‘Eyes on where children play’: a retrospective study of active free play

The purpose of this study was to examine factors that influenced childhood active free play. Participants were 13 young adults who resided in one western Canadian city. They took part in semi-structured and walk-along interviews during which they were asked about their memories and experiences of play. Analysis showed that, whereas parental restrictions and safety concerns were limiting factors, a sense of community and safety in numbers facilitated their involvement in active free play. However, the young adults thought these factors had since become eroded from modern society. We concluded a reduced sense of perceived safety exists because there are fewer eyes on where children play.     

Transforming the Classic Political Forest: Contentious Territories in Java

Java’s extensive political forests and their contentious social relations have been profoundly transformed since the turn of the 21^st century. This paper analyses new forms of forest land use, control, and revenue distribution, shaping and shaped by political-economic changes and neoliberal-era reforms. Villagers’ expanded uses, access to, and control of the forest understory under the violently thinned out canopies of the main tree species has generated newly spatialised forest politics, with new institutions and forest labour practices. The changes in land, species, and labour controls, and in villagers’ access to forest products and revenues define this historical transformation in the constitution of Java’s classic political forest. Contentious co-production has resulted in fragmented territories and a momentary (at least) weakening of state controls within the old imperial political forest.     

Region‐specific determinants of the foreign direct investment in China

This study revisits region‐specific determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Eastern, Central, and Western China using econometric and spatial analyses. It uses a data set covering 31 Chinese provinces and autonomous regions spanning the period 2005–15, together with panel data regression. Our statistical results show that in Eastern China, FDI is significantly associated with bilateral trade, orientation towards the service industry, industrialisation level, and availability of strategic assets in the region. In Central China, FDI is mainly pulled by availability of the domestic market and strategic assets in the region. In Western China, FDI inflows are mainly determined by natural resource endowment, industrialisation level, and regional innovation and production effectiveness in information and communication technology industries. Our analysis also reveals the impact of FDI in China's regional development and its capacity to hollow out the three Chinese macro‐regions. Our findings for China lead us to suggest that those governments seeking to attract FDI should not solely rely on it to facilitate local economic development and should make use of local circumstances in combination with FDI to boost their economies.     

The Europeanization of Prehispanic tradition: Bernardino de Sahagún’s transformation of Aztec priests (tlamacazque) into classical wise men (tlamatinime)

The Nahua wise men known as tlamatinime have been treated as core figures of Prehispanic indigenous culture in Mexico. Most scholars, basing their opinions heavily on the works of Bernardino de Sahagún (Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, Coloquios y doctrina cristiana, and the Florentine Codex) portraying the tlamatinime as scholars, philosophers, scribes, poets, and physicians who reflected the advanced and highly civilized nature of Prehispanic Mexico. However, in this article, I argue that in their search for indigenous intellectuals, scholars have overlooked one of Bernardino de Sahagún's pet projects: ‘taming’ or domesticating Aztec religious authorities, turning them from threatening shaman-like figures into misguided but otherwise professional teachers, thinkers, and public speakers, thereby stripping them of their religious authority.     

Changing trends in international marriages between Korean men and Southeast Asian women, 1993–2013

Korea witnessed a large increase in the fraction of men marrying spouses from Southeast Asia. In the 1990s, about one per cent of Korean men’s new marriages were to Southeast Asian women but by 2005, this increased to over nine per cent with even higher rates in rural areas. With the use of a logit model and Marriage Register data from 1993–2013, the determinants of international marriages are explored using a more rigorous approach and over a longer period of observation compared to previous studies. Older Korean men with lower socioeconomic status were more likely to marry a woman from Southeast Asia (compared to a fellow Korean). The predictors of international marriage differed depending on the wife’s birth country: if the wife had some college education there was a higher probability of marriage to a Filipino woman, but less likely to a woman from China or Vietnam, compared to marriage to a Korean woman. Finally, over the past two decades the education level, age at marriage, and country of origin of the foreign wives have changed substantially. The data shows fewer women migrating from China (of which about 70% are ethnically Korean), and a rising number from Vietnam. This ‘marriage migration’ has implications for the demographics, ethnicity, and occupational composition of those living in Korea.