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1.
Framed by the UK Government’s efforts to combat social exclusion by encouraging a shift from welfare to work through (re)training, this paper explores the types of training courses being offered to and taken by women with young children in West London. Drawing upon qualitative research, the paper explores the actual and desired uptake of ‘body training’ courses among mothers, linked, in part, to the current ‘body work’ skills gap in the local economy. The encouragement given to women and the interest they have in engaging in ‘body training’ is, we suggest, linked to the discursive construction and performance of a highly feminised and, often, maternal identity, which emphasises women’s caring role and the caring self. By probing the body/training nexus through the motivations and choices of mothers in West London the paper raises questions about gender identity and stereotyping in relation to training-for-work policies and the role of training in (re)inforcing the woman-body coupling within Western dualistic thought. 相似文献
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In our editorial introduction to this themed issue on labour geography, we outline some important on-going debates in the relatively young field of labour geography and suggest future directions for research. First, there is the key question of labour as an active agent in the production of economic landscapes. The agency of labour will likely remain a defining feature of labour geography, but perhaps it is not as important to construct theoretical analytical boundaries as it is to define labour geography as a political project. Second, debates continue surrounding the production of scale and the multiscalarity of organized labour. Third, labour geographers have yet to engage in any sustained fashion with unpacking the complex identities of workers and the way in which those identities simultaneously are shaped by and shape the economic and cultural landscape. Fourth, there is some debate on the costs and benefits of a ‘normative’ labour geography which emphasizes what workers and their organizations ‘could’ or even ‘should’ do. Lastly, we challenge the assumption that labour geographers have not yet asserted themselves as activists in their own right. We conclude the editorial by introducing the articles included in the issue. While these articles may not address every gap in the literature, they do contribute in significant ways to move the labour geography project forward. 相似文献
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Parvati Raghuram 《Geoforum》2009,40(1):25-33
The migration of health professionals has been accompanied by politically and morally charged discussions on the effect of such migration on the health of those left behind in their countries of origin. In the UK, the National Health Service, which has long been dependent on overseas migrants to bolster its own staffing, has responded to critics accusing it of ‘poaching’ health professionals from poorer countries with a range of measures to limit health worker mobility. These measures counterpose the right to mobility of health workers with the right to health for those they leave behind, posing academics working on brain drain with a quandary: how do we think ethically about brain drain migration? This paper aims to address this question by exploring the spatial and temporal ontologies that are being mobilised in current thinking around the brain drain. It explores how these ontologies shape both public debates and policy initiatives, foreclosing other ways of thinking about health worker mobility. It argues that routing discourses of brain drain through insights drawn from care ethics and postcolonial thinking will highlight the historical transnational connections that mark medical labour markets and how the category ‘medical worker’ is precisely dependent on this transnationalism. 相似文献
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Steven Tufts 《Geoforum》2009,40(6):980-990
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David Crouch 《Geoforum》2003,34(3):395-408
In this paper we explore history and heritage mobilised to do service for marginalized interests. We discuss how resources, such as, place, texts, artefacts and practice are drawn upon to forward particular political interests. Touching on recent work in non-representational theory we suggest that more attention be paid to the micro-politics of doing and link more formal action to that of ‘everyday’ practice. The examples used show how particular actors draw on history and heritage to advance their positions and how their performances reinforce claims based on alternative practices. The examples used illustrate how this involves the notion of ‘reclaiming’ historical action, historical texts and historical place. In particular how this relates to land and specifically in this paper the metaphor, representation and practice of ‘digging’. 相似文献
7.
Ingunn Moser 《Geoforum》2008,39(1):98-110
This article contributes to recent discussions about the politics of nature by exploring how Alzheimer’s disease is being shaped as a ‘matter of concern’. Drawing on work on differences in medicine from science and technology studies, and from the geographies of naturecultures, it explores the ‘mattering’ of this disease in a number of locations including: an international Alzheimer’s patients’ movement; a medical textbook; laboratory science; daily care practice; an advertisement for anti-dementia medication; general practice; parliamentary politics; and a conference on dementia. It explores how these locations interfere and co-exist with one another and argues against the ‘science centrism’ of science and technology studies which contributes to the dominance of science and medicine by granting these analytical privilege. The same problem is posed in the recent STS turn from science to politics - the danger is that politics is similarly privileged. 相似文献
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Steven Tufts Author Vitae 《Geoforum》2004,35(1):47-58
Toronto’s quest to host the Summer Olympic Games has dominated both contemporary planning discourse and practice. For some, the pursuit of the games embodies Toronto’s transformation into a ‘competitive’ global city. Relatively unexplored in this discourse are the contradictory roles that labour plays in contemporary urban development. I argue that the new labour geography can provide some interesting insights into such processes. Specifically, labour geographers have given workers with divergent interests greater agency in shaping economic landscapes and have noted the multi-scalar organisation of labour. The paper looks at the contradictory and conflicting positions held by different labour unions in Toronto toward the city’s bid to host the 2008 Olympics. The case study suggests that labour is an active agent in processes shaping contemporary Toronto and support the bid for complex reasons ranging from the promise of jobs to potential future organising opportunities. 相似文献
10.
