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Teachers are an occupational group particularly prone to suffering from burnout, a condition caused by chronic stress from work overload. Burnout is a risk factor for adverse psychological and physical health, thus it is important to test the efficacy of tools and techniques for alleviating burnout and enhancing job satisfaction. One potentially suitable technique is positive expressive writing. In the present study, we investigated the effects of a positive writing intervention on burnout, job satisfaction, anxiety, perceived stress and self-reported physical symptoms and compared these effects in teachers and other full-time workers.A group of teachers (n = 35) and a group of non-teachers (n = 31) who worked full-time in other professions were randomly allocated to complete either three consecutive days of positive expressive writing, or writing about a more neutral topic, online, 20 minutes per day, for three consecutive days State anxiety declined to a greater extent for participants in the positive writing condition compared to the neutral writing condition. Positive writing also conferred benefits on some aspects of job satisfaction, but not burnout. There were no specific benefits for teachers compared to non-teachers. The present study is the first to observe that positive expressive writing may be a useful technique for enhancing job satisfaction in full-time workers.

In recognition of multi-sited and dynamic diaspora formation, this article explores the relationship between significant (yet limited and differentially experienced) political change and emotional geographies for those outside of their country of birth. We do this with reference to the removal of President Robert Mugabe from power, as experienced by first-generation Zimbabwean migrants, asking if and how ‘change’ has been experienced and felt, but also what such responses do through what we call diasporic reorientations. This helps us to think through emotional alignments with/to Zimbabwe, as part of practical trajectories already under formation, but reinforced, exacerbated and in some cases reconfigured. We discuss how participants understood and navigated contested notions of ‘change’ with attention to the ambiguous co-existence of celebration, uncertainty, scepticism and tentative hopefulness. We then highlight the significance, complexity and unevenness of diasporic reorientations, through intentions, desires and experiences of return. In so doing we contribute to debates around the significance of emotional spatialities and temporalities in the re-construction of diasporic subjectivities, through and despite of such ‘change’.

Law enforcement agencies in the UK are embracing evidence-based policing and recognise the importance of human source intelligence (HUMINT) in the decision-making process. A review of the literature identified six categories likely to impact the handling of a covert human intelligence source (CHIS) or an informant: (a) handler personality traits; (b) informant motivation; (c) rapport; (d) gaining cooperation; (e) obtaining information, and (f) detecting deception. This study sought to identify which of these categories current HUMINT practitioners considered the most when planning and conducting a meeting with an informant. A bespoke online survey was designed and disseminated to 34 practitioners using purposive and snowball sampling. Directed content analysis and thematic content analysis were conducted. Results indicate that practitioners appear most concerned with gaining co-operation (d) and detecting deception (f). Results also found an inter-connectivity between the six categories, with informant handlers often having to balance competing requirements. Implications for future research are discussed.

THEME: SOCIAL INNOVATION IN PUBLIC SERVICES—INNOVATING ‘CO-CREATIVE’ RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN SERVICES, CITIZENS AND COMMUNITIES?\ud Guest editors: Sue Baines, Rob Wilson, Inga Narbutaite Aflaki, Aldona Wiktorska-Święcka, Andrea Bassi and Harri Jalonen\ud Editorial: Innovating ‘co-creative’ relationships between services, citizens and communities

Traumatic deaths of military personnel can have tragic consequences for the lives and health of bereaved significant others. To mitigate the effects, the UK Armed Forces enhanced the support for bereaved military families. However, little is known about whether the support has been satisfactory. The present research applied mixed methods to explore the experiences of bereaved UK military families (N = 264) with different types of support and how it historically changed over time. The findings suggest that although support has improved, further improvements are required in the provision of financial information, administrative support, and access to psychological support for all bereaved family members.

