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This paper revisits the histories of Unemployed Workers' Centres to consider the politicisation of unemployment in the UK. Drawing upon archive material and over 50 oral histories, it considers the emergence of centres as a response to a crisis of increasing unemployment and retrenchment of the welfare state. The paper indicates how Asef Bayat's concept of "non‐movement" proves useful for capturing a wider sphere of labour organising, moving beyond more conventional spaces and actions. This approach critically revisits the role of centres in conversation with emerging work in labour geography and social movements studies around the fostering of solidarities. It reveals tensions around their making, whilst also stressing the potential of seemingly small acts when held alongside campaigns. Revisiting this repertoire of activity reveals the persistence of trade union engagements with communities beyond the workplace, as well as a critical insight into the politics of space in forging such alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the impact agenda in the UK to realign debate about the relationship between schools, universities and (human) geography. It positions this debate in systemic tendencies within UK higher education. It argues that, whilst impact can be seen as a further instance of neoliberalism, emphasising the gap between accountability and accounting allows an identification with communicative and reflexive knowledge and, more broadly, critical praxis. The paper draws on a year-long research-based collaboration with school teachers and their students involving performance work and the development of decision-making curriculum materials. It argues that working in these ways with schools can provide the basis for public engagement partnerships between schools and universities and a means to constitute diverse research publics. In these ways, it is argued, a wider sense of impact can be reappropriated, to reclaim the critical subject and to constitute academic value [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to recent debates in human geography about ideal-type versus contingent neoliberalism, or what Gibson-Graham conceptualises as 'strong' vs 'weak' theory, by offering some reflections from an in-depth study of the private finance initiative (PFI) in England. It first introduces the history and purpose of the PFI as the Labour government's flagship public-private partnership (PPP) approach to public infrastructure modernisation. It then critically analyses its use in inner-city regeneration through a case study of a PFI housing scheme in the northern English city of Leeds. The paper argues that, when seen through the lens of 'strong theory', a PFI appears to be a consciously designed 'neoliberal straitjacket' intended to lock-in gentrification-based regeneration at the neighbourhood level, guarantee long-term profits to (finance) capital, and create powerful privatising and marketising pressures across the local public sphere. However, it is equally possible to construct a preliminary 'weak theory' of the PFI that unhides its inherent contradictions and shows how everyday activism by local community actors can successfully influence and contest how neoliberalism is rolled out on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade the scope of the socio-environmental concerns included within an environmental justice framing has broadened and theoretical understandings of what defines and constitutes environmental injustice have diversified. This paper argues that this substantive and theoretical pluralism has implications for geographical inquiry and analysis, meaning that multiple forms of spatiality are entering our understanding of what it is that substantiates claims of environmental injustice in different contexts. In this light the simple geographies and spatial forms evident in much “first-generation” environmental justice research are proving insufficient. Instead a richer, multidimensional understanding of the different ways in which environmental justice and space are co-constituted is needed. This argument is developed by analysing a diversity of examples of socio-environmental concerns within a framework of three different notions of justice—as distribution, recognition and procedure. Implications for the strategies of environmental justice activism for the globalisation of the environmental justice frame and for future geographical research are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluates the authoritative approaches to the production of educational textbooks in human geography in Great Britain. Involvement of human geography in the research and teaching of cultural studies; Continuation in the production of textbooks conveying authoritative messages; Approach of cultural geography to words and texts.

There have been several calls in recent years for a revival of regional geography, focusing on the individuality of places and their roles as contexts within which social structuration occurs. As yet, little has been written about the ways in which such work can be undertaken, providing a framework for the study of places that both emphasises their individuality and sets them in the context of social theory. Using the example of a particular event, the 1984-85 National Union of Mineworkers' strike in Great Britain, and the individuality of one place during that event, this essay provides an initial framework for defining the nature of a place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]