This paper uses evidence from focus groups in England to consider how consumers think about and, more importantly, distinguish foods by both primary and secondary qualities, using both their own judgement but also advice produced by various organisations acting as ‘knowledge intermediaries’, such as independent certification bodies. We thus consider the ‘sorting out’ that consumers do with food, particularly in developing typologies of ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’, and the cues on which they base these judgements, from the material immediacy of ‘mucky carrots’ to the abstract remoteness of organic certification. In particular, we problematise the ‘knowledge-fix’ that underlies attempts to provide knowledge to promote more sustainable and ethical consumption. This raises problems of how consumers give assurance schemes meaning, how ethical and sustainable schemes are subject to re-fetishization and how consumers tend towards increasing scepticism and distrust of such claims, thus making a ‘politics of reconnection’ far from easy. 相似文献
11.
This paper focuses on what observers have perceived to be a failure of development leading to a ‘crisis of youth’ as increasing numbers of young people find it more difficult to gain education, access to health, a job and meet standard of living aspirations. For some, a possible escape is offered by migration to Europe, the United States or Australia, often illegally. For those remaining behind, however, international development agencies offer a ‘globalisation of solutions’ to employment, gender inequality and poverty through the millennium development goals and the programmes to attain them. In this paper we do not take the failures of development at face value but look at local contexts to present a more complex picture of the relation between education, work and social life. Based on fieldwork conducted in urban areas of The Gambia and Ghana, we argue that rather than education as a catch-all solution we need to give more attention to the costs incurred by and for young people in pursuing education and training, to the operation of and actual opportunities in labour markets, and to patterns of gender socialisation which give women limited scope to exercise agency. This paper explores key gender dimensions of work and education among low-income urban youth noting that despite on-going efforts to increase young women’s enrolment in schools and access to employment, gender inequalities have been far from eradicated. Our field interviews reveal how social expectations that women should perform the bulk of reproductive labour in their youth as well as in adulthood and constraints placed on young women’s personal freedom in respect of their social relationships reduce time dedicated to education and establish fewer contacts relevant to securing paid employment. The result is for men to end up with more educational qualifications, more skills, and higher-paying jobs, even if unemployment among young people in general remains a major problem. 相似文献
12.
《Geoforum》2017
This paper engages with contemporary debates in labour geography through its focus on: migrant workers as active agents of change; precarious employment, its complexities and consequences; and the importance of material spaces in migrant labour struggles. Since the early 2000s the South Korean government has been strengthening the institutionalised regulation of low-wage migrant workers. A key tool in this process is the Employment Permit System (EPS), in force since 2004. Under this policy migrant workers are temporary sojourners and effectively socio-politically, culturally and spatially excluded from Korean society. EPS restricts migrants’ freedom to choose or change workplaces, which renders them vulnerable to economic and social precarity. Employers use these restrictions to segregate migrant workers from co-nationals, and low-waged migrant workers often find themselves in exploitative working conditions in isolated places. This paper is based on deep ethnographic fieldwork in “Nepal Town” in Seoul and remote Nepalese workers’ accommodation. We examine how such precarious working conditions and isolation impact on workers’ active involvement in the formation and transformation of Nepal Town in Seoul. We examine the ways in which Nepal Town is a site of spatial agency and praxis for Nepalese workers and explore the potentialities of ‘reactive ethnicity’. The empirical insights provided, suggest that the regulatory migration regime for low-wage migrant workers is strongly linked with new formations of material landscapes of connection, mobility, freedom and safe space. Such space production enables migrant workers to perform agency and employ tactics of resistance in order to create spaces of possibility. 相似文献
13.
