Transitional geographies: making mobile children

Geographers of childhood have variously accounted for the experiences of mobile children. Less has been said about the practices of becoming mobile, including the acquisition of skills, engagement with travel technologies and the shifting child–parent relations implicated in the process. This article explores the making of mobile children through ethnographic research with 7–12-year-olds practising the journey between home and school in Helsinki, Finland. Elaborating on the work of psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott, it argues that families enact flexible spatial arrangements—transitional spaces—to experiment with their attachments to urban environments. Transitional spaces foreground the diverse relations between children, parents and the world, allowing the replacement of standard notions about growing up with situated accounts of how families make space for children's expanding mobilities. Against a cultural atmosphere stressing the risks and uncertainties of childhood, this view opens an affirmative approach to children's geographies—one that emphasises the trust, play and collaboration between adults, children and environments.     

Elemental mobilities: atmospheres,matter and cycling amid the weather-world

Abstract

Everyday experiences of movement have become a central concern for social and cultural geography in recent years. Work here has begun to unpack the specific meanings, imaginaries and experiences that come to be bound up with mobile bodies and their practices. However, it has been suggested that more could be done to examine the material, elementary, molecular and physical aspects of movement which are significant to the experience of being on the move. Therefore, this paper explores the experience of cycling amid such turbulent ‘elemental’ materialities. Such ‘matters’ matter to cycling in the way that they (re)make both mobile environments and mobile subjectivities. Cyclists come to have quite immediate and intimate relationships with the material and ‘elementary’ aspects of the environments they move through given their relatively unmediated encounters with them. This paper draws on video-interview based research with 24 commuter cyclists in Plymouth, UK to consider cyclists’ experience of atmospheric conditions in terms of air’s force and air quality. From this, the paper reflects on how the experience of such ‘elemental’ matters might be significant to future research on and planning for cycling.     

Surviving through movement: the mobility of urban youth in Ghana

In Africa, young people are engaging with a globalised world of flows and movements but are coming of age in environments characterised by uncertainty, economic hardship and unemployment. Drawing upon research conducted in Madina, a suburb of Accra, a social navigation perspective is adopted to explore young people's everyday mobility and their aspirations for future mobility. By drawing attention to the meanings young people ascribe to movement, and by analysing their movements as tactics of social navigation, the importance of spatial mobility to young people's everyday well-being and their processes of social becoming are illustrated. Young people find that their mobility is bounded by a range of factors including labour market characteristics, gender and generational relations, and their spatial location on the outskirts of the city and the margins of the world. However, neither their daily mobility nor their spatial imagination is restricted to Madina; real or imagined travel takes them to other parts of the city, into rural areas and across the nation's borders. Through illustrating how significant mobility can be for everyday survival, this paper contributes to ‘the mobility turn’ in the social sciences which has overlooked the importance of mobility for livelihoods in the global South.     

Experimental determination of CePO4 and YPO4 solubilities in H2O–NaF at 800°C and 1 GPa: implications for rare earth element transport in high‐grade metamorphic fluids

Monazite (CePO₄) and xenotime (YPO₄) are important accessory minerals in metasediments. They host significant rare earth elements (REE) and are useful for geochronology and geothermometry, so it is essential to understand their behavior during the metasomatic processes that attend high‐grade metamorphism. It has been proposed that F‐bearing fluids enhance solubility and mobility of REE and Y during high‐grade metamorphism. We assessed this possibility by determining the solubility of synthetic CePO₄ and YPO₄ crystals in H₂O–NaF fluids at 800°C and 1 GPa. Experiments used hydrothermal piston‐cylinder and weight‐loss methods. Compared to the low solubilities of CePO₄ and YPO₄ in pure H₂O (0.04 ± 0.04 and 0.25 ± 0.04 millimolal, respectively), our results indicate an enormous increase in the solubility of both phosphates with increasing NaF concentration in H₂O: CePO₄ solubility reaches 0.97 molal in 20 mol.% NaF, and YPO₄ shows an even stronger solubility enhancement to 0.45 molal in only 10 mol.% NaF. The greatest relative solubility increases occur at the lowest NaF concentration. The solubilities of CePO₄ and YPO₄ show similar quadratic dependence on NaF, consistent with possible dissolution reactions of: CePO₄ + 2NaF =  CeF₂⁺ + Na₂PO₄^? and YPO₄ + 2NaF = YF₂⁺ + Na₂PO₄^?. Solubilities of both REE phosphates are significantly greater in NaF than in NaCl at equivalent salt concentration. A fluid with 10 mol.% NaCl and multiply saturated with fluorite, CePO₄, and YPO₄ would contain 1.7 millimolal Ce and 3.3 millimolal Y, values that are respectively 2.1–2.4 times greater than in NaCl‐H₂O alone. The results indicate that Y, and by extension heavy rare earth elements (HREE), can be fractionated from LREE in fluorine‐bearing saline brines which may accompany granulite‐facies metamorphism. The new data support previous indications that REE/Y mobility at these conditions is enhanced by complexing with F in the aqueous phase.     

