A cyberethnographic (Robinson and Shulz, 2009) study of one friendship group reunited online after 20 years is presented.This study follows a group of eight migrant and non-migrant women living over three continents (four countries).The study uses data gathered over a period of one year from the archives of one 'e-group'. Beginning with the notion of Babha's (1994) 'third space' and cultural hybridity, the study examines the interactions of these 'in-between' subjects. The disjunctive notions of place, 'other space' and time are examined within this online site. The Foucauldian idea of heterotopias is offered as an explanation of this online 'other space' and of the migrant experience.
ABSTRACTThe national prevalence studies of the mental health of looked after children in Great Britain provide sobering reading. Forty‐five per cent of looked after children in England were found to have a diagnosable mental health disorder. In contrast, this is to one in 10 in the general population. Carers estimated that mental health problems were even more widespread. Children with mental health disorders were also more likely to have education, health and social issues. This paper discusses the findings and argues for early intervention along with inter‐departmental and interdisciplinary approaches. The recent Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services Review clearly indicates that issues of access to appropriate and timely Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services remain. However, the introduction of evidence‐based approaches is encouraging. Young people's views on the services they want and on what is important for emotional well‐being and mental health are important considerations.
Purpose – This study aims to examine aspects of children's sustainability socialization. Many studies examine children's attitudes to sustainability. However, few studies build an understanding of how, where and when children are socialized to sustainability.
Design/methodology/approach – Interviews with 30 children explore the socializing agents (who), learning situations (where), learning processes (how) and learning effects (what). The study also delineates and compares the environmental, self and social dimensions of sustainability.
Findings – Socialization to environmental sustainability is highly structured and formal, and children rarely go beyond the knowledge and actions they are taught. Socialization to the self dimension combines formal and informal mechanisms with a greater propensity for elaboration and generalization. Meanwhile, socialization to societal sustainability involves unstructured and individualized processes and outcomes.
Research limitations/implications – This is an exploratory study. Future research could develop scales to measure children's sustainability dispositions and actions. Researchers could then use such scales to examine the sustainability socialization of children from other demographic and cultural groups.
Practical implications – The findings indicate that children are often positively disposed towards sustainability but lack the knowledge and direction needed to exercise this desire. Thus, marketers should more clearly articulate how their product solves a sustainability problem.
Social implications – This paper could inform sustainability education policy. It has practical applications in the area of sustainability curriculum design in schools.
Originality/value – Being the first study that explores children's socialization to three dimensions of sustainability, this paper provides a unique contribution to consumer behaviour theory and would be of interest to academics, practitioners and social marketers.
The environmental consumer-citizen has become a global master narrative that is the outcome of environmental discourse ( Darier, 1999 ; Harper, 2001 ). In this article, we examine a particular strand of the environmental citizen identity in the context of environmental and consumption consciousness. Through interviews with Australian children about themselves, their consumption, and their links to local and larger global communities, we uncover an adapted strand of this narrative. A local transformation of the master narrative on environmental citizenship is seen in the national identity narrative of the 'ethno-consumer'. This identity narrative is one of the 'good' green Australian consumer-citizen constructed in relation to regional political and economic discourses. We uncover how this strand of environmental consciousness is used as identity capital in children's narratives of self and nation (Hage, 1998). We suggest that there exist several levels of identity narratives. In this particular context, the national identity narrative appears to adapt and accommodate, but also dominate, the global master narrative for these children.
In: Bulletin of the World Health Organization: the international journal of public health = Bulletin de l'Organisation Mondiale de la Santé, Band 102, Heft 2, S. 94-104D
Purpose: Literature from across the social sciences and research evidence are used to highlight interdisciplinary and intersectional research approaches to food and family. Responsibilisation emerges as an important thematic thread as family has (compared with the state and corporations) been increasingly made responsible for its members' health and diet. Approach: Three questions are addressed. First, the extent to which food is fundamentally social, and integral to family identity, as reflected in the sociology of food; Second, how debates about families and food are embedded in global, political and market systems; and thirdly, how food work and caring became constructed as gendered. Findings: Interest in food can be traced back to early explorations of class, political economy, the development of commodity culture, and gender relations. Research across the social sciences and humanities draw on concepts that are implicitly sociological. Food production, mortality and dietary patterns are inextricably linked to the economic/social organization of capitalist societies, including its gender-based divisions of domestic labour. DeVault's (1991) groundbreaking work reveals the physical and emotional work of providing /feeding families and highlights both its class and gendered dimensions. Family mealtime practices have come to play a key role in the emotional reinforcement of the idea of the nuclear family. Originality/value: Highlights the imperative to take pluri-disciplinary and intersectional approaches to researching food and family. Additionally, this article emphasizes that feeding the family is an inherently political, moral, ethical, social and emotional process, frequently associated with gendered constructions.
The caring mother is one of the most recurring images of femininity in post-war advertising. We examine how mothers are depicted as knowing consumers in advertisements in Australian Women's Weekly and the United Kingdom's Good Housekeeping magazines between 1950 and 2010. Our data suggest that although visual representations of maternal consumer knowledge change over this period, assumptions about the responsibilities of mothers endure in the family-related advertisements in these women's magazines. There is a shift over time, however, from a representation of mothers as passive recipients of advice provided by external experts to a more active representation of mothers as experts themselves within both domestic and private spheres. We trace historically how the trope of the knowing mother works as a visual discursive device that helps to reinforce not just patriarchal hegemony, but a particular form of maternal hegemony. The hegemony of motherhood presents a particularly desirable/idealised femininity. However, this visual depiction also serves to gender the very way in which maternal knowledge is to be used. While maternal knowledge is depicted as changing from being merely intuitive or practical to subsuming the technique of knowledge or prescribed expertise; the purposes for which such knowledge is used remain firmly situated within the maternal/feminine realm of nurturing and caring consumption for the family. Despite shifts in discourse that appear to increasingly value mothers' knowledge—there exists an enduring assumption that mothers should use their knowledge for domestic caring and consumption, ultimately reinforcing a heteronormativity of the use of women's knowledge that subdues even expert knowledge for a domestic purpose.