The issue of the social geographical dimensions of climate change is timely and important. This paper sets out to explore one example of this: how people living in the Pacific who are most at risk of being made landless by climate change are portrayed in policy discourse, and how high-level international representatives of Pacific nations have responded to these portrayals. At the heart of this is contention over the portrayal of Pacific Island peoples as ‘climate refugees’. This paper analyses a number of documents since the 1980s, largely from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that deploy the identity construct of ‘climate refugees’. Fieldwork undertaken at the United Nations in New York in 2004 also enabled seven interviews with national ambassadors representing Pacific small island states. Interviews revealed how Pacific ambassadors have responded to the category of ‘climate refugees’, and positioned themselves in the discursive field surrounding the climate change debate. A poststructuralist framework, drawing on Foucault’s ideas of discourse and subject categories provided a means to critically scrutinise and better understand how people from Pacific countries are imagined in the wider, global geopolitical arena, but crucially, how leaders from these nations also construct themselves in relation to climate change and its associated impacts. 相似文献
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Kristin Asdal 《Geoforum》2008,39(1):123-132
In this article I make use of a combination of actor-network-theory, governmentality studies and feminist studies of science to show how nature is done or enacted within politics and administration. In particular I show how it relates to the theories and practices of economics and accounting. I explore the process by which the ‘critical limits’ of nature under the impact of acidification was created as a part of the politics and negotiations about acid rain. I demonstrate that even though the outcome was not ‘Nature’ as such, understood as a form of moral high-ground, the effect of this process was to produce ‘a nature as a whole’, in a process of unification. This I argue can only be understood relationally: ‘Nature’ is taken into account by way of accounting. In doing this I engage with Latour’s work on the politics of Nature and argue that nature is not necessarily such a deadly tool to politics as is sometimes taken for granted. Before we throw Nature out with our empirical studies of sciences, natures and politics, in the plural, we need to look first at how Nature-wholes emerge, are enacted, and take part in politics. 相似文献
15.
The complex mobilities of homeless people in rural England 总被引：2，自引：0，他引：2
Paul Cloke 《Geoforum》2003,34(1):21-35
This paper explores the interconnected issues of mobility, power and meaning in the context of rural homelessness. It explores two common assumptions relating to these interconnections: that rural homeless people move to cities thereby transposing homelessness into an urban problem; and that mobility is deeply implicated in the mapping of moral codes in rural areas. Drawing on a range of interviews with homeless people, and workers with homelessness agencies in the rural areas of Gloucestershire and Somerset, the paper discusses four types of movement: ‘local’ homeless people moving out of rural areas; ‘local’ homeless people moving within rural areas; homeless ‘incomers’ moving to rural areas; and itinerant/transient homeless people moving through rural areas. The complex mobilities of rural homeless people influence common ideas about where homelessness occurs and how it is experienced. These mobilities also affect how homelessness is ‘made known’ in rural areas, as different elements of the mobility of homeless people are discursively scattered amongst identity labels and policy arenas other than homelessness. Finally, homeless mobilities problematise the adequacy and nature of policy responses to homelessness in rural areas. 相似文献
16.
The everyday implications of a volatile geopolitical climate are increasingly recognised, but far less is known about how people’s emotional geographies are affected by geopolitical change. This paper offers a critical examination of how some young people in different parts of the world navigate fears and hopes that might be considered ‘global’ in nature, and those that might be considered ‘everyday’. We report from participatory research conducted with young people from a range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds living in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We examine how personal fears and hopes intersect with wider anxieties about youth, urban crime and terrorism. The research suggests that global-everyday emotions are not separated out in young people’s analyses. They are critically reflexive about wider discourses of fear, while undertaking the day to day business of navigating what are sometimes challenging emotional topographies. 相似文献
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Drawing upon the discussions and insights provided by researchers and policy-makers during a seminar series, this paper explores the rationales for, and the practices and difficulties of, interdisciplinarity. The urban environment provides the problem context. Despite a consistent rhetoric and repeated attempts to promote interdisciplinary research, not least by the funding councils in response to policy imperatives, success appears to have been limited. The paper suggests that rather than viewing interdisciplinarity as a distinct, often difficult, category of research it is more useful to consider a continuum of research types from multi- to transdisciplinarity. The paper furthers the interdisciplinarity debate by characterising five categories of ‘border troubles’. These involve the relentless association of interdisciplinarity with ‘real world problems’, the epistemological structuring of disciplines, assumptions about the disciplinary division of labour and the privileging of certain frames and forms of enquiry, the increasing complexity of knowledge transfer, and the ‘hard wiring’ of the research funding and assessment system. However, we conclude optimistically in terms of the evident willingness of researchers to occupy hazardous disciplinary border zones to further urban environmental understanding and propose a set of ‘conditions for success’ encompassing both the approach and practices of participants in interdisciplinary work as well as operational and contextual factors. 相似文献
18.
