Breaking silence: exploring motherhood and social transformation in a participatory action research with Alteñan mothers

In November 2012, a researcher, two social workers and five mothers embarked on a participatory action research (PAR) journey with the aim to develop new ideas for interventions for children and young people in street situations of the city of El Alto in Bolivia. In this article, we attend to the topic of personal and social transformation in PAR. We explore how the mothers of young people in street situations perform and negotiate their subjectivities as mothers in their everyday life; how they create (new) subjectivities in exchange and in interaction with each other during the mother project; and how the performance of their (new) subjectivities can bring social change. The mothers in our group shared stories of being silenced by social services in their everyday lives, as their motherhood is declared not good enough or as they are perceived too guilty to claim for help. It was the first time the mothers shared their stories with other mothers of their lives with their children in street situations. By noticing that they all experienced or heard of similar events that their children were subjected to in the streets, the mothers grew confident enough to talk back. Mothers talked back by denouncing injustice and by transforming doubts into questions, providing them with more knowledge. Finally, as the mothers reached out to social services, mothers’ presence, questions and stories confronted aid workers with their own flaws, and their comfortable discourse of blaming families, creating new paths towards social transformation.     

Towards individualising couple finance: women’s housing assets and household decisions in Japan

Individualisation, which is increasingly promoted in European welfare states, tends to be absent from policy discourse as well as housing studies in Japan. It is largely because the ‘family as a unit’ is still a dominant approach in their household finance, social security and taxation systems, which also reflects women’s lack of home ownership. However, recent demographic trends such as falling marriage rates, low fertility and increased female labour participation indicate significant diversification in women’s life-course. Thus, today women making their own financial investment and house purchase have increasingly become popular practice. In this context, a new approach beyond the conventional ‘family as a unit’ may be required in the development of a new social contract. Drawing on data from qualitative research conducted among women in their 30s, this article explores the relationship between financial independence, household decisions and asset holding of partnered women in Japan, which reveals contested dimensions of women’s independence and autonomy in household and family life. Through the lens of home ownership, it considers the importance of promoting individual assets in order to foster gender equality in marriage.     

Reluctant liars? Public debates on propaganda and democracy in twentieth-century Britain (ca. 1914–1950)

The place of propaganda in a democratic society has been discussed long before the age of fake news, as the heated debate on this issue that took place in the UK and other democracies from around 1914 to 1950 clearly shows. Drawing upon a variety of published and archival sources, the article examines the changing views of British political elites, intellectuals, publicity experts and the public on the proper role of government in the public sphere, while discussing their influence on government policies and exploring the light they shed on British—and, more broadly, liberal democratic—culture and identity.     

A. V. Dicey and English constitutionalism

The jurist A. V. Dicey’s study of the Law of the Constitution (1885) has been since its publication the dominant analysis of the British constitution and the source of orthodoxy on such subjects as parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. This canonical status has obscured the originality of Dicey’s ideas in the history of legal and political thought. Dicey reworked the traditional idea of sovereignty into two separate concepts – legal and political sovereignty – in order to square the common law notion of the sovereignty of parliament with the democratic idea of the sovereignty of the people. He forged a new concept – ‘the rule of law’ – to explain the legal basis of liberty in common law countries in a manner that was both Benthamite and constitutionalist. Finally, he provided a democratic and anti-federalist rationale for maintaining the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. This majoritarian, centralist and utilitarian constitutionalism has been one of the most enduring products of Victorian scholarship. This article seeks to recover it in its original context and, in so doing, to show the value of reintegrating legal thought into the mainstream of modern British history and the history of political thought.     

Edward Abramowski's concept of stateless socialism and its impact on progressive social movements in Poland in the twentieth century

The author traces the impact of Abramowski's ideas on the recent history of Poland. His concepts were not only popular in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the syndicalist movement in the interwar period (1918–1939), but they also exerted a profound influence on the cooperative movement and democratic left-wing opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. The leaders of the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) were much influenced by Abramowski's ideas and, according to some researchers, the Solidarity movement from 1980 to 1981 in Poland was the culmination of his concepts. Today's anti-systemic movements in Poland (anarchists, syndicalists, alter-globalists) are also inspired by Abramowski. The author also draws attention to certain similarities between Abramowski's ideas, Kropotkin's idea, Gramsci's concept of civil society and the thought of the young Marx. The author also outlines Abramowski's social ideas in the context of ideas promoted by the main theoreticians of the Polish left in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.     

