Shedding light on the Cypriot rural landscape: Investigations of the Athienou Archaeological Project in the Malloura Valley,Cyprus, 2011–2013

Abstract

Since its inception in 1990, the Athienou Archaeological Project (AAP) has focused on diachronic patterns of rural land use within the Malloura Valley located along the edges of Cyprus’s fertile Mesaoria plain. Employing careful field methods of excavation and recording, members of AAP have sought to reconstruct ancient life in this understudied region by charting local responses to regional and pan-Mediterranean networks of exchange. The present contribution reports on the results of excavations (2011–2013) in the Geometric to Roman period rural sanctuary and of limited pedestrian survey (2013) in light of the project’s research goals, while highlighting AAP’s effective implementation of a mobile computing platform that streamlined field recording through an increased reliance on born-digital data. For a discussion of AAP’s mobile computing platform in the context of our fieldwork in Cyprus, please see our online supplementary article on the JFA website (http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1179/0093469015Z.000000000112).     

Ethical consumption? There's an app for that. Digital technologies and everyday consumption practices

Ethical consumption mobile phone apps are increasingly popular. These apps allow consumers to scan the barcodes of products they are considering purchasing and determine whether or not they align with their ethics. App technologies are often applauded for their potential to provide consumers with targeted, crowd-sourced information about products while shopping and to foster more political, and less individualistic, consumption practices by connecting users to one another and to campaigns. There is a growing field of scholarship conceptually examining the role of information and digital technologies in ethical consumption. However, there is little empirical research on how consumers engage with ethical consumption apps in everyday ways. Drawing on an in-depth study with 21 participants, this paper explores how app use mediates people's experiences of ethical consumption. We contend that the app design structures and limits how individuals engage in ethically motivated consumption and influences their conceptualizations of ethical consumption as a political practice. We conclude by illustrating that critically examining what it means to be “ethical” in a digital world is a crucial area of research for geographers, particularly as these ethics play out through the everyday use of mobile technologies.     

基于手机信令数据的城市时间活力模式及影响因素研究——以南京市中心城区为例

本文基于手机信令数据从时间维度诠释城市活力的概念,并构建其评价指标体系。研究从活动强度、活动混合度、活动联系强度三个维度测度城市活力,在此基础上通过对一日24小时的城市活力时间序列进行聚类,得出五种城市时间活力模式,并构建计量模型分析社会经济和建成环境对不同时间活力模式的影响。主要结论有：(1)南京市中心城区城市时间活力模式可分为高活力波动型、高活力稳定型、中活力波动型、中活力稳定型和低活力稳定型五类;(2)不同时间活力模式在空间上的分布具有一定规律,高活力波动型时间活力模式多位于区域就业中心与公共服务、商业服务中心附近;(3)影响因素方面,居住人口密度、年龄结构、经济水平、交通区位、功能性质、开发强度均对高活力波动/稳定型街区的形成有促进作用。研究从时间维度扩展了城市活力的研究视角,可为探索城市时空间规划、保障城市高质量可持续发展提供重要参考。     

中国手机移动地图使用对居民出行的影响及其机理分析

手机移动地图作为一种新兴的地图形式近年来迅速发展并对居民出行特征产生了深远的影响。本文通过问卷与访谈相结合的方式进行了相关定性定量分析,研究了当前居民对移动地图的使用情况、不同人群对移动地图的使用差异及移动地图的使用对居民出行特征的直接影响,并且进一步探究了其背后的机理模型。一方面移动地图对出行的直接影响造成了信息化时代下居民出行的新特征。另一方面不同年龄,性别,教育,区域的居民对移动地图的使用存在差异,而这种差异或放大或削弱了个人属性对出行特征的影响,从而间接作用于出行特征,改变了传统出行模式。最终,本文讨论了目前移动地图存在的问题及其在未来对城市交通的影响并提出了相应意见建议。     

Talk,technologies and teenagers: understanding the school journey using a mixed-methods approach

This paper focuses on the methods used in a project which set out to capture the movements and to consider the wellbeing of 30 teenagers on their journeys to and from school. A mobile phone linked to a GPS receiver was used to automatically log travel patterns whilst the respondents added ‘blog’ images and text about how they felt on the journey. Follow up interviews further explored the data. The paper shows that by using a range of methods the young people became involved in the project in different ways providing a rich picture of contingent and complex school journeys.     

