As Basket and Papu: Making Manus Social Fabric

Between 2012 and 2019, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, hosted Australia's offshore detention centre for asylum seekers and refugees, known as the Regional Processing Centre (RPC). This paper analyses some of the social impacts of the RPC on Lorengau town, the urban centre of Manus, through the analytical lens of the Manus idiom, as basket (Tok Pisin). Materially this refers to the everyday Manus basket whilst metaphorically, it refers to an individual's or community's social, cultural, political and economic base. First, I examine asylum seekers and refugees as a social category that emerged during this period when they were referred to as papu by locals. Papu is an honorific kinship term for grandfather or elder man; for men who are symbols for family identity, social belonging, and rights to land. Second, I examine the changing materiality of Lorengau's markets as indicative of wider societal transformations and dissonance brought about by the RPC. My ethnographic data are based on long term involvement in Manus, including three recent visits to Lorengau in 2017, 2018, and 2019 where I studied the social impacts and the changing social practices of Manus people in response to the RPC.     

Exploring the associations between cooling centre accessibility and marginalization in Montreal,Toronto, and Vancouver,Canada

Cooling centres provide respite, safety, and social support during extreme heat events for populations that do not have the resources to own or operate in-home air conditioning. The objective of this study was to measure the spatial accessibility of cooling centres and analyze the associations between cooling centre access and marginalization in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, Canada. The potential spatial accessibility of cooling centres within a 15-minute walk was measured at the dissemination area scale using the two-step floating catchment area method. A two-stage modelling approach was used to analyze the associations between cooling centre access and marginalization. Approximately 62%, 58%, and 54% of the populations in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver had access to at least one cooling centre. In Montreal and Vancouver, high marginalization areas were more likely to have cooling centre access than low marginalization areas. Of the areas with cooling centre access, smaller access scores were observed in areas with high residential instability. Approximately one-fifth of the areas in each city had no cooling centre access and high marginalization, and may be considered for future cooling centres or programs that improve accessibility to existing centres.     

Stalin’s humanitarian government: class,child homelessness and state security in a historical perspective (1930s–40s)

Informed by Didier Fassin’s concept of humanitarian government, this article reveals a distinct pattern of secret care provisions imposed under Stalin by the secret police and its successor agencies (NKVD, MVD) first to the peasant children displaced by class war and the famine of 1932–33, and then to the children made homeless by the Great Terror and the 1940s’ national deportations. The article also identifies the under-researched reception centres as crucial sites for both administering emergency assistance and establishing the social classification necessary to apply these discriminatory measures. Affected by the decreasing faith in their possible socialist rehabilitation and lack of any official display of compassion, these children’s lives appeared even less worthy of saving in the course of major emergencies. These findings challenge the official Soviet view of the existence of a universal childhood worth protecting, which guided the first socialist country’s intervention to save other children nationally and internationally.     

Traditions and transitions: teenagers' perceptions of parading in Belfast

The purpose of this article is to explore and illuminate teenagers' experiences of, and attitudes to, parades in Belfast. The research draws on responses from 125 teenagers located in interface areas (areas where Catholics and Protestants live side by side but apart) to government supported attempts to rebrand Orangefest (traditional parade associated with Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist community) and St Patrick's Day (traditional parade associated with Catholic/Nationalist/Republican community) as all-inclusive community events. For the most part, young people access these parades in pre-existing, single identity peer groups and view these parades as either inclusive or exclusive calling into question the extent to which Belfast's city centre can be viewed as shared space.     

Health centre visits among the elderly with chronic ailments: Evidence from the Kanchanaburi Demographic Surveillance System, 2004, Thailand

This study deployed statistical and spatial (GIS) analyses to test the effects of geographic, demographic and occupational factors in predicting health centre visits among the elderly (≥60 years) with chronic ailments in Kanchanaburi Province, western Thailand. Datasets from the Kanchanaburi Demographic Surveillance System (2004 baseline survey and a 2006 project follow-up) comprised five land-use landscape and occupational strata: urban/semi-urban (industrial), rice field, plantation crop, upland and mixed economy. Travel distance to the nearest health centre was calculated following transportation routes and the GPS coordinates of individual home locations, and the number of healthcare visits under the national free universal coverage (UC) scheme reported for the previous year was used as a dependent variable in regressions. Broadly, the study found that distance was not a significant predictor of the rate of elderly health centres visits for those with co-residing spouses and/or adult children (77% of sample), and for the elderly still working (48% of the sample) who were the least likely to access healthcare. Owning motorised vehicles did not encourage visits, which also varied by land-use and occupational strata.     