This study focused on United Nations (UN) civilian volunteers serving in “hot spots”, and tested a model to predict their intentions to apply for a new UN assignment. These individuals have characteristics of both assigned expatriates and self-initiated expatriates. In-Role Behaviours (IRB) and Organizational Citizenship Behaviours towards the Local Population (OCB-Locals) were related to sense of personal accomplishment, that in turn was related to intentions to apply for another UN assignment. Sense of personal accomplishment played a mediating role. Both the personality trait of agreeableness and the attitudinal factor of commitment towards the local population were predictive of IRB, but only agreeableness was predictive of OCB-Locals. Moderation effects were identified, but the direction of most of them was unexpected. For example, it was low openness to experience that strengthened the link between sense of personal accomplishment and intentions to re-apply. The study’s implications for expatriation research and for practice are discussed.

IMPACT\ud A critical barrier to the large-scale adoption of technology-enabled care services (TECS) remains a lack of evidence around their business cases that would create sufficient value for the stakeholders involved. Drawing on a case study of telecare service delivery, involving public funding and institutions in north east England, the authors highlight the opportunities that technology provides, as well as a series of challenges that need to be addressed. The findings will be particularly helpful for telecare stakeholders, shaping how services are provided.\ud \ud ABSTRACT\ud Technology-enabled care services (TECS) are primarily provided in the UK as a public service, using public funds and national systems of health and care. The delivery of such services, however, is increasingly market orientated and subject to many challenges. The authors draw on the literature and case study evidence, to explore the value propositions and value co-creation within TECS, highlighting the challenges and obstacles, as well as possible ways forward.

This article develops new understandings of the weekly mass participation running event, parkrun. The popularity of parkrun has been understood in terms of counteracting sedentary lives and obesity and offering mental-health benefits. However, in view of critical accounts of running in general, a more nuanced inquiry was pursued through examining parkrun in the broader context of runners’ lives, particularly their occupations. Managers and professionals formed an exemplifying occupational group. Changes in managers’ and professionals’ work have brought to the fore characteristics of contemporary work more generally such as performativity and insecurity. Data was generated from parkrunners through an artefact prompted conversational method and as the inquiry was insider-research, so the auto-ethnographic influences on the research are critically examined. Visual and narrative findings from parkrunners are presented and interpreted through a social-constructionist identity lens. The distinctive theoretical contribution of this inquiry is to provide a more detailed discussion of identity than is the norm in the field, and to show how running, like work, could structurally regulate identities but how running also offered scope for agentic identity-work. The results show that a desired sense-of-self was unlikely to be derived from occupations whereas parkrun provided an additional identity dimension and enabled the construction of a more positive and satisfying sense-of-self.

The article argues that British maritime museums do more to represent the nation than the sea, thereby contributing to nation-building discourse, and offers an alternative way of thinking about belonging through the lens of maritime mobilities. The United Kingdom’s national maritime museums are, of course, but a few among many museums seeking to incorporate a more diverse range of community voices and perspectives into their collections and exhibitions. Yet maritime museums are a particularly pertinent example of Britain’s nation-building discourse due to the global reach of Britain’s seaborne colonialism and exploration, and the concomitant range of their galleries. The article discusses the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall (NMMC) in the wider context of how maritime museums depict the nation. It argues that the NMMC’s presentation of the sea illustrates how nation-building connects with colonialism in latent, largely unacknowledged ways that are broadly representative of Britain’s maritime museums. The article concludes that were maritime museums to take seaborne mobility as a starting point for decolonialised exhibits, they would provide visitors with a greater range of tools with which to critically analyse Britain’s maritime histories, the legacies of which are still being played out today.

The democratisation of the creative process in design and social innovation has brought the position of the designer into question. Therefore, a shift is necessary from the traditional role-based approach towards one that is value-based. This paper introduces the sociable designer, who is driven by being social, rather than doing social. Based on insights from field work conducted in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, this reorientation highlights the value of design in supporting the reconfiguration of social relationships by thinking of design as a socially-embedded practice.

In recent years we have been able to observe the emergence and mainstreaming of a EU discourse on digital sovereignty, which highlights the importance of gaining back control of EU digital infrastructure and technological production, based on the EU’s perceived loss of economic competitiveness, limited capacity to innovate, high degree of dependence on foreign digital infrastructures and service providers, and, related to all these factors, difficulty in providing EU citizens with a high level of cybersecurity. Bearing in mind that a considerable percentage of these infrastructures and service providers are under private sector control, the present article asks how this sovereignty discourse conceptualises the role of the private sector in EU cybersecurity. Drawing from a Regulatory Capitalism theoretical model, this article proposes that the EU has instead entered a Regulatory Mercantilist phase where it seeks to reassert its control over cyberspace, impose digital borders, accumulate data wealth and reduce its dependence on external private sector actors whose values may not reflect those of the EU order. A new approach to cybersecurity is emerging, in which the non-EU private sector can be perceived as much of a threat as foreign powers, and from whom digital sovereignty must be secured.