Students as Tour Guides: Innovation in Fieldwork Assessment

This paper introduces and details an innovative mode of fieldcourse assessment in which students take on the role of tour guides to offer their lecturer and peers a themed, theoretically informed journey through the urban landscape of Havana, Cuba. Informed by notions of student-centred learning and mobile methods, the tour offers an enjoyable, challenging, rigorous yet flexible form of assessment that can be effectively transferred to a wide range of contexts. Feedback suggests that students are very positive about the tours in relation to other potential modes of assessment both in terms of what they learn and as an experience. Ongoing efforts to develop the tours since they were first used in 2003 are described.     

The ILT and Geographers: If you are not in it,you cannot influence it

Film as a tool for learning offers considerable opportunity for enhancing student understanding. This paper reflects on the experiences of a project that required students to make a short film demonstrating their practical understanding of qualitative methods. In the psychogeographical tradition, students were asked to “drift” across the urban environment and record their own experiences of the places encountered. The findings suggest this “drift-film” strategy can be successful in sensitizing individuals to the benefits of qualitative methods, can enhance students' ability to story-board and structure their arguments, and develop key editing skills which can be transferred to future employability.     

Going mobile: perspectives on aligning learning and teaching in geography

There has been little consideration to date regarding how we might best adjust our assessment protocols so that the overall learning experience remains appropriately aligned to both content and teaching approach when adopting location-specific mobile learning. This paper explores the success of a novel strategy to design an assessment regime that captures a field experience in Dublin as a whole for both staff and students alike. Evaluation identified that the use of a combined mediascape-essay approach as a major component of the assessment successfully captured the main elements of the learning and teaching experience and facilitated deeper learning and creativity.     

Interpretive walks: advancing the use of mobile methods in the study of entrepreneurial farm tourism settings

This article draws on the application of interpretive walks in a socio‐geographical study of tourism‐oriented entrepreneurial activity on multi‐generational family farms in New Zealand. We highlight the great potential this method holds for tourism researchers interested in the ways tourist spaces are produced in processes of place‐making. Mobile methods have been a feature of qualitative field research in several disciplines for some time, particularly in cultural geography with its emphasis on human interactions in and with landscapes. The interpretive walk, known also as the walking interview, has been applied mainly in urban neighbourhood, health, transport, and housing research, where it has proven very useful for revealing human connections to place that have been difficult to elicit using stationary face‐to‐face interviews. This article is one of the few that reports on the use of the method in a farm tourism setting. It is also one of few applied studies seeking to understand the local geographies of farm tourism and their connections to the farm site as both family home and place of primary production. The method is characterised as an effective tool for navigating and interpreting the socio‐spatial settings in which new rural tourism ventures emerge, evolve, and are embedded. The approach allows for unexpected encounters with spatial practices and strategies, projects, and objects, behind which lie stories of changing human relationships with the land, economy, and community, and of the exigencies of everyday life that are less readily unearthed using conventional interviews.     

Liminality at work in Norwegian hotels

ABSTRACT

Hotels are spaces of temporary accommodation, but they are also important temporary spaces for an increasingly mobile and segmented workforce with different backgrounds and motives. In this paper we wish to address the temporary and transitional nature of hotel work by employing the term ‘liminality’. More specifically, we analyse the hotel as a liminal space for transient workers that view this work as a temporary endeavour. By drawing upon data from a study of hotel workers in Norway, we discuss how the liminality of hotel work may be understood. Here, we turn to an important debate within tourism studies on the blurring relationships between consumer and producer identities in resorts, often referred to in terms such as ‘working tourist’ or ‘migrant tourist-worker’. For a relatively privileged group of workers, the hotel becomes a space of liminal lifestyle pursuits as well as a space of work. We also contrast this privileged group with a different and less privileged liminal group of ‘expatriate workers’. Transient lifestyles and consumption of recreation among workers can have problematic effects in terms of reducing solidarity, and we wish to develop this further by investigating how worker representation and solidarity develops in liminal spaces of work. While strategies of liminality may have a transformative impact on the individual, their aggregate effects might simultaneously alter the way in which hospitality work is negotiated – from the collective to the individual level. As such, hotels as employers of working tourists pose a great challenge to collective representation, and may undermine effective worker action for less privileged groups of workers. The final section of this paper addresses this challenge, asking what bearings the individualism that dominates liminal work spaces has for trade unionism in the hospitality industry.