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The UN has stated its aim to eliminate 'Female Genital Mutilation' by 2030. In adherence to this, many countries have introduced or enhanced legislative and policy measures aimed at prevention through surveillance and punishment. In the European context, while protecting young girls from harm is the notional purpose of such measures, political and media debates have often been framed within nation-building rhetoric: across Europe 'FGM' has become the de rigour signifier of the vilified migrant/Muslim Other. This paper explores the impact of FGM-safeguarding measures in relation to citizenship and belonging for people of Somali heritage living in Bristol, England. It contributes to the incipient critical scholarship concerned with the powerful but blinkered hegemonic narrative pedalled by the UN and the policy turn within Europe towards prevention-through-criminalisation. Further, it advances debates on the conundrum of inclusive citizenship considering how a policy intervention which was initiated with widespread support among affected groups and undertaken on an anti-racist platform, resulted in stigmatisation and racism. Using Anderson's (Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control. Oxford: OUP) framework of citizenship as a 'community of value', the paper also contributes to the growing body of work on how citizenship is experienced and the symbiotic and interdependent relationship between status, rights and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the normalisation of xenophobic narratives surrounding migration, and an overarching 'hostile environment' regulating asylum in Britain, this paper explores music-making as a unique lens to highlight the negotiation of belonging, uncertainty and marginality amongst a group of fifty forced migrants in Bristol. Through a focus addressing the nexus between power, affect and the everyday, this paper discusses how the dehumanising processes that characterise the British asylum regime operate in and through the spaces, bodies and objects constituting its 'ordinary' materiality. Concurrently, this paper addresses how the entanglement of bodies, 'things' and sounds emerging from the co-creation of weekly music groups enabled the group participants to negotiate pleasure, expression and sociality in a context of enforced marginality and uncertainty. Consequently, this paper discusses the music-making sessions as affective practices of diasporic belonging: relationalities arising from multiple forms of displacement that enabled momentary, but productive domains of sociability, co-presence and solidarity beyond ethnic, national, gendered and religious lines. The conclusions consider the contributions of theoretical approaches enabling researchers (and potentially advocates and community organisers) to recognise the stakes and significance of forced migrants' (in)visible forms of sociality that take place beside the discursive and institutional frames of State and humanitarian interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role does child psychotherapy have to play in addressing the mental health needs of children in areas of disadvantage? This paper will discuss an innovative programme of school-based mental health work, led by child psychotherapists in Bristol. Referencing child psychotherapy's early work with severely deprived children, and the pioneering work in schools by colleagues such as Youell and Jackson, the paper describes how the Bridge in Schools (BiS) has developed a local response to the high level of unmet mental health needs of children, especially in deprived areas of the city. We consider the challenges and opportunities to be found in building partnerships with school teams, and applying child psychotherapy in a school environment. We explore the relevance of child psychotherapy, both in developing therapeutic approaches to learning and behaviour management that provide containment for vulnerable children, and in offering effective and timely therapeutic interventions. We draw on evaluation data to show that this approach can significantly improve access and outcomes for families who currently do not reach CAMHS thresholds. Finally, we consider how these developments in child psychotherapy give us unique opportunities to contribute to the government's current re-design of child mental health services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities looking to embark on more sustainable development pathways may need to evaluate the controversial but usually impactful measure of road pricing as a means of reducing their reliance on conventionally fuelled automobiles. Understanding the mechanisms determining the public acceptability of road pricing could be critical for its implementation. Studying the attitudes of older people is of particular significance because of their increasing demographic and political importance and vulnerability to transport-related social exclusion. Prior research identified that older people's social norms and pro-social values affect their attitudes to road pricing. The present paper extends this understanding based on the results of three focus groups conducted in Bristol, UK. According to these, there are three distinctive expressions of pro-sociality: pro-environmental values and generativity, which are mainly drivers of support for road pricing, and pro-equity values, which are mainly drivers of opposition. Social norms have two particular expressions: subjective norms (i.e. norms reflecting participants' immediate social environment) and norms about others and society in general. Furthermore, a theory-driven thematic analysis indicates that trust on the integrity of the concept and older age as a life stage associated with ageing, retirement, lower income, mobility barriers and deteriorating health are important in how attitudes reflecting and affecting public acceptability to road pricing form. Finally, the paper highlights the need for packaging road pricing with measures promoting its pro-social potential and the importance of peer-to-peer communication and accepting citizens as “social influencers”, tailored consultation, pro-social branding, pre-implementation trials, clear administrative roles, transparency, and “political patience”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much debate about the impact of recession and austerity on the voluntary and community sector over recent years. Using secondary data from the 2008 National Survey of Third Sector Organisations, Clifford et al. (2013), writing in this journal, have argued that voluntary sector organisations located in more deprived local authorities are likely to suffer most due to the combined effect of cuts in government funding in these areas and their greater dependency on statutory funding. This paper develops this argument by exploring the sector’s changing relationship with the state through an empirical analysis of the differential impact of recession and austerity on voluntary and community organisations involved in public service delivery in the two English core cities of Bristol and Liverpool. This paper