This article considers the benefits, limitations and potential impacts of ‘ethic matching’ South Asian (SA) police officers to victims, or conversely allocating ‘different’ non-SA officers to reported honour-based abuse (HBA) cases and other crimes. To explore these themes, semi-structured interviews in one English police force with 15 police specialist detectives in Public Protection took place. Lack of cultural competence by some non-SA officers was evident, exposing stereotyping and tokenism. Some professional race anxiety features, but to a lesser extent. Cultural ignorance impacts an officer’s ability to identify crime patterns; results in misconstruing victim perspectives and means that officers may not recognise cues that victims are at risk. The opposing perspective identifies that there are enormous benefits to ‘ethnic matching’ SA officers and victims when investigating crimes, notably enhanced insight due to cultural competence, excellent victim rapport and the use of foreign language skills. Conversely, findings indicate that in exceptional circumstances cultural bias by some same ethnicity officers can act as an impediment, influencing officer decision-making and detrimentally affecting victims’ best interests. Extant literature reinforces the contention that victims do not want to be ‘ethnic matched’ to the police or other professionals, for fear that officials may leak information to the wider community. Albeit there are notable benefits to ethnic matching, factors such as training and experience are equally important. Nevertheless, the article affords valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of ethnic matching and ethnic difference, which will aid operational supervisory police officers when resourcing such incidents.

This article examines the development of anti-transgender debates within the United Kingdom, which have gained traction due to proposed amendments to the country’s Gender Recognition Act (GRA). A group of determined lobby groups, taking their lead from like-minded organizations in the United States, has protested vigorously against the proposed changes to the GRA, especially with respect to “single-sex spaces”. As a result of this furor, the lives of transgender people have become the subject of open debate. Trans people now see their legitimacy questioned, and their ability to access services increasingly being placed under the microscope. This article argues that the literature on radicalization – developed in response to domestic terrorism – can explain these developments. UK lobby groups are successfully pushing a radical agenda to deny the basic rights of trans people, and are doing so under the cover of “free speech” – a sacrosanct element of life in Anglo-Saxon countries.

The challenges facing public services and non-profit organizations are complex and multi-faceted, confounding the orthodoxies of bureaucratic public administration and New Public Management approaches. This article discusses the merits and potential of the emerging ‘Human Learning Systems’ (HLS) approach to the funding, commissioning and management of public services as an alternative management logic. Building on prior introductory work, the authors analyse the current state of development, content and operation of HLS and its collaborative process, involving more than 300 organizations. Drawing on the experience of public and non-profit service professionals in adopting and experimenting with this approach, the authors found that HLS can provide a helpful and innovative conceptual frame to promote constructive engagement with complexity in public management theory and practice.\ud \ud IMPACT: \ud Current approaches to public management based on principles of marketization, management and measurement are increasingly being seen to fail when faced with the complex world of public services. The Human Learning Systems (HLS) concept represents an alternative approach which embraces the complexity of the real world of organizations working to deliver services. Produced in collaboration with an emerging community of funders, managers and commissioners of services, HLS offers a framework which bridges academic complexity theory and the diverse contexts of practice. This article introduces HLS as a means to enable organizations, practitioners and service users to work together more effectively.

In February 2015, three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green Academy left the UK to join the Islamic State (IS). Kadiza Sultana, Amira Abase and Shamima Begum became emblematic of the group’s “pull” and ...