Governmental mobility: The power effects of the movement of detained asylum seekers around Britain's detention estate

This paper explores the ways in which mobility can have governmental effects in the context of the management of asylum seekers awaiting deportation from the UK. Drawing upon the case of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre, a facility for the incarceration of immigration deportees near Oxford, the paper makes the case that the way asylum seekers are moved between detention centres within the UK has implications for the way they are represented to both asylum activists and asylum sector employees, causing them to choose to use their influence differently by with-holding the support that they might otherwise provide. The constant moving and repositioning of asylum seekers means that they are depicted as transitory, fleeting and depersonalised to those actors with the greatest degree of influence over them. The subjection not only of asylum seekers through forceful, blunt forms of power, but also of more powerful asylum sector actors through subtler, governmental techniques, has significant material implications for the incarcerated asylum seeking community that populates Britain's detention estate.     

Financial crises and the balance of power in international finance, 1890–2010

Has the centre of gravity of international finance irreversibly started to shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific since the financial debacle of 2007-2008? This article discusses this highly topical question in a historical perspective, by considering previous changes in the balance of power in international finance and the role played by global financial in these changes. Particular attention is paid to the Baring Crisis of 1890, the American Panic of 1907, the financial crisis of July -August 1914, the banking crises of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the financial instability of the early 1970s and the ensuing banking failures, the International Debt Crisis of 1982, and the Japanese Banking Crisis of 1997-8. The article concludes that financial crisis, perhaps surprisingly, did not lead to clear changes in the balance of power in international finance; and that the financial debacle of 2007-8 is unlikely, in the medium-term, to fundamentally alter the current order.     

Meeting places: drivers of change in Australian Aboriginal cultural institutions

Since the 1970s, there has been a fraught yet hopeful Aboriginal cultural resurgence in Australia. An element of this movement has been the establishment of Aboriginal art centres and cultural centres across Australia. Using a comparative approach to Aboriginal art centres, this paper analyses the appearance and characteristics of the more recent Aboriginal cultural centres. The methods used are a review of the literature on Aboriginal art centres, and for the less-researched Aboriginal cultural centres, a case study. This paper posits that cultural centre characteristics are shaped through the formation of alliances made possible by the advent of land rights, an Aboriginal cultural turn amongst Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and changing approaches to regional development. While not themselves a movement that will lead to socio-economic change, these types of arts and heritage projects are aligned to such movements. With a larger scale and more central locations, Aboriginal cultural centres open up opportunities for larger and more diverse alliances, and therefore new opportunities for Aboriginal people’s participation, activism and expression.     

Development of a Methodological Framework for Handling Urban Archaeological Resources: Tarsus Historic City Centre,Turkey

In Turkey, most of the historic city centres have been continuously occupied since early ages, and ongoing research or ad hoc findings indicate urban archaeological resources beneath modern cities. According to the results of such research, archaeological and conservation sites are determined in terms of current legal frameworks. However, urban archaeological resources have not been included in the planning process because of inadequacy in spatial documentation, so archaeological deposits have been seen as problem areas in urban development. Thus, urban archaeological resources — not only subsoil resources, even monumental sites — could not be integrated into urban daily life, so most citizens are not aware of archaeological layers beneath their feet. The research project in Tarsus historic city centre, which is supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), primarily aims to develop a method to include urban archaeology — especially subsoil archaeological resources — into the urban conservation planning process of multilayered historic city centres in Turkey. In this way, planners would be informed, aware, and equipped about the urban archaeological potential at the earliest stages of the planning process. Consequently, urban archaeology, as an inter-/ multi-disciplinary field of research, is going to evolve as a crucial planning analysis in urban conservation including not only archaeological research, but also in evaluating settlement history and issues in urban development.     

Between containment,confinement and dispersal: the evolution of the Italian reception system before and after the ‘refugee crisis’

In this article, I will analyse how the Italian reception system has been transformed after the ‘refugee crisis’, showing how the change cannot be reduced to a mere expansion of the reception capacity. I will do this by tracing a genealogy of the Italian reception system and highlighting its main features before and after the ‘refugee crisis’. My hypothesis is that the ‘refugee crisis’ and the sense of emergency it created has stimulated the emergence of distinct segments within the Italian reception system functioning according to radically different philosophies and objectives. This, in addition to increasing the overall lack of consistency of the system, is having a profound impact on the rights of asylum seekers, greatly increasing the risk of their spatial and social segregation within Italian society.