Walking with preschool‐aged children to explore their local wellbeing affordances

An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.     

Rethinking State Rail Policy

In the last two decades, many states established rail promotion programs in an effort to limit the contraction of their railroad networks. Now federal funds for rail projects are nearly exhausted, and states must decide whether to expand considerably their levels of internal funding for short line investments. Such a decision requires a careful articulation of policy goals, combined with sound cost-benefit techniques. Research shows, however, that states often fail to evaluate the full range of costs and benefits when considering rail investments. Instead, the economic development benefits of local rail service frequently are overstated, while the potential for rail investments to meet broader transportation planning needs is neglected. This paper evaluates the rationale behind state intervention in the rail industry, discusses the tendency of states to focus on economic development to the exclusion of other benefit categories, and presents summary results from an analysis of an investment project in North Carolina. The paper suggests that state funding for rail projects is more likely to be justified based on intermodal substitution benefits generated by local rail service, rather than the railroads' potential to increase jobs.     

Lung cancer, chronic disease epidemiology, and medicine, 1948-1964

Beginning in the early 1950s, a series of epidemiological, biochemical, pathological, and animal studies demonstrated a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. A number of reputable scientists challenged these findings, but for a variety of reasons, including the behavior of the tobacco industry, historians have assumed that these objections were insubstantial and disingenuous. Viewing these objections in scientific and medical perspective, however, suggests that there was a legitimate and reasonable scientific controversy over cigarette smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s and early 1960s. That controversy had important consequences. A new chronic disease epidemiology emerged, transforming the role and importance of epidemiology to medical research. This new epidemiology supplemented Koch's postulates, establishing a statistical method that allowed for linking environmental factors to the etiology of chronic diseases. The 1964 report to the surgeon general, Smoking and Health, represented the denouement and codification of these developments. This reexamination of the scientific controversy over smoking in the 1950s and early 1960s provides an important context for understanding the subsequent public relations battles between the tobacco industry and public health after 1964.     

Maria Mirabilis: Beholding Mary in the Miracles†

In medieval miracles of the Virgin Mary that feature images, gazing at Mary and being seen by her can shape or change the identity of the miracle's protagonist. Such miracles often feature figures who have the potential to be adult male Christians but do not yet hold that status; they are transformed by their encounters with the malleable materiality of Marian images. Narratives of a Muslim devoted to a Marian statue and an English child who has to have an image of the Crucifixion explained to him show how questioning the nature of such images, and their material implications, could lead to belief. The widely popular story of “The Jewish Boy” extends the power of the image to suggest that merely looking upon it without understanding is sufficient to create a circuit of likeness and recognition that ultimately leads to conversion. In such miracles, an ostensibly surface-oriented or simplistic mode of religious devotion engages with gendered bodies in powerfully transformative ways that touch on complex theological issues.