Suchergebnisse

In May 1995, a 33 year-old woman named Alison Hargreaves made her name by becoming the first woman (and second person) to make an unaided solo ascent of the world's highest mountain, Everest. She was constructed as an exemplar of the highest order, a national heroine to be proud of, and in the vein of a series of British female heroes who punctuate the typically masculine narrative of national achievement. By August she was dead, the victim of a violent storm on the upper reaches of the peak they call the Savage Mountain, K2. The focus of vitriolic media attention, Hargreaves was stripped of her heroic status and condemned for the irresponsibility of leaving her two small children motherless, and so opened a national debate on `motherhood, ambition and risk'. This article explores that debate. In so doing it probes the meaning of heroism, as both a culturally mediated idea of extraordinary actions, and as part of a wider politics of recognition and representation that calls for a consideration of the role of public communication.

Greater consideration of transgender communities within planning has been called for from research highlighting their absence in policy and practice. However, there is little work that outlines how trans is considered within current planning practice. This article presents an empirical case study of how trans becomes articulated into city-level policy and practice in Brighton & Hove, the "LGBTQ capital" of England. A poststructural approach is used to analyse how trans is problematized within planning documents and interviews with planning practitioners. We develop the concept of "choreographing" to reflect the constrained rhythms and selective positioning at work in the articulation of trans in and out of planning policy and practices. By tracing the only consideration of a specific identified need of the transgender population in Brighton & Hove planning policy, we evidence the previous siloing of these concerns that positioned them in relation to other municipal services, but not planning. We show how interpretive practices within a Health and Equalities Impact Assessment process do not allow the specific needs of trans people and communities to be considered, instead positioning trans people as having greater "sensitivity" to generic changes in the built environment. This research concludes that current planning practices can facilitate the consideration of trans communities in planning and policy-making, yet simultaneously constrain and inhibit the ability to enhance trans liveability in the city. This article opens up theorizing into how consideration of trans and LGBTQ communities and knowledge are integrated into planning processes and calls for a creative disruption of current practice.

Through a theoretical and empirical consideration of gift exchange we argue in this paper that those with legal interests in land have constructed property relations around a claim of reciprocity with nature. This has been used to legitimate the ways in which they have deployed their property power to exclude others, thus seeking to retain their dominion over both humans and nonhumans. In so doing, however, people with such interests have failed to understand the dynamic of gift relationships, with their inherent inculcation of subject and other, to the point where the exercise of power becomes contingent on the continued hegemony of property relations. Using the politics of recreational access to inland waters in England and Wales, we show that power—over both humans and nonhumans—is temporary and conditional in ways that are not fully theorised in most contemporary debates about property rights and their deployment on nonhuman subjects.

Scholarly fields are meant to be dynamic to accommodate new information that is infused with old. One of these areas is the notion, subject, subfield and process of street culture. Despite the frequency of its usage in the social sciences, urban planning, and selected areas of the visual arts, rarely is the term street culture defined and when it is, the definitions are often conceptually lacking. This article synthesizes current ideas about the study of street culture by examining six major questions that street culture researchers currently grapple with. The article outlines suggestions for improving scholarship in this field.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential and durability of arts practice as research through developing a new approach to arts research that challenges the conventional association between dominant constructions of community and dominant modes of research.Design/methodology/approach– A co-design approach, situated in arts practice, has been used to generate a conceptual framework that offers potential to open up the workings of communities by examining them from the standpoint of those who have everyday experience of these communities.Findings– The paper argues that there can no longer be clearly demarcated boundaries between "academics" and "community partners" in a genuinely co-designed arts research process. Rather, there are "research partners" who share mutual recognition of skills and experiences that allow them to commit to a durable "new creative scholarship" that reflects their collective identities.Social implications– The conceptual framework celebrates the life stories of individuals at the expense of the grand metanarratives favoured by empirical sociology and mainstream humanities. The framework reflects the commitment of the authors to create accounts of communities that do justice to their collective wisdom, dynamism and connectivity, as well as their transience, their needs to transform and their responses to change, in ways that reflect the lives of those involved rather than the needs of externally imposed disciplinary regimes.Originality/value– The conceptual framework is a new approach to qualitative research; its value lies in putting the participants at the heart of the research process where they not only generate narrative, but also situate, mediate and remediate it in ways that extend conventional participative research practices.