Geography of belonging: nostalgic attachment,transnational home and global mobility among Romanian immigrants in Spain

This article explores how human global mobility is linked to a sense of home and belonging and outlines ways in which European Union (EU) enlargement could contribute to broader debates about migration, both empirically and theoretically. To accomplish this aim, I use the context of Romanian migration to Spain. Since EU enlargement in 2007, Spain has emerged as a major destination for Romanian migrants. The main argument of the paper is that transformations in the EU over the past 20 years through its open border policy have changed migrant workers into EU movers, and this change affects people's perceptions about sense of home. This analysis is prompted by a qualitative and narrative turn in migration studies, and an emphasis on new mobility pathways in accounting for the embodied dimensions of migration. Key to the paper is an analysis of how people can maintain a sense of home while being on the move. It attempts to demonstrate that migrants' experiences of belonging in their host country may vary greatly depending on the time of movement, the politics of EU borders, the nature of mobility and personal and individual circumstances.     

Cuban Landscapes: Heritage,Memory, and Place

Growing individual mobility has been a key element in the re-evaluation of the links between (national) place and identity in what has been labelled a'borderless world'. In this paper, an alternative perspective is provided by exploring the ways in which discussions around travel are used to redefine the nation as a bounded, familiar and homely place.

In the first section, a number of key themes in the wider literature on ‘home’ are identified and applied to the nation, notably the idea that ‘homely spaces’ are imagined and experienced in relation to journeys elsewhere. This idea is then evidenced by a range of empirical data, which shows how individuals are often made aware of their own national identity and allegiances, when negotiating encounters with other people and cultural forms.

In discussing the discomfort and uncertainty they experience in ‘foreign’ locales, the national home is defined as a secure base from which to proceed and, most importantly, to return. Interestingly, these types of views were expressed by a range of social actors, ranging from college students, who travelled widely and with great enthusiasm, to retired people, who were increasingly restricted in their ability to visit foreign locales.     

Travelling in your backyard: the unfamiliar places of parenting

Current theoretical understandings of family-as-activity, as suggested by the terms ‘doing family’ or ‘families we choose’, locate family practices such as parenting, within the realm of the spatial. Feminist geography particularly has been instrumental in conceptualisations of parenting as a spatial project that involves constant renegotiation of the ‘everyday’ spaces of home, work and play. However, what are less evident in the literature are the specificities of the actual places and spaces of parenting: where parents go in the course of their parenting or how they actually use particular spaces. Furthermore, most scholarly work on parenting has been based on the theoretical and material experience of heterosexual parents, with the experiences of non-heterosexual parented families under-documented. Using data from a recent study with lesbian parents, this paper seeks to address some of these conceptual and empirical gaps, suggesting that an exploration of the everyday spatialities of same-sex parenting contributes, not only to expanding current geographic understandings of family and parenting, but also understanding of the material places where these identities—familial, parental, sexual—intersect.     

The space between: using ‘relational ethics’ and ‘relational space’ to explore relationship-building between care providers and care recipients in the home space

Geographers and other social scientists have a longstanding interest in ‘geographies of aging’ focused on the provision of care to vulnerable older populations and the challenges and experiences of caregivers [Skinner, M. W., Cloutier, D., & Andrews, G. J. (2014). Geographies of ageing: Progress and possibilities after two decades of change. Progress in Human Geography, 1–24]. This qualitative research project explores strategies for relationship-building used by home support workers and older residents according to a ‘relational ethics’ framework, enacted in the ‘relational space’ of the home environment. This framework rests on four principles: engagement, embodiment, mutual respect and environment, and argues that ‘relationships’ between care providers and care recipients must be preserved as the real essence or heart of the health care experience. Two linked conclusions are drawn from the research: that the treatment of the environment can be expanded using a social geographic lens to capture the more active influence of ‘homes’ on relationship-building and second, the relational ethics framework is useful in the home care context to characterize and ground the importance of relationships in the home care domain and the importance of home care to foster aging in place for vulnerable older persons.     

Care-givers,leisure and meanings of home: a case study of low income women in Dublin

This article seeks to contribute to the literature on the meanings of domestic spaces by furthering understandings of the sorts of roles that space plays in shaping women's leisure experiences. The study researched a group of 15 women who live in disadvantaged areas of Dublin city and care for dependent children. Focus groups and structured conversations revealed the poverty of the spatial capital available to these women, depicting local environments as difficult and stressful, and to be endured rather than enjoyed. They further revealed the extent to which the women's lives were shaped by their obligations as care-givers. Within the home itself, private domestic spaces were found to be deeply embedded with powerful ideologies of motherhood that did not necessarily evaporate in the simple absence of obligations imposed by children. Instead, they tended to serve as constant reminders of how things ‘should be’, consequently constraining some women's abilities to divest themselves of care-giving duties and engage in self-focused recreation. Some of the women studied were able to move beyond obligation, and for them leisure represented modest yet significant opportunities to self-determinedly relax, reclaim and even luxuriate in certain spaces within their homes. Similarly, once relieved of child-caring responsibilities, leisure encounters within the local environment afforded some women new insights into familiar spaces.     

基于产业链视角的国内外事件管理研究述评

文章分析了事件产业链各环节的构成及相应的研究取向,从上游、中游、下游及影响评估四个方面对国内外事件管理研究领域的主要观点及其差异进行了述评。发现对事件管理的战略管理,产业融合背景下利益相关者合作,及事件参加者体验被忽视的地位等研究的缺失在国内外均有存在,国内尤为突出;而产业发展成熟度的不同使国内外研究角度与方法存在诸多不同,研究结果的梳理为事件产业发展提供了理性的反思,并进一步指出了研究应关注的问题。     

Home as a Pocket of Local Order: Everyday Activities and The Friction of Distance

Discourse on the information society currently highlights issues of networks, flows and mobilities as prime organizers and re‐organisers of time—space relationships. Such discourse promotes notions of the flexible use of time and space, of people's decoupling from place and even of the end of geography — the belief that distance does not matter. Yet, in this article we argue that the roles of geographical stationarity and proximity in everyday life — understood as the creation and maintaining of pockets of local order — indicate the continuing and often neglected importance of the friction of distance. We demonstrate this empirically by focusing on the home as a pocket of local order, investigating the intensity and spatial extension of people's everyday activities, projects and contacts — their corporeal, virtual and medial (media‐related) mobilities — with the world outside. We support our thesis with data from the population, household and individual levels.     

Making-Home From Below: Domesticating Footpath and Resisting “Homelessness” in Mumbai

Drawing upon ethnography among footpath dwellers in Mumbai this paper argues that hegemonic ideas and practices of urban inhabitation constrain subaltern visions of home as well as public space. In doing so, it warrants an ontology of urban inhabitation that transcends occupancy politics. It is not just the neoliberal state and property-entrenching capital but also the politics of inclusion that fragments subaltern subjectivities of belonging and dispossession. By highlighting everyday practices, particularly the use of footwear, food preparation and consumption, performance of modesty, and rearing of pets, I articulate two ways in which home is experienced and homelessness is resisted through claims where interlocutors have no spatial legitimacy: by (re)producing spatial and moral boundaries and practising multiple mobilities that enable transient domesticities. This paper thus provides an expanded sense of home that moves beyond the materialities of home making, and binaries of the “private” interior and “public” exterior.