Attachment concepts are used in diverging ways, which has caused confusion in communication among researchers, among practitioners, and between researchers and practitioners, and hinders their potential for collaboration. In this essay we explore how attachment concepts may vary in meaning across six different domains: popular discourses, developmental science, social psychological science, psychiatric diagnosis, psychotherapy, and child welfare practice. We attempt to typify these forms of attachment discourse by highlighting points of convergence, divergence, and relay between the different domains. Our general conclusions are that diversity in the use of attachment concepts across different domains of application has been largely unrecognised, and that recognition of these differences would reduce confusion, help identify sites where infrastructure needs to be developed to support coordination, and strengthen opportunities for collaboration to mutual benefit. We suggest that academic attachment discourse would benefit from clarification of core terminology, including: “attachment”, “internal working model”, “trauma”, and “dysregulation”.

This article presents the responses of 4113 sports fans (55% of whom self-identified as female), collected via an online survey from April 2019 to June 2019, about their views on trans women competing in women’s sports. In presenting the data we draw on two recurring themes – gender identity and fairness – to explain the contrasting views surrounding the traditional gendered organization of sports. The overall findings are that just over half of our male and female participants are against the inclusion of trans women, with non-binary participants more supportive and those who preferred not to disclose their gender identity less supportive. The article concludes by suggesting that whilst there is evidence of progressive attitudes amongst our participants, there is also strong resistance to trans women competing in women’s sports that is primarily related to the perceived retention of an unfair biological advantage by being assigned male at birth. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Teaching assistants (TAs) in the United Kingdom typically work with students with additional and special needs, including the most challenging and vulnerable pupils, in low paid, precarious roles. However, no research has examined how organisational factors such as job demand, control, and support can influence TAs' wellbeing, despite recent evidence demonstrating the importance of organisational factors to teacher wellbeing. Using a large-scale questionnaire approach, data from 2,957 UK TAs investigated the extent to which job demands, control, role clarity, peer- and management-support, organisational change, relationship quality, and student and parental behaviour contribute to perceived stress. Results show that job demands and control consistently contribute to increased perceived stress in TAs regardless of the phase of school in which they are based. There is also some evidence that TAs experience aggression from pupils and parents. For primary-based TAs, a broader range of factors contribute to stress, including levels of support and negative pupil behaviour. Implications are subsequently discussed, with reference to the TAs themselves and the culture of schools in which they work, as are suggestions of the implications for the children in their care. Suggestions for future research and intervention are also discussed.

by Tom Parker, London, World Scientific Publishing Europe, 2019, 893 pp., £200 (UK) (Hardcover), ISBN 9781783266548

This chapter combines approaches from economic and business history with social network analysis to evaluate the challenges faced by a genuinely ‘transnational’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ business trading between Europe and the Indian Ocean world in the eighteenth century. By employing Peter F. Drucker’s differentiation between a ‘multinational’ and a ‘transnational’ enterprise, it evaluates the levels of national preference in the private trading operations of a multinational group of merchants sent by the Prussian East India Company to Bengal in the 1750s. Its findings demonstrate not only the lack of cosmopolitanism of these European traders but also the increased levels of principal-agent problems and moral hazard incurred by transnational enterprises which operated across several national and imperial frameworks. Although headquartered in Emden, Prussia’s eighteenth-century North Sea Port located on the German-Dutch border, and chartered by Frederick II of Prussia, the 1750s Prussian Companies trading to China and Bengal were genuinely transnational enterprises. Their capital, directors, sailing and commercial staff were drawn from Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Flanders, Sweden, France, and the German states. This cosmopolitan make-up posed a distinct set of challenges in terms of governance and firm organization. The focus of this chapter is on a single voyage, that of the ship Henry Prince of Prussia sent out in 1754 by the newly founded Royal Prussian Commercial Company Trading to Bengal. The captain was a Flemming and the three supercargoes in charge of the expedition were Scottish, French, and Flemish respectively. Instead of accomplishing their mission as instructed, the four took over the ship and the company’s funds to finance their own trade along the Coromandel Coast and Bengal in India before their ship sunk in the Ganges mouth a good one and a half years later. The subsequent legal case produced minute evidence that permits us to trace their Indian trading contacts and commercial social network as they developed over time, which in turn gives an insight both into how limited the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of these individual traders actually was and at the same time how even this limited cosmopolitanism posed an insurmountable challenge for a transnational enterprise operating across different legal and political frameworks.

