RESEARCH ARTICLE Precarious living in liminal spaces: neglect of theGypsy–Traveller site Joanna Richardson Centre for Comparative Housing Research, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK ABSTRACT Gypsy and Traveller sites are precarious and liminal spaces to live. Insufficient in number and below standard in management and maintenance, the impact can result in poorer health and education outcomes, but also reduced community cohesion in society where conflicts occur over perceived values of spaces and of people. This article explores the precarious lives of Gypsies
not need to be licensed on the same terms. ‘Neither a professional nor a friend’: the liminal spaces of parents and volunteers in family support Jenny Fisher,1 j.fisher@mmu.ac.uk Rebecca Lawthom, r.lawthom@mmu.ac.uk Zinnia Mitchell-Smith, z.mitchell-smith@mmu.ac.uk Teresa O’Neill, t.oneill@mmu.ac.uk Hugh McLaughlin, h.mclaughlin@mmu.ac.uk Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Home-Start is a family support charity whose delivery model is a national and global example of how targeted volunteer support can benefit parents, carers and children experiencing
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Engagement with non-academic groups and actors – such as policy-makers, industry, charities and activist groups, communities, and the public – in the co-production of knowledge and real-world impact is increasingly important in academic research. Drawing on empirical research, interdisciplinary methodologies, and broad international perspectives, this collection offers a critical examination of the liminal space of interactions between policy and research as spaces of difference and engagement, showing them to be far from apolitical.
The authors consider what, and who, are present in these encounter spaces and examine how pre-existing perceptions about differences in social identity, positionality and knowledge can affect engagement, equity and research outcomes.
Transitions and the life course: Challenging the constructions of ‘growing old’ explores and challenges dominant interpretations of transitions as they relate to ageing and the life course. It takes a unique perspective that draws together ideas about late life as expressed in social policy and socio-cultural constructs of age with lived experience. The book is aimed at academics and students interested in social gerontology, policy studies in health and social care, and older people’s accounts of experience.
The COVID-19 pandemic was not a great ‘equaliser’, but rather an event whose impact intersected with pre-existing inequalities affecting different people, places, and geographic scales. Nowhere is this more apparent than in housing.
Written by an international group of experts, this book casts light on how the virus has impacted the experience of home and housing through the lens of wider urban processes around transportation, land use, planning policy, racism, and inequality. Case studies from around the world examine issues around gentrification, housing processes, design, systems, finance and policy.
Offering crucial insights for reforming cities to be more resilient to future crises, this is an invaluable resource for scholars and policy makers alike.
In this ethnographic study Maria Adams turns a geographical and feminist lens on prisoners’ families.
She captures the testimonies of families as they navigate the sociological and social challenges of the imprisonment of loved ones, exploring key concepts including inequality, penal power and vulnerability. She also measures the impacts on many aspects of families’ emotions, relationships and identities, and considers the sources of support and resilience they draw on.
With original research and fresh insights, the book deepens our understanding of carceral geography and how families experience spaces, both inside prison and beyond the bars.
Urban Reflections looks at how places change, the role of planners in bringing about urban change, and the public’s attitudes to that change. Drawing on geographical, cinematic and photographic readings, the book offers a fresh incisive story of urban change, one that evokes both real and imagined perspectives of places and planning, and questions what role and purpose urban planning serves in the 21st century. It will interest urban and architectural historians, planners, geographers and all concerned with understanding urban planning and attitudes toward the contemporary city.
Exploring various aspects of social work from an anthropological perspective, this original book uses an ‘outsider’ position to develop a reflexive dialogue with social workers from England and elsewhere in Europe.
Bell, an anthropologist, worked alongside social work educators and social workers for many years. She widens our insights into social work by offering thought-provoking examples suggesting how social work practitioners view their occupation and their practice, and how wider society views them.
Blending research and personal reflection to critically examine social workers’ preoccupations and contributions to society, the author explores identities and definitions in social work, making this book refreshing reading for academics, researchers, students and practitioners.
This book establishes asylum seekers as a socially excluded group, investigating the policy of dispersing asylum seekers across the UK and providing an overview of historic and contemporary dispersal systems. It is the first book to seek to understand how asylum seekers experience the dispersal system and the impact this has on their lives. The author argues that deterrent asylum policies increase the sense of liminality experienced by individuals, challenges assumptions that asylum seekers should be socially excluded until receipt of refugee status and illustrates how they create their own sense of ‘belonging’ in the absence of official recognition. Academics, students, policy-makers and practitioners would all benefit from reading this book.
Are Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) connecting families? And what does this mean in terms of family routines, relationships, norms, work, intimacy and privacy?
This edited collection takes a life course and generational perspective covering theory, including posthumanism and strong structuration theory, and methodology, including digital and cross-disciplinary methods. It presents a series of case studies on topics such as intergenerational connections, work-life balance, transnational families, digital storytelling and mobile parenting.
It will give students, researchers and practitioners a variety of tools to make sense of how ICTs are used, appropriated and domesticated in family life. These tools allow for an informed and critical understanding of ICTs and family dynamics.