Re-scaling collective bargaining: union responses to restructuring in the North American auto industry 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
John Holmes 《Geoforum》2004,35(1):9-21
Historically, political struggles to define the geographical scale at which labour relations and collective bargaining will be conducted have been of crucial significance to the labour movement. Today, workers and their unions face very difficult challenges. In many manufacturing industries changes in the organizational structure of production at different geographical scales have undermined the effectiveness of the organizing and collective bargaining strategies associated with traditional industrial unionism. This paper focuses on collective bargaining strategies developed by North American autoworkers’ unions to respond to the extensive restructuring of the automotive industry that took place during the 1990s. These strategies include innovations in the structure and content of collective bargaining and efforts to redefine the scale at which collective bargaining takes place. Following a brief discussion of the challenge posed by the integration of Mexico into a continent-wide production system, the analysis focuses on the strategies devised by the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union during the 1996 and 1999 rounds of collective bargaining to address issues raised by outsourcing and modular manufacturing. With outsourcing, the automakers are not so much eliminating jobs as they are deciding who gets to do them, at what price, and under what working conditions. With modular manufacturing, the organizational boundaries between firms are blurring and the terms and conditions of work in one firm arguably are becoming dependent upon management decisions made in another firm. The CAW’s response has been to develop new collective bargaining strategies including the concepts of ‘work ownership’ and ‘satellite bargaining’ which involves redefining the traditional geographical extent of the bargaining unit. While the empirical focus is on the North American automobile industry, the general issues related to the re-scaling of production, and especially outsourcing and modular manufacturing, are common across a range of manufacturing industries. 相似文献
19.
The inclusion of new groups of workers has been an important component of union renewal efforts. Several unions in Canada have begun to dedicate significant resources to better organize and represent Aboriginal workers. Drawing on interviews with union activists, organizers and representatives from two national public sector unions in Canada, we present an overview of union strategies to engage with Aboriginal peoples. Results suggest that understanding the distinct territorial context of Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to work and unions has been necessary to the success of these union strategies. This approach begins by drawing connections between Aboriginal peoples’ present-day relationships to work and their prior occupancy of, and dispossession from, lands and resources. Because of the geographical specificity of how the colonial experience affected Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to work and unions, unions have had to adopt non-normative approaches to their engagements with Aboriginal peoples. In workplaces where settlers were dominant, addressing racism in the workplace and gaining support for initiatives to hire and train Aboriginal workers were important. Alternatively, in Aboriginal workplaces, organizing was a priority. Here questions of union legitimacy have taken precedence and the focus of unions has been on partnership building. Most importantly, however, engagement with Aboriginal peoples has brought attention to the colonial practices within unions and helped to foster growing Aboriginal voice within the labour movement. 相似文献
20.
With rising public awareness of climate change, celebrities have become an increasingly important community of non nation-state ‘actors’ influencing discourse and action, thereby comprising an emergent climate science-policy-celebrity complex. Some feel that these amplified and prominent voices contribute to greater public understanding of climate change science, as well as potentially catalyze climate policy cooperation. However, critics posit that increased involvement from the entertainment industry has not served to influence substantive long-term advancements in these arenas; rather, it has instead reduced the politics of climate change to the domain of fashion and fad, devoid of political and public saliency. Through tracking media coverage in Australia, Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom, we map out the terrain of a ‘Politicized Celebrity System’ in attempts to cut through dualistic characterizations of celebrity involvement in politics. We develop a classification system of the various types of climate change celebrity activities, and situate movements in contemporary consumer- and spectacle-driven carbon-based society. Through these analyses, we place dynamic and contested interactions in a spatially and temporally-sensitive ‘Cultural Circuits of Climate Change Celebrities’ model. In so doing, first we explore how these newly ‘authorized’ speakers and ‘experts’ might open up spaces in the public sphere and the science/policy nexus through ‘celebritization’ effects. Second, we examine how the celebrity as the ‘heroic individual’ seeking ‘conspicuous redemption’ may focus climate change actions through individualist frames. Overall, this paper explores potential promises, pitfalls and contradictions of this increasingly entrenched set of ‘agents’ in the cultural politics of climate change. Thus, as a form of climate change action, we consider whether it is more effective to ‘plant’ celebrities instead of trees. 相似文献