Parenting,care and the family car

This paper draws on driving ethnographies conducted with heterosexual parents in a regional centre in New South Wales, Australia, to illustrate the doing of family care in the mobile space of the car. Our analysis employs a narrative ethnography used by geographers working in materialist more-than-human feminist perspectives. In doing so, we advance writing in the gendered geographies of care and car dependency by exploring mothers’ and fathers’ involvement in driving their children. We engage with work which challenges the epistemological and ontological orthodoxies that once dominated transport and family studies in order to better tackle car dependency in the Anthropocene by understanding how parents ‘do’ family somewhere-on-the-move. Parents’ care for and about kin is lived and felt through the sociality of driving somewhere together. We conclude with insights for theory and policy.     

Ribbonmen and radicals: the cultivation of Irishness and the promotion of active citizenship in mid-Victorian Glasgow

A secular, at times radical, tradition of organising and representing Irishness in Scotland had been moulded before 1861. However, in that year, local branches of a new Dublin-centred organisation, the National Brotherhood of St Patrick (NBSP), appeared, offering a new sense of purpose. As this article will argue, the Brotherhood probably had at its core local Ribbonmen (some of them in all probability with “advanced nationalist” views in that post-1848 period) and they were now keen to engage in an “open” subscriber association less obviously prone to the accusations of conspiracy which their previous clandestine solidarity had generated. The NBSP and a later association, the Irish National Association of Scotland, provided opportunities for a more public leadership to emerge and gave Irish-Scots workers important associational experience. In the longer term, this associational activity represents a key stage in the development of a social radical discourse, later so characteristic of Irish Home Rule politics in Scotland.     

CAN WE GET OLD HERE? SENIORS' PERCEPTIONS OF SEASONAL CONSTRAINTS OF NEIGHBOURHOOD BUILT ENVIRONMENTS IN A NORTHERN,WINTER CITY

Populations around the world are ageing. In response, the World Health Organization (WHO) has developed initiatives to encourage cities and regions to become age‐friendly for seniors. This work examines WHO's age‐friendly domains in the context of a northern, winter city in Canada. The urban centre of Edmonton, Alberta experiences both a climate characterized by long, cold winters and a sprawling, built environment with very low population densities. The research found that seniors did report a difference in built environment preferences in summer and winter and that some of those preferences match the elements of the eight WHO domains. However two additional important findings also emerged. First, winter weather was the dominating concept for discussion of the environment regardless of the time of year, and these weather concerns conflated seniors' perceptions of public–private spaces, pointing to the need to carefully examine how this conflation might influence civic participation. Second, participants almost unanimously spoke to the need to make individual adaptations in order to navigate their environments as their mobility decreased. In other words, instead of expecting environmental adaptations to meet their changing needs, seniors accepted and individually managed – to the best of their ability – the ongoing challenges. These findings provide empirical results that can be used to develop supportive built environments in winter cities, with an emphasis on ‘upstream’ health geography and public health imperatives that enable safe and vibrant neighbourhoods to support healthy aging, which has implications for geographers, planners, and public health personnel.     

For all the Wrong Reasons? Re‐evaluating Truman,Domestic Influences,and the Palestine Question

This essay is a re‐evaluation of President Harry Truman's foreign policy in Palestine and whether his decision‐making was influenced by domestic issues, events and attitudes. The article both weighs in on the current debate of whether Truman was susceptible to electoral influences and the Jewish vote, and argues that Truman never knowingly placed American interests in jeopardy by going against the recommendations of his State Department. Rather, the advice of his closest aids convinced him that a pro‐Zionist policy would not detriment American interests in the Middle East. Thus, Truman could then seek to gain political and electoral advantages from a policy that he believed was already in America's best interest. In addition, I will argue that American anti‐Semitism and a revival of nativist attitudes in America resulted in an environment in which America would not accept its share of the displaced persons. As a result, Truman advocated a policy of refugee Zionism with regards to the Palestine Question, which ultimately undermined the British, who were too weak to uphold the Palestine Mandate following the war. Thus, the influence of American domestic issues took many forms and was one integral factor in the eventual outcome of the Palestine Question.