexte en particulier, mais qu'elles peuvent également créer ce contexte.

Sabiendo escala: derechos de propiedad intelectual, espacios de conocimiento y la producción de lo mundial

En este artículo trato la importancia de espacios de conocimiento con relación a la construcción y la política de escala. He unido literatura sobre el reescalar con críticas feministas sobre conocimiento para ilustrar como la lucha sobre la escala a que se representa y legitima los conocimientos es un elemento del reescalar importante y poco reconocido. Hago uso del concepto de Neil Smith (1984 Smith, N. 1984. Uneven Development, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.  [Google Scholar]) de saltar escalas para ver la construcción del espacio mundial de conocimiento como un salto de escala en que un conocimiento particular, la creencia folklórica occidental, se redefine como mundial y universal. Lo que le diferencia de otras formas de conocimiento locales/anecdóticas/irreconocibles es su relación al poder y su capacidad de saltar de una escala para otra, así redefiniéndose como conocimiento mundial. Comparo las relaciones sociales y económicas y relaciones de poder asociadas con conocimiento en el pueblo de Puno en las Filipinas con las relaciones de conocimiento tecnocientíficas, tal como son manifestados por regimenes de propiedad intelectual para ilustrar que los conocimientos no representan una manera natural de entender un mundo separado que ya existía, sino que informan la manera en que se experimenta ese mundo. Amplio el concepto de espacios de conocimiento de David Turnbull (1997 Turnbull, D. 1997. Reframing science and other local knowledge traditions. Futures, 29: 551–563. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) para revelar que todos los conocimientos no sólo surgen de un contexto paricular, sino que también crean ese contexto.     

Progressive localism for an ethics of care: Local Area Co-ordination with people with learning disabilities

In the UK devolution to ‘new’ nations and localities is generating differences in the tone and substance of social care. In Scotland there is an apparent rejection of the ‘personalisation’ model dominant in England and other neoliberal welfare states; in its place, there is an emphasis on locally based co-produced care provision, involving local organisations, practitioners and individuals. The paper argues that this is an outcome of the open and deliberative nature of policy-making, and the further devolution of social care provision to local authorities in Scotland. Local scale networks and spaces of provision are generating a ‘progressive localism’, contesting the association between the local scale and financial austerity, drawing on a relational understanding of place. Non-commodified and locally-based provision expands the discourse of care from ‘caring for’ individuals to ‘caring about’ people and places, in what is termed an ‘ethics of care’. The paper uses the example of people with learning disabilities to examine a more broadly conceived ‘caring’ within local communities, offering possibilities for inclusion and belonging. The paper draws on interviews with key policy makers and place-based care practitioners, known as ‘Local Area Co-ordinators’.     

‘The Blade Was in My Own Breast’: Slave Infanticide in 1850s Fiction

This article examines antislavery authors’ attempts in the 1850s to fictionalize the Margaret Garner story of slave infanticide as a means of converting northern white readers to the antislavery cause. In their attempts to gain sympathy for an enslaved female protagonist who had murdered her own child, these authors confronted strong cultural beliefs about femininity, motherhood, and blackness. Almost uniformly, their strategy involved lightening the skin of the main character and presenting the killing of her child as a form of suicide. Nevertheless, the intense emotions surrounding the slavery issue by the mid‐1850s also led these authors to endow their fictional slave women with an aggressiveness that challenged contemporary social boundaries for women.     

Family stories,public silence: Irish identity construction amongst the second‐generation Irish in England

Formal narratives of history, especially that of colonial oppression, have been central to the construction of national identities in Ireland. But the Irish diasporic community in Britain has been cut off from the reproduction of these narratives, most notably by their absence from the curriculum of Catholic schools, as result of the unofficial ‘denationalisation’ pact agreed by the Church in the 19th century (Hickman, 1995). The reproduction of Irish identities is largely a private matter, carried out within the home through family accounts of local connections, often reinforced by extended visits to parent/s ‘home’ areas. Recapturing a public dimension has often become a personal quest in adulthood, ‘filling in the gaps’. This paper explores constructions of narratives of nation by a key diasporic population, those with one or two Irish‐born parents. It places particular emphasis on varying regional/national contexts within which such constructions take place, drawing on focus group discussions and interviews for the ESRC‐funded Irish 2 Project in five locations — London, Glasgow, Manchester, Coventry and Banbury.     

Commentary: feeding Teotihuacan in the context of commodities research

This commentary on the Feeding Teotihuacan collection of papers provides an “outsider” perspective on the contributions, by an archeologist who conducts research on agriculture and plant use by the ancient Maya.