Our Human Geography list tackles the big issues, from equality to population growth to sustainability, publishing in cultural and social geography, development geography, political geography, qualitative and quantitative research methods and urban geography.
The list includes internationally renowned names such as Danny Dorling, Loretta Lees and Anne Power. We publish a range of formats including research books that bridge theory and apply it to practice.
Human Geography
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The chapter summarizes the book’s key conclusions. In relation to the current research landscape on midlife, the book sheds light on the usefulness of the concept of life transitions, especially concerning body changes, often in the context of work and care relations. However, these concepts should be embedded in broader processes at various scales – from the ideologies of neoliberal self-sufficiency, management and workplace management to global processes of ageing. In terms of policy, the chapter highlights the challenges and opportunities of more inclusive, gender-aware work schedules and workspaces. It also explores nascent policies and activism related to the recognition of menopausing as a significant process that concerns more than half of the people who have reached midlife and beyond.
This chapter sets the agenda for long-overdue research on the geographies of menopausing. The long process of hormonal change that can have a marked impact on how people use time and space, and relate to each other, the chapter argues, is a highly pertinent issue to which geographers can contribute. By analysing how the contradictory term ‘menopause’ was invented in the medical field, the chapter illuminates awkward temporalities dictated by medical science vocabulary and symptomology, which control women and gender-diverse people as they age. The chapter sheds light on how gendered geographies of power can make an important contribution to researching experiences of menopausing, develop a plurality of knowledge and standpoints, and delve deeper into economic geographies to critically examine hormone treatment supply chains.
Setting the scene for the book, this chapter establishes an argument about midlife spaces and times as relational and embodied. It begins with reflections on the author’s positionality and radical openness to subjective ways in which midlife is experienced. The chapter also presents key approaches relevant to the subsequent chapters, outlining the argument for the importance of narratives that shape midlife spaces, temporalities and experiences. Furthermore, the chapter justifies how midlife relates to broader processes and attitudes towards ageing, particularly in relation to midlife transitions, body changes and work. The chapter introduces the relevance of menopausing as a significant social process with distinct geographies and concludes by alluding to relevant political aspects related to midlife in work and care relations.
In the 21st century, global demographics are rapidly changing, with a higher population of middle-aged people than ever before. As the ‘sandwich’ generation, people in midlife often experience significant work and intergenerational caring responsibilities, yet they are the subject of relatively little research.
This short, accessible book redresses the balance in offering a geographical approach to how people embody and claim space in midlife while analysing the influences of gender, class and location. The author considers midlife in varying socio-cultural and geographical contexts, viewed through the lens of the global neoliberal shift.
This chapter explores the notion of lifecourse transitions and theorizes opportunities and challenges that current lifecourse research presents in relation to midlife. Specifically, it delves into the transitions experienced in the body and in working life. The author argues that transitions are not clear-cut; rather, changes at work, embodied transformations and dynamic situations of care can be better understood if we place these changes within larger processes. At the micro scale, relationships in families and with other relevant people contribute to midlife changes to a great extent. However, they cannot be separated from processes at the macro scale, such as the political economy within which people live and work. The chapter uses original data from the author’s research with middle-aged people who migrate between Latvia, the UK and the Nordic countries and non-migrants in Latvia.
Drawing on original research with middle-aged people in Latvia, the UK and the Nordic countries, this chapter puts forward novel ways of analysing home and relationships as fundamental and highly complex processes in midlife. Particular attention is given in this chapter to how home spaces, places and temporalities construct specific experiences and relationships within families and broader communities. The research explores phenomena of home ownership and societal expectations of what a good life is in midlife, vulnerabilities related to renting in the middle years of the lifecourse, and inheritance as a specific and typical event that shapes relationships and the ways people live. The chapter provides a novel analysis of middle-aged migrants and their motivations to establish a home.
The chapter analyses the key ways in which midlife is narrated in the popular media, psychology, self-help, and feminist writings. By examining the main differences between such texts and the messages they convey, the chapter justifies the argument that we need to be aware of and knowledgeable about the ways we talk about midlife and gendered middle-aged bodies, as these frames shape perceptions and send messages that serve certain agendas and ideologies. Hence, the chapter sheds light on how self-help can result in individualism and psychologism: instead of claiming space outwards, the expectation is to turn inwards. In contrast, feminist writing provides new avenues for embracing the middle years with their turning points, questioning neoliberal impositions, claiming space and time, and looking forward to ageing.
This chapter considers that even when planning services have not been outsourced, they are increasingly subject to the pressures of commercialisation which have impacted local government in an era of super-austerity. The logics driving these changes are arguably counter to those that underpin planning as an activity. Combining an overview from our focus group and desk data with rich detail from our ethnographic work, we explore the multiple forms this takes, such as ideas about planning services becoming revenue neutral through fee-raising work, new conceptions of customers and clients, ideas about local authority wholly owned companies and development arms, and the implications for what it means to provide public planning services in this changed context. A central place is given to planner perspectives on these changes and the implications of the UK’s uneven development geographies.
This chapter explores the somewhat overlooked trends around commodifying and casualising planning work. Starting with exploring the justifications for the increasing commodification of planning into work ‘packages’ which might be delivered by private consultants, we then turn to consider how such commodification enables planning staff to be perform roles regardless of their connection to a place and whether or not there is a particular vocational commitment to working for that place. This is exemplified by the increasing use of agency staff within local authorities rather than permanent employees. We argue that this is changing internal work relations and, arguably, reducing the traditional notions of place attachment and organisational loyalty which might have once been considered to typify local authority planning. For agency staff themselves, it also changes the way that they, as professional planners, shape their careers. These issues are explored in this chapter. Drawing in particular on our focus group and biographical interview material, we consider the consequences of the casualisation of working conditions in planning.
In this concluding chapter, we return to the idea of the ‘delivery state’, summarising how processes of privatisation, commercialisation and commodification have shaped a particular, narrow configuration of the public interest purposes of planning, organised around the imperatives of delivery and therefore tending to exclude anything that risks problematising the efficient facilitation of development. Bringing the strands of our argument together allows us to show how the various chapters of the book have developed a novel and critical perspective on the dominant contemporary culture of neoliberalised planning in the UK. Moving beyond this critical analysis, we go on to argue that there is an urgent need for broader debate about the forms of planning required to respond to key societal challenges from the housing crisis to the nature and climate emergencies. We conclude by offering some possible directions for renewing the public interest purposes of planning.
