Youthful Creativity in Regional Australia: Panacea for Unemployment and Out‐Migration?

This paper addresses the theme of youth out‐migration from rural Australia, in the context of recent policy discussions about creativity and its role in regional development. Ethnographic fieldwork in one rural location – the New South Wales Far North Coast – is drawn upon to highlight how creative industries are being cast as a potential way of promoting cultural activities and jobs for young people, and in turn, how they might be imagined as a means to mitigate youth out‐migration. Yet, creative industries have contradictory employment and social outcomes. Creative industries are likely to generate higher rates of youth participation in economic activities than public data reveal. However, strategies for future job growth should also consider the limitations and instabilities of creative industry employment. Second, and more broadly, the paper discusses those socio‐cultural dimensions of nascent creative industries that may have a more substantial impact when conceived as part of strategies to stem youth exodus from rural areas. Creative activities may contribute to rural development in indirect ways, especially if linked to policy goals of increased tolerance of youth activities, better provision of cultural services, and improved well‐being for young people. While formal job‐creation may be limited, creative industries could mitigate some of the impacts of youth migration to cities by enriching regional social life and mediating perceptions of the advantages and drawbacks of rural versus urban life. This kind of policy imagination requires a shift in attitudes towards young people and a more genuine commitment to encourage young people to feel that they belong in non‐metropolitan areas.     

市场经济与社区建设

市场经济与枉区建设是一种相辅相成、相互促进、缺一不可的关系。市场经济的发展历程告诉我们,市场经济发展到一定历史阶段,需要一个强有力的市民社会的支持。否则,经济的发展是无法深入持久的。枉区建设是我国大规模深层次社会改革的起点,它为打遣中国的市民枉会提供了最好的平台和契机。市场经济改革为枉区建设提供不竭的动力资源和物质基础,社区建设则为市场经济提供强有力的社会保障;市场经济是枉区建设的逻辑前提,社区建设则是市场经济的必然结果。     

城市社会区域体系结构公正配置的空间控制原理与路径

从现代人本主义思维出发,以城市社会地理学原理,即从社会空间结构与社区规划角度,探讨城市居民的生活空间的质量构成,体现在城市要满足各阶层居民(社会)生活的空间结构上。而城市(社会)生活的空间结构的健全与否取决于生活空间行为的社区体系与场所体系的空间构成上。主要体现在居民以居住为主的生活行为对立的居舍类型的可获性上。由此,不同阶层居舍类型体系是城市(社会)生活空间质量的区域基础,其空间分布类型的可获性决定对应阶层人群能否获得以居舍为主的生活空间。本文首次从居民选择居住地行为规律以及形成的城市居舍类型空间结构演化的理念下论及城市社会区域空间体系公正配置与空间控制原理。     

构建社会主义和谐社会必须解决弱势群体问题

构建社会主义和谐社会必须解决弱势群体问题,这是巩固中国共产党执政地位的需要,是社会主义题中应有之义,是使整个社会充满刨造活力的需要,也是维护社会稳定有序的需要。在构建社会主义和谐社会的进程中,解决弱势群体的途径一是要建立和完善与我国经济社会发展水平相适应的社会保障制度,二是要发挥国家政策导向的作用,建立健全扩大就业再就业的政府主导机制。     

Queerly situated? Exploring negotiations of trans queer subjectivities at work and within community spaces in the UK

While traditional perspectives on transgender from some strands of feminism and within medical/psychoanalytical discourse have argued that transgender people conform to and reproduce gender stereotypes, queer theory has celebrated transgender as a site that highlights the social and cultural construction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and, moreover, as a symbol of transgressive gender possibility. Both of these readings ignore the complexities of lived trans experiences and identifications. By evaluating a queer reading of trans through recent empirical research into transgender identities, I suggest that while trans identifications certainly queer binary models of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, such transgressions are materially, culturally, socially and spatially contingent. The article draws on empirical research to explore the ways in which access to queer subjectivities is constrained by, and negotiated alongside, the locales of the workplace and community spaces.     

C.S. Lewis: an Irish writer

This article examines the effect of C.S. Lewis's Irish background on his work. It attempts to contradict the assumption that this Belfast-born writer should be included in the English and not the Irish canon. It emphasises that Lewis saw himself as Irish, was seen by others as Irish, and that his Irish background, contrary to what some have written, was important to him throughout his lifetime. It goes on to demonstrate the ways in which his work was influenced by his youth in Ireland and by the Irish mythology that he loved. Furthermore, this article maintains that, as a child of pre-partition Ireland with roots throughout the island, Lewis was influenced by the country as a whole, not just his native Ulster. Finally, it attempts to understand why Lewis, a proud Irishman, did not do more to promote himself as an Irish writer.     

From golden hills to sycamore trees: pastoral homelands and ethnic identity in Irish immigrant fiction, 1860–75

The prose fiction that remembers the trials of starvation and eviction of the Great Famine (1845–50) often juxtaposes representations of blasted, infertile land with images of a green, idyllic Erin. Through a discussion of Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway (1861), Elizabeth Hely Walshe's Golden Hills: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1865) and John McElgun's Annie Reilly (1873), this article reveals that immigrant writers of the Famine generation often negotiate depictions of Famine-stricken wasteland with evocations of a pastoral homeland. In the case of the two Catholic novels, Bessy Conway and Annie Reilly, the pastoral becomes a point of ethnic identification through which the immigrants can recollect and reconstruct a sense of Irishness in exile. By contrast, Golden Hills, which focuses on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, does not lament the mass exodus of afflicted Irish: the novel rather envisions emigration as a way to regenerate Ireland as locus amoenus.     

Fate of the ash hurley in a global economy

The Irish sport of hurling, which pre-dates written history, has traditionally been played with an ash hurley shaped by a local craftsman known as a hurleymaker. Hurleymaking has always been an Irish practice, but now finds itself threatened by a global economy, an inconsistent supply chain, and synthetic manufacturing.     

Councils,consultations and community: rethinking the spaces for children and young people's participation1

The participation of children and young people in decisions that affect them is now mainstream in social and public policy in the UK. Yet for many young people formal participation opportunities are abstracted from everyday lives and concerns. Children may not feel empowered despite the existence of formal structures for participation. This raises questions about how ‘spaces’ for participation are constructed. This paper critiques prevailing models of participation in formal structures and instead, argues for the need to rethink children's participation as a more diverse set of social processes rooted in everyday environments and interactions.     

迁居对单位老年人日常生活社会网络的影响

社会网络对于老年人的日常活动与生活质量起着至关重要的作用,关系到老年人的身心健康、主观幸福感以及生活满意度等多个维度。本文以单位老年人为研究对象,通过深入观察、追踪研究、结构访谈、案例剖析等质性研究方法,对比迁居前后单位老年人的日常生活与社会交往状态,分析迁居后单位老年人应对新居住空间与原有社会交往空间分离下的日常活动与交往模式的调整与变化,重点剖析迁居老年人与原单位社区之间的互动,进而归纳迁居对单位老年人社会网络的影响机制,并从老年人迁居与社会交往的互动关系的角度提出相关的老龄政策。