57 THREE Spaces Socionatural resources occupy geographical space. They take up space, border space and interact with space. But those resources are social, too, in that they must be used and exchanged within a system of social relations. The meaning and significance of any resource alters according to the distributive in/equalities and stratifications of the social system to which it belongs. Which is to say that since all social systems are structural, enduring across time and shaping the lives and opportunities of social agents, resources are structural
67 FIVE Public spaces of Kopčany We left the lodging house and a few children were already awaiting us near the entrance to the building. A girl halted one of the colleagues and screamed at her for something while the other colleague took me down the stairs and introduced me to other children. I ended up with a group of young boys who were playing near a puddle at the verge of a humpy parking place, probably a result of a clogged sewer. We brought skipping ropes for the children and we played with them while I started my first conversations in the
103 SIX Place and space Continuing with the approach in Chapter Five, this chapter begins with ways in which awareness of the meaning and importance of place is shared between the humanities and social work. Moving on to a consideration of that over-familiar term globalisation, this leads on to a more general consideration of how research practices occur in space and place. This book is not where one would think of turning for discovering and applying research methods. But when we consider how social work and research take place from place to place, and in
long challenged the traditional temporal split within Western thinking, the legacy of Cartesian dualism and modernism’s idea of ‘progress’ is reflected in the dominant conceptualisation of time. A linear and separatist temporal orientation dominates, with time usually constructed as moving in a forward flow from past, to present, then future. Such is the normalisation of this linear time and space framework that differing experiences of the temporal are usually seen through pathological lenses. For example, clinically, the merging of objects from different time
9 TWO Theorising time and space in social gerontology The themes of time and space occupy a central place within social gerontology (Baars 2015), however, these are generally implicit and often poorly theorised by researchers and writers in the field. Yet the ways in which we understand time, space and the interconnections between them impact on the ways we frame ageing and later life. As conceptions of time and space change so too do our theories of ageing. As a result, it is important to critically assess the time-spaces employed in social gerontology
Succeeding in the art of policymaking in contemporary politics involves designing policies which reflect the deeply interconnected nature of political space. And yet, while the fluid and networked nature of political space is undisputed, policy continues to be articulated through the age-old categories and hierarchies of scale . Indeed, it is difficult to understate the importance of scale for giving order and clarity to our understandings of policy. If we were for a moment to imagine a world without the vocabularies and metaphors of scale, thereby eliminating