Local and nonlocal knowledge typologies: technological complexity in the Irish knowledge space

This paper advances a measure of knowledge complexity to analyse for Ireland whether more complex knowledge is generated by local or foreign firms. Information on assignees, technological structure and global ownership contained within a recently developed Irish patent database forms the basis for distinguishing between technologies developed by local and nonlocal firms. Thereafter, our knowledge complexity index uses a modified bipartite network to link these technologies to their country of origin, i.e. local or nonlocal. Our results indicate that the most complex technologies tend to be produced in a few diverse regions. Furthermore, the majority of complex knowledge is generated in technology classes where the share of foreign activity is greater than local firms.     

Urban memory and planning: investigating the use of oral history

Investigation of the reciprocal relation between individuals and space within its cultural and historical evolution allow us to conceive the intrinsic qualities and dynamics of any space in its context and to develop new conceptions to explain what kind of a place it is. Oral history provides opportunities to listen to the voice of space as well as a new way to discover its unique and different characteristics that give the users the feeling of belonging and place attachment. In this study, the place of oral history method in historiography, its use in diverse disciplines related to the shaping of urban space, such as urban planning and architecture, and the possible contribution of oral history to planning and designing urban space are discussed. It is revealed that the use of oral history in research and practice can give effect to develop a sense of belonging for all users and to achieve sustainability of urban memory. For this reason, place-based studies and utilization of oral history method within them are of significant importance, for either acquiring the knowledge embedded in memories or understanding the expectations of users or to provide solutions to place-based problems.     

消费地理学视角下非物质文化遗产的消费研究——姊妹节中的传统手工艺苗绣

消费研究的爆炸式增长始于20世纪80年代的消费热潮。消费地理的研究领域在过去的三十年里已经大大扩展,超越了经济和文化之间的传统分歧,并逐渐占据了主导的地位。本研究关注传统节庆中非物质文化遗产苗绣的消费实践,从不同的空间主体（在地的身体、流动的身体、固定的空间、临时的空间）对苗绣的消费过程进行分析,采用参与式观察法和深度访谈法解译施洞地区苗族和游客在传统节庆姊妹节中对苗绣的消费实践。研究发现,消费的话语和实践在特定的空间中定位身体,反过来地方又影响着具身化的消费实践。     

Painting Country: Spatial,Somatic and Linguistic Experience in Central Australian Aboriginal Art

A demonstration that the spatial experience informing some Central Australian Aboriginal art is topographically precise brings into question the relevance of structuralist methodologies for appraising these maps of country. Qualitative aspects of spatial, somatic, linguistic and emotional experiences are found to inform the way‐finding depicted in paintings by artists of three language groups.     

Morality and the Concept of the Market Seller among Gehamo

This paper examines the negative moral evaluations of people who buy and resell fresh food by Gahuku and Gehamo people in and around Goroka, the capital of Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. During my fieldwork from 2010 to 2015, vendors in the Goroka fresh food market argued that the value of fresh food should be based on the work that people did to produce it rather than on price competition, or on supply and demand. An examination of market vendors’ practice of ‘giving extra’ to customers, and the responses of vendors who resold food to negative moral evaluations of their activities, led me to an examination of the morality of production in relation to land, ancestors, and social relations; the morality of the marketplace; as well as ideas about what makes someone a good social person. Drawing on Erik Schwimmer's (1979) discussion of the concept of work in Melanesian societies, I argue that vendors in the Goroka market continue to emphasize use value and their own identification with the food that they are selling rather than the exchange value of alienated produce. While marketplaces are the apparent locus par excellence of capitalist economic activity, a consideration of the morality of Goroka market vendors leads to the caution that just because one sees something that looks like a marketplace in which people are engaging in commodity transactions does not necessarily mean that it is a marketplace in which people are engaging in commodity transactions. Similarly, just because something looks like a price does not necessarily mean that it is a price. Those considerations, in turn, lead to a re‐examination of Kenneth Read's (1955) characterization of morality and personhood among Gahuku in light of contemporary market exchange.