Public service broadcasting in Italy: Historical trends and future prospects

The article outlines the current structure and organization of public service broadcasting in Italy and explores various options for its future development. With moves towards digital broadcasting, RAI is set to enter a discrete next stage which will bring new challenges and will inevitably lead to a revision of its public service remit. While it is currently unclear how far Italian public service broadcasting will change, there is evidence that members of the government and senior RAI managers wish partially to privatize core elements of its public service. Focusing on the development of television, the article addresses some of the salient issues facing RAI and other public service broadcasters who have become the victims of a pervasive disenchantment with public provision of goods and services.     

Home away from home: meanings of the American truck stop

This paper explores the place attachments of long-haul truck drivers to the truck stop. The feelings and ideas truckers have about truck stops are based upon the function these businesses play in the truckers' mobile lifestyle and the social interactions that are performed within those spaces. Drivers' relationships to these stops also illustrate that modernity and the prevalence of homogenized places do not result in placelessness because feelings and perceptions about these places are based upon the role these businesses play in the everyday tasks of long-haul drivers.     

Mobility,Land Use,and Leadership in Small-Scale and Middle-Range Societies

Over the past century, the fields of archaeology and anthropology have produced a number of different theoretical approaches and a substantial body of data aimed at ways to understand hunter-gatherer, horticultural, and agropastoral societies. This review considers four recent edited volumes on foraging and food-producing societies. These books deal in innovative ways with a broad array of issues, including transitions in human prehistory and history, mobility, land use, sharing, technology, social leveling strategies, leadership, and the formation of social hierarchies. Small-scale societies include hunter-gatherers or foragers, while middle-range societies may include complex hunter-gatherer (ones with storage and delayed return systems), horticultural, and agropastoral societies, some of them with institutionalized leadership, status hierarchies, and differential access to power and resources. An important set of themes in these books includes diversity in adaptations to complex social and natural environments, the significance of (1) matter, (2) energy, and (3) information in small-scale and middle-range societies on several continents, the persistence of foraging, and the development of inequality. The roles of sharing, exchange, and leadership in small-scale and middle-range societies are explored, as are explanations for social, economic, and political transformations among groups over time and across space.     

SOME QUANTITATIVE INDICATORS FOR EXPLAINING AND EVALUATING NATIONAL POLITICAL PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Based on the information found in probate estate inventories, this article examines patterns of spousal preference and marital mobility in eighteenth-century Ottoman Kastamonu, located in northern Anatolia. For this purpose, we introduce quantitative techniques and categories of analysis specifically designed for Ottoman sources, primarily postmortem estate inventories (terekes), allowing us to measure how various socioeconomic groups established marital associations and to what extent they married other groups. The article also compares marital and intergenerational mobility patterns in eighteenth-century Kastamonu.     

Anticipated mobility and its archaeological signature: A case study of Folsom retooling strategies

This essay highlights the value of anticipated mobility for untangling variability in prehistoric stone tool manufacture. To do so, it explores the organization of weaponry production at a series of Folsom campsites via the highly visible archaeological signature of Folsom fluting. A model of weaponry replacement based on deep planning and anticipation of needs is proposed, according to which Folsom hunters commonly replace their projectile points as they wear down, break or are lost, but on fewer occasions engage in the mass production of fluted points. This technological organization is consistent with a highly mobile way of life in which advanced planning buffers the risk associated with limited or stochastic access to good quality lithic raw materials. The model is then put to the test at the Lindenmeier site in northern Colorado. The spatial patterning of fluting activities in two discrete areas of the site demonstrates contrasting strategies of point manufacture: conservation versus gearing up (creation of a surplus). It is argued that these patterns represent distinct facets of a single technological organization.     

Readjusting Cultural Codes: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

In this article I seek to apply the notion of anti-Semitism as a cultural code, which I initially developed 25 years ago with relation to the antimodernist trends in late-nineteenth-century Germany, to the phenomena of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism today. From the 1960s anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism formed part of a larger ideological package consisting of anticolonialism, anticapitalism, and a deep suspicion of US policies. In the eyes of members of the developing countries, Jews became a symbol of the West and legitimate targets for hatred. Thus, the position on the Jewish question, even if not in itself of paramount importance, came to indicate a belonging to a larger camp, a political stand and an overall cultural choice. The question is whether the position towards Israel today, which has become a central issue for the European left, can still be considered a cultural code or whether it rather indicates a more direct anti-Jewish attack, above all as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.