Organic Public Geographies: “Making the Connection”

Abstract: A new field of “public geographies” is taking shape ( Fuller 2008 ) in geography's mainstream journals. While much is “traditional”, with intellectuals disseminating academic research via non‐ academic outlets ( Castree 2006 ; Mitchell 2008 ; Oslender 2007 ), less visible is the “organic” work and its “more involved intellectualizing, pursued through working with area‐based or single‐interest groups, in which the process itself may be the outcome” ( Ward 2006 :499; see Fuller and Askins 2010 ). A number of well‐known projects exist where research has been “done not merely for the people we write about but with them” ( Gregory 2005 :188; see also Cahill 2004 ; Johnston and Pratt 2010 ). However, collaborative writing of academic publications which gives research participants authorial credit is unusual ( mrs kinpainsby 2008 ; although see Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006 ). This paper is about an organic public geographies project called “Making the connection”. It is written by a diverse collection of (non‐)academic participants who contributed to the project before it had started, as it was undertaken, and/or after it had finished. This is a “messy”, process‐oriented text ( Cook et al. 2007 ) working through the threads (partially) connecting the activities of its main collaborators, including a referee who helped get the paper to publication.     

Exploring the daily geographies of diverse men caregiving for family members with multiple chronic conditions

Within Canada, it has been estimated that almost half of all family, also known as informal, caregivers are now men. However, the contributions and experiences of these caregiver men have received relatively little attention, particularly from geographies of care and caregiving researchers. This analysis hopes to shed light on the unique, yet diverse, experiences of men caregiving for persons with multiple chronic conditions in Canada. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nineteen men caregivers in two provinces of Canada, this analysis aims to explore how social and physical axes of difference shape men’s daily lived geographies when providing care. Our thematic findings reveal that caregiving is experienced by participants at the three scalar levels of the body, the home and the community. Our intersectional analysis reveals that at each scalar level, being a man was not the only variable shaping caregiving experiences. Rather, it was also age, physical capacity, culture, socio-economic status, marital status, housing status, social connectedness, relationship to the care recipient and care recipients’ physical and mental capacity that shaped experiences and meanings of place during the caregiving process. Accounting for this diversity at each scale, our findings point to the unique stresses and challenges experienced. We conclude by emphasizing the significance in acknowledging the diverse challenges that exist for all caregivers in order to inform comprehensive and inclusive social policy that ultimately will produce equitable caregiver supports.     

Feelings of distance and proximity: exploring the emotional geographies of men caregiving for family members with multiple chronic conditions

Care exchanges are imbued with emotion, yet few geography of caregiving researchers have explored how emotions shape such experiences. Furthermore, the emotions of caregiver men have been largely overlooked. As such, this secondary analysis aims to geographically explore the emotion discourse of a diverse group of men caregiving for family members with multiple chronic conditions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with nineteen men caregivers in Canada, our thematic findings reveal that the men’s discourse portrayed emotions experienced relationally at three levels: Between the caregivers and their own selves, others and the wider community. It was also found that the men commonly expressed their emotional experiences using geographic notions of distance (e.g. feeling far, isolated) and proximity (e.g. feeling close, connected) and that these emotions were further complicated by the participants’ diversity or situated ‘place-in-the-world’. Overall, our findings demonstrate the importance of emotional geographies in caregiver men’s lived realities and how they move between distance and proximity in order to manage their emotions as caregivers. By considering caregiver diversity and the role emotions play in shaping caregiver experiences, programs, services and best practice can become better informed on ways to enhance the provision of more context sensitive and equitable caregiver support.     

A Spatiotemporal Bayesian Hierarchical Approach to Investigating Patterns of Confidence in the Police at the Neighborhood Level

Public confidence in the police is crucial to effective policing. Improving understanding of public confidence at the local level will better enable the police to conduct proactive confidence interventions to meet the concerns of local communities. Conventional approaches do not consider that public confidence varies across geographic space as well as in time. Neighborhood level approaches to modeling public confidence in the police are hampered by the small number problem and the resulting instability in the estimates and uncertainty in the results. This research illustrates a spatiotemporal Bayesian approach for estimating and forecasting public confidence at the neighborhood level and we use it to examine trends in public confidence in the police in London, UK, for Q2 2006 to Q3 2013. Our approach overcomes the limitations of the small number problem and specifically, we investigate the effect of the spatiotemporal representation structure chosen on the estimates of public confidence produced. We then investigate the use of the model for forecasting by producing one‐step ahead forecasts of the final third of the time series. The results are compared with the forecasts from traditional time‐series forecasting methods like naïve, exponential smoothing, ARIMA, STARIMA, and others. A model with spatially structured and unstructured random effects as well as a normally distributed spatiotemporal interaction term was the most parsimonious and produced the most realistic estimates. It also provided the best forecasts at the London‐wide, Borough, and neighborhood level.     

An Economy of Country Houses

This paper presents an economy of country houses with the ultimate aim of generating a framework for the evolution of country house management theory for the development of management practice and education. Whereas traditional management theory (for large entities) has evolved from the modern and narrow interpretation of economy, this paper employs the old but broader archaic form (oeconomy). This is a device that has previously been used both to generate an alternative understanding of organisations in general as well as for specific types of organisation. When combined with empirical data collected from a range of different country houses, an economy of country houses has emerged. This oeconomy is based on a number of core concepts, each of which has a number of key issues associated with it. The results show that this economy is quite unique, although there are some similarities with the economy of small businesses and the conflict approach of business management theory.     

Santo Domingo de Talaje: resurrecting a seventeenth-century Spanish mission at Darien Bluff,Georgia

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an overview of archaeological investigations conducted at Darien Bluff, McIntosh County, Georgia, over the past 75 years. The discovery of lost artifacts, missing excavation records, and several draft reports provided an opportunity to obtain a comprehensive overview of Spanish Mission period activity at the site of Mission Santo Domingo de Talaje, a primarily seventeenth-century mission that once stood on the banks of the Altamaha River. Included are archaeological and historical perspectives of the researchers who excavated the site and new interpretations by the authors that draw on recently relocated artifacts and excavation records.