Towards a nuanced understanding of health‐supportive place using composite research methods

Chronic non‐communicable diseases comprise a major challenge for health in contemporary Australia and across the globe and, while various factors are at play, personal choices in behaviour and lifestyle are significant. The physical make‐up and ongoing management of the places where we live positively and negatively influences these lifestyle choices and subsequent health outcomes. However, responses—in research, policy, built environment design, construction, and management—frequently fail to recognise the intricacies of this people‐place‐behaviour nexus largely because those responses are highly focused and empirical. Rather, the health‐supportive environments needed to address the current chronic disease epidemic also require additional—networked, nuanced, and intuitive—understandings. Responding to that need, the study described in this paper took a comprehensive view of what constitutes a health‐supportive built environment. We detail the composite methods employed—built environment audits, interviews, and focus groups—all of which are available for use by others in similar situations. Then, using two case study examples, we reflect upon how our methodology revealed otherwise hidden aspects of the extent to which the study sites supported or hindered health‐supportive behaviours and responses. These results suggest intervention actions for policy makers and practitioners that will help them respond to the complex needs of communities in creating a health‐supportive environment.     

Engagement in a Public Forum: Knowledge,Action, and Cosmopolitanism

Facing challenges to the civic purpose of higher education, some scholars and administrators turn to the rhetoric of engagement. Simultaneously, the political philosophy of cosmopolitanism has gained intellectual favor, advocating openness to the lived experiences of distant others. We articulate linkages between these two discourses in an extended case study, finding that a cosmopolitan ethos of engagement in a rural context can improve (1) understanding among people ordinarily separated by spatialized social‐ecological differences, (2) prospects for longer term environmental sustainability, and (3) the visionary potential of collaborative inquiry. Despite globalization of food systems and neoliberal shifts in fishery management, an annual fisheries forum facilitates coalitions that overcome dichotomies between technocratic and local knowledge, extending benefits to fishing communities, academia, and public policy. Iterative and loosely structured capacity building expands informally through affective processes of recognition and care, as decentralized leadership supports collective mobilization toward alternate futures.     

Multiple Waves of Political Disintegration in the Classic Maya Collapse: New Insights from the Excavation of Group D,Ceibal, Guatemala

In the study of the Classic Maya collapse around the 9th century a.d., scholars tend to emphasize its gradual nature. New data, however, point to multiple episodes of rapid social change that affected wide areas. We investigated these critical moments at Ceibal (Seibal), Guatemala, through intensive excavations in its Group D. This naturally defensible location was used as a primary elite complex, possibly including a royal palace, during the Late Classic period (a.d. 600–810). By refining the chronology, we have identified four episodes of political disruption, including the impact of a military defeat by the Dos Pilas dynasty in a.d. 735, the takeover of Ceibal by an illegitimate ruler in a.d. 771, the ritual destruction of various buildings at the Ceibal dynastic collapse around a.d. 810, and the final abandonment of Ceibal around a.d. 900. These finds provide significant insights into the process of political disintegration in the Maya lowlands.     

Wandering intellectuals: establishing a research agenda on gender,walking, and thinking

Building on a study of three women who practice walking-for-thinking as a part of their intellectual work, the analysis identifies potential themes for a future research agenda on gender, walking, and thinking. A particular focus is the subtle, daily, management of gendered expectations and ways in which walking, for these women, is a contribution to such management. We name this ‘walking away from expectations’ and identify three themes: walking away from others’ gaze, walking away from restlessness and domestic responsibility, and walking away as belonging. Walking emerges as a skilful way of creating the conditions to do one’s intellectual work and manage gendered expectations. Further, the meanings of silences about gender in the context of intellectual work and walking is discussed and questions for future research agenda are suggested.     

The body eating its food politics: reflections on relationalities and embodied ways of knowing

This Viewpoint article builds on feminist geography research methods, scholarship of embodiment, and more-than-human geographies to challenge us to think about how relationalities are reconfigured through attention to the human eater’s body. Drawing on an example from ethnographic research, the author problematizes how an embodied act of eating other non-human bodies raises concerns for how we negotiate the complicated sets of ethical relations that we each confront on a daily basis. In particular, this example is used to describe the ethical dilemmas researchers encounter when the intellect conflicts or collides with the corporeal. Rather than reinstate the mind–body dualism that feminists have long argued against, this article grapples with the complicated and complex negotiations embodied knowledge contributes to academic knowledge production. Embodied knowledge is not straightforward, yet should be acknowledged in our academic scholarship and debated about its potential for epistemological and ontological openings in our areas of research.     

柳诒徵论中国传统史学的治史原则与方法

柳诒徵作为中国现代文化保守主义史学大师结合西方新史学思想,对中国传统史学做了大量阐述。他对中国传统治史原则和方法的阐述尤为丰富和精深,主要包括五方面:一、"治史之必本于德"的原则;二、国史书写的道德评判准则;三、史识与史德、史法的关系和治史重在求取史识;四、注重史事普遍联系的史学记载和表述;五、正确看待考据在治史中的地位和作用。这些史学思想体现了柳诒徵史学通贯古今和兼融中西的基本特征。     

Young people's involvement in policy research

This article reviews the legacy of young people's involvement in policy research in the UK and proposes an approach of collaboration with young people that may be useful in other settings. It critiques the sociocultural and socioeconomic context relevant to young people's involvement in research, using the Young Researcher Network (YRN) as a case study. A key benefit of using the YRN has been the ability to identify and analyse potential barriers and facilitators influencing the relationships of young people and organisations whilst both groups worked together to improve policy. This allowed young people to connect to the policy environment in a meaningful way. The approach has been embedded into The Office for the Children's Commissioner in England, the National Institute for Health Research as well as other leading youth organisations in the UK, which is likely to increase the direct involvement of young people in policy research.     

Governing the Commercial Streets of the City: New Terrains of Disinvestment and Gentrification in Toronto's Inner Suburbs

This paper explores the commercial shopping street as a site of racialized class struggle. The argument builds around the study of a disinvested inner‐suburban neighbourhood in Toronto, which furnishes an ideal case through which to achieve the paper's objectives of, first, identifying commercial space as an important site of contestation over competing suburban futures; second, delineating how processes of racialization inform the economies of commercial gentrification and urban renewal; and third, highlighting the epistemological and theoretical insights that emerge when research is conducted collaboratively, among academic, community, and activist groupings. The paper argues that such commercial spaces play a key role in making the city accessible to vulnerable and marginalized groups. Two competing planning agendas centred on reordering commercial space, meanwhile, spell the almost‐certain demise of such arrangements: a “real estate” vision featuring new condominium developments, and a new urbanist resistance favouring “green” and “creative” alternatives. Our engagements with precarious, predominantly immigrant‐owned businesses and community‐based researchers reveal the complicity of both modes of development planning with processes of displacement and structural racism. Specifying these dynamics as “racialized class projects” opens up space for intervention and organizing.     

Recent Trends in Northwestern America

The Northwest Coast has long held a seminal role in the ethnographic and theoretical development of anthropology in North America. Both that role and the saliency of Native American Indigenous peoples have seemingly waned over time. Almost invisibly, however, a critical mass of new ethnographic perspectives and a new aspiration toward synthesis have emerged across the sub-disciplines and subject areas of Americanist anthropology in the United States and particularly in Canada. The Northwest Coast as the quintessential culture area has become a more fluid continuum of contact zones intersecting across Northeastern North America, as reflected in the works discussed here.