highlights how the scale and unevenness of public spending cuts, the levels of voluntary sector dependency on statutory funding and the rising demands for the sector’s services in a period of recession and austerity are being experienced locally. It portrays a sector whose resilience is being severely tested and one that is being forced rapidly to restructure and reposition itself in an increasingly challenging funding environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the fate of Banksy’s (2014) Mobile Lovers which was painted overnight on the door of the Broad Plains Youth Club in Bristol. The subsequent removal of Mobile Lovers from the youth club for safeguarding in the Bristol Museum afforded the work a seemingly neutral zone of protection. However, the museum was also represented as an agent of the city, and as a democratic space, where visitors, as ‘the people’, were encouraged to record their own preferences for the future of the work. Rancière’s conceptualization of democracy as a disruptive process, rather than an established consensual state of affairs, is employed to challenge an understanding of the museum’s strategies as self-evidently democratic. Despite the high profile dispute between the youth club and the City of Bristol over who should be considered the proper beneficiary of Banksy’s work, it was agreed that it should be considered a ‘gift’ to the community and should thus be protected. The case of Mobile Lovers sets a socio-moral precedent for the safeguarding of street art, as it represents a novel recognition of the wishes of the community and the intentions of the artist in determining the fate of street art, and a rare acknowledgement of the moral rights of street artists to determine the first distribution of their work, over the rights of property owners, who are otherwise able to claim the tangible artworks on their walls as individual, rather than community, property. Ultimately, the perception of street art in socio-moral terms as a ‘gift’ enabled an orientation to, and subversion of, the legal strictures currently prohibiting the recognition of the moral rights of street artists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores Social Dreaming (SD) as a method for understanding the affective responses to one of the exhibitions that marked the bicentenary of the 1807 Act that abolished the British slave trade, Breaking the Chains: The Fight to End Slavery, at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (BECM) in Bristol. It asks whether SD can serve the evolving purposes and mission of museums and their role in society. The theory and practice of SD is described and findings are interpreted from a psychosocial and Deleuzian perspective. Finally the value and potential of SD is discussed as a process for attending to audience reactions to disturbing exhibitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joseph Cottle started his Bristol Album in 1795, recognizing the promise of his new circle of friends. Among those who contributed poems to this album were Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, William Gilbert, Dr Beddoes, and the anonymous author of a poem 'Evening', described in the album as 'Written by an Insane Man at Dr Fox's'. 'Evening' appears in the album immediately before a contribution in Coleridge's hand, and it has a number of verbal parallels with 'The Eolian Harp', which Coleridge was to start two months later. Dr Edward Long Fox, who in 1795 played a leading role in Bristol's radical community, was a medical practitioner who treated the mentally ill. This paper looks at how the poem was transmitted from the privacy of Fox's asylum to the pages of Cottle's album, and assesses its significance for that early Romantic writing circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The Bristol Girls Dance Project was a cluster randomised controlled trial that aimed to increase objectively measured moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) levels of Year 7 (age 11-12) girls through a dance-based after-school intervention. The intervention was delivered in nine schools and consisted of up to forty after-school dance sessions. This paper reports on the main findings from the detailed process evaluation that was conducted.Methods: Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from intervention schools. Dose and fidelity were reported by dance instructors at every session. Intervention dose was defined as attending two thirds of sessions and was measured by attendance registers. Fidelity to the intervention manual was reported by dance instructors. On four randomly-selected occasions, participants reported their perceived level of exertion and enjoyment. Reasons for non-attendance were self-reported at the end of the intervention. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with all dance instructors who delivered the intervention (n = 10) and school contacts (n = 9) in intervention schools. A focus group was conducted with girls who participated in each intervention school (n = 9).Results: The study did not affect girls' MVPA. An average of 31.7 girls participated in each school, with 9.1 per school receiving the intervention dose. Mean attendance and instructors' fidelity to the intervention manual decreased over time. The decline in attendance was largely attributed to extraneous factors common to after-school activities. Qualitative data suggest that the training and intervention manual were helpful to most instructors. Participant ratings of session enjoyment were high but perceived exertion was low, however, girls found parts of the intervention challenging.Conclusions: The intervention was enjoyed by participants. Attendance at the intervention sessions was low but typical of after-school activities. Participants reported that the intervention brought about numerous health and social benefits and improved their dance-based knowledge and skills. The intervention could be improved by reducing the number of girls allowed to participate in each school and providing longer and more in-depth training to those delivering the intervention.Trial Registration: ISRCTN52882523 Registered 25th April 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the case of Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK, as a neighbourhood in a city which has appropriated the discourse of the creative industries from the bottom up in order to foster its regeneration against capital’s art of rent. We show how Stokes Croft’s self-branding as a cultural quarter has led to struggles over the creative and cultural commons thus produced, which we conceptualise as value struggles where localised value practices clash with capital’s imposition of value. Our case study including two vignettes points both to the productivity of such value struggles in producing new value practices understood as commoning, as well as the limits of reproducing a common life in the face of existing financial and property regimes. Stokes Croft therefore serves as a case in point of the tragedy of the urban commons and points to potential ways of overcoming it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]