In this paper, we examine the continual and rapid growth of privatised baby/toddler swimming franchises (birth to 4 years) as part of a wider trend and market growth of baby/toddler sports, for example, Rugby Tots, Baby Ballet, and Little Kickers (football). Throughout the paper, we apply Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and habitus to understand parents’ motivations for taking their baby/toddler to organised swimming classes. These sporting activities are expensive for parents with each session costing between £6-20 for a baby/toddler to participate which means that only parents with economic capital can afford to consume these activities. Our findings suggest that consuming these activities reflect views on good parenting, support the development of physical and social capital and forms of family class distinction which start in the early years. We argue this is significant as such early formative experiences support the development of leisure and sporting habitus which have value and may influence future leisure choices and opportunities.

In this article we discuss a large scale research project aimed at uncovering people’s everyday engagements with pornography. We focus on women aged 18–25; the only category of our participants in which women outnumbered men. Looking at responses from women in this group we examine their narratives, views, feelings, positions and judgments. We focus in particular on the elements of pornography that engaged them in terms of content and scenario, style and aesthetics, emotion and thought, tone and mood, and identification, and we consider the accounts of four participants in more detail. Our discussion illustrates what different forms of engagement with pornography can look like and outlines what they suggest about the possible relations of porn engagement and sexuality. We situate our discussion in relation to qualitative cultural studies work, a tradition of feminist audience studies, an emerging porn studies, and accounts which understand both sexuality and media and consumption as part of everyday life.

2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the seminal events of Northern Ireland’s 1968: a milestone offering up an opportunity to reassess a pivotal moment in the province’s recent past. This article will argue that the civil rights period has fitted into a common model of the past being used to perpetuate the divisions at the heart of Northern Irish society. It will go on to demonstrate how an innovative methodological and theoretical approach, based on oral history, education and – most crucially – agonism, has facilitated the unearthing and integration of complex and hitherto marginalised Ulster Protestant perspectives.

This article examines the big data practices employed by the online gambling industry to illustrate the wider societal power structures involved. As well as using data for commercial ends, gambling operators in the UK market are obligated by law to utilise gamblers’ data to protect problem gamblers. This paper argues that the use of data in this way can be interpreted as a form of social control when observed through a Foucauldian lens. Contrary to the dominant narrative of free and informed choice, gamblers’ behaviour is arguably being governed both at an individual level through disciplinary mechanisms of surveillance and correction, and at the level of the population through governmentality techniques applied to the gambling environment. Through big data practices and industry discourse, these mechanisms of power are used to frame the choices of individuals and shape them into a productive population of ‘responsible gamblers’.

This paper explores the persistence of scepticism in British newspapers’ narratives around climate change. It is based on 958 news articles collected over three decades (1988–2016) from nine newspapers. The analysis of “general consensus” around climate change and the consensus around both its causes and consequences, shows that scepticism is still present in newspapers’ narratives especially in relation to centre-right political orientations. The increasing consensus around both the causes and consequences does not necessarily mean that scepticism has disappeared, but it raises further questions around the modalities through which consequences, and actions to limit their impact, are represented.

Through the increased attention match-fixing has received from both academia and policymakers in recent years, its complexity and the consequent inability to identify a one-fits-all description of the phenomenon have been underlined, highlighting that we have yet to fully capture the various forms of its manifestation in modern day sport. At the same time, and despite academic endeavours, the scholarly work on policy responses against match-fixing is remarkably scarce. In addressing these gaps, this study aims to examine two high-profile match-fixing cases in Greece and Turkey, the ‘Koriopolis’ and the ‘Şike Davası’ scandals, respectively, while considering the policy responses of UEFA, through the analysis of its normative framework and the way in which it was implemented in the two cases. This comparative study offers details of the social organisation of the two scandals, highlighting the various actors, structures and processes within them, as well as the UEFA policy responses they were met with. What is underlined through the study is not only the key role of individuals embedded in the football ecosystem but also the potentially adverse effects of adopting the ‘organised crime’ narrative in both official and media accounts, preventing us from truly capturing the phenomenon and policymakers from responding to it. Simultaneously, this study highlights that despite its existing detailed and thorough normative framework, UEFA’s inconsistency in its implementation in the two cases sends a mixed message about tolerating match-fixing, while inviting much needed further research on the matter.

This article explores the extent to which Covid-19 has impacted the trajectory of EU Cybersecurity Policy. The Covid-19 crisis has led to an unprecedent reliance on digital solutions, ranging from teleworking to virus-tracking systems, resulting in the proliferation of Covid-19 related cybercrime, critical information infrastructure attacks and dissemination of pandemic disinformation. Although the virus has been repeatedly portrayed as life altering and as having considerably increased the cybersecurity risks faced by States, businesses and citizens, the proposed solutions, however, have accelerated existing trends in the field rather than resulting in significant institutional change. In particular, there has been a reinforcement of the role as a coordinating actor, of the introduction of further coherence between sub-areas and instruments, and of the positioning of public-private partnerships at the heart of the policy. However, where the role of social media platforms in facilitating the spread of disinformation is concerned, a changing trust relationship has resulted in a discursive shift in which these platforms require greater oversight, a belief reinforced by the spread of Covid-19 disinformation. The article proposes, through the lenses of historical and discursive institutionalism, that the EU’s response to Covid-19 in the field of cybersecurity can only be understood in light of these pre-existing trends, which are the result of an economic and security path dependence that emerged in the 1980s.

Lad culture is pervasive in UK higher education, fuelling misogyny and violence towards women. Lad culture is commonly described as mix of boorish socialising, drinking, sport and pack behaviour. This study reports on the attitudes and experiences of laddish students from a UK university. Laddish behaviours were ubiquitous in their university lives. They were well aware of the harm lad culture causes but struggled to manage their behaviour. Being a lad is an important part of their identity. With their lad friends they relaxed their performance of assertive masculinity. Interviewees identified banter within their friendship group as an essential social currency but were explicit that banter aimed at other people was bullying. Academic success was important and was gained in part by making a distinct break from anti-academic lads. Their self-awareness and willingness to engage with the issue offers opportunities for more effective interventions to combat misogyny.

In a climate of diminishing resources, securing a prolonged commitment to volunteer from special constables is an aspirational goal for police organisations. This paper moves beyond traditional egoistic and altruistic standpoints that draw people into this unpaid role, to consider ongoing decision-making processes that occur in post, which can shape a long-term career path as an unpaid volunteer special constable. Rich narratives, drawn from semi-structured interviews with volunteer special constables, capture a unique and original perspective largely absent from discussion around special constable motivation. Data and findings speak to important gaps in existing knowledge about how and why orientations to volunteering can change over the duration of a special constable’s service, resulting from organisational rather than policing experiences. Findings serve as a timely reminder that while it is important to develop deeper understandings of motives to becoming a special, so too is the significance of furthering knowledge on ways in which the experience of being a special constable within the police organisation can work to sustain commitment, motivation and thus encourage retention.

This chapter examines ways in which power distorts relationships between professionals and service users. It specifically discusses relationships between professionals and disabled service users. It draws on observations made by disabled service user representatives interviewed by Shaping Our Lives and by Joanne Molloy-Graham and Maggie Cameron. The focus is mainly on relations between professionals and disabled people in contexts of service user involvement in the evaluation, planning and co-production of health, education and social care services, though more incidental interactions will also be considered. The author comes from a social model perspective but also uses symbolic interactionist (SI) and structural symbolic interactionist (SSI) perspectives too. Core concepts within symbolic interactionism include, for example, symbols (words, looks, gestures), interactions, attitudes, socialisation, role-taking, reference groups, roles and definitions of situations. Structural symbolic interactionism places emphasis on the impact of social structures on social interactions.

Maria Laura Ruiu is lecturer at Northumbria University (Newcastle upon Tyne). She has recently completed her second PhD in Social Sciences (Northumbria University). She also acted as post-doctoral researcher at the Desertification Research Centre (University of Sassari, Italy) investigating the adaptive capacity of some communities to climate change impact. This paper analyses the first phases of the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak management in Italy by exploring the combination of political, scientific, media and public responses. A lack of coordination between political and scientific levels, and between institutional claim-makers and the media, suggests a mismanagement of the crisis during the first phases of the outbreak. The outbreak management suffered from the five communication weaknesses identified by Reynolds, related to i) mixed messages from multiple messengers; ii) delay in releasing information; iii) paternalistic attitudes; iv) lack of immediate reaction to rumours; and v) political confusion. This supports that the communication of uncertainty around an unknown threat should be accompanied by both political and scientific cohesion. However, both political and scientific dysfunctions caused the failure of several government efforts to contain the outbreak. This paper contributes towards informing policymakers on some lessons learned from the management of the Covid-19 in one of the most affected countries in the world. The Italian case study offers the opportunity for other countries to improve the management of the outbreak by limiting the spread of both chaos and panic.

This article examines how unaccompanied minors from Afghanistan experience migration as a space of both freedom and loneliness situated between competing moral frameworks: family projects, neoliberal discourses of independence, and a quest for new ways of being. While migration is devised as a family strategy to financially sustain the household, it also creates new desires for young people: to study, to have fun, and to fulfil individual goals. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the UK, I analyse how youth find themselves caught in moments of moral crisis as both an ethical dilemma and an experience of self-transformation – caused by the tensions between family expectations, social policies, and a search for independence. I argue that young people often struggle to find the moral ground to exercise freedom and to make the good choice, without the guidance of their parents and within neoliberal politics of self-governance. This article considers youth’s aspirations and imaginaries of ‘good life’ within different communities of belonging, and it highlights the importance of the role of kinship for understanding how youth conceptualise their future, and ultimately exercise choice.

This paper explores the political impact of protest actions that explicitly make use of performance practices in their execution, and takes the activist work of Margaretta D’Arcy as the central object of analysis. Concentrating on D’Arcy’s protest actions at Shannon Airport and her subsequent trial(s), the paper examines the ways in which Ireland’s ‘Guantanamo Granny’ tries to engage the Irish state in a ‘meaningful’ public debate about its ‘complicity’ in the global ‘war on terror’, despite a stated position of neutrality. This debate, the essay argues, is facilitated in part by D’Arcy’s capacity to turn the legal and disciplinary systems of the state back on themselves, so to speak. The contention is that by ‘ignoring’ risk, both physical and legal, and leveraging a lifetime’s experience and understanding of theatre and performance as a mechanism of protest, D’Arcy’s performative activist actions render the state ‘ridiculous’ socially, politically and legally.

Despite a plethora of studies focussing on sports mega event volunteering, little is known about volunteers who live outside of the host city. This exploratory research makes a novel contribution by focusing on a group of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games volunteers from a non-host region. Within this context, the study explores volunteers’ motives, the utility of using financial subsidies to support volunteering participation, and their attitudes towards post-event volunteering. Semi-structured interviews with twelve volunteers were conducted, accompanied by interviews with key local stakeholders. The findings suggest that Olympic-related factors and altruistic feelings were central motivations to volunteering. Some previous volunteering experiences increased confidence levels to volunteer at the Olympics. The financial scheme was perceived as an impetus further enhancing Leicestershire residents’ confidence to volunteer. Program participants also indicated positive attitudes towards future volunteering intentions.

The precipitous increase in commercial poaching across parts of\ud Africa has been met by progressively more militarized responses.\ud Amounting to green militarization, we now see national armies,\ud increasingly paramilitarized rangers, military tactics, and even\ud sophisticated military technology used to address the problem.\ud Scholarly investigations on the topic have largely been\ud approached from a political ecology perspective and hence have\ud not made connections with the equally relevant field of critical\ud military studies (CMS). We see this as a missed opportunity. This\ud paper is thus an early attempt to begin forging these connections.\ud At the most general level, we introduce green militarization – as a\ud practice and realm of scholarly debate – into CMS. By bringing in\ud environmental conservation and non-human nature, this offers a\ud broader view into the vast areas of nominally civilian life that are\ud increasingly militarized, a defining interest of CMS. Second, we\ud draw from core CMS insights – especially regarding the link\ud between development and security – to grasp changing practices\ud and trends in green militarization. In particular, we illustrate how\ud the recent shift towards softer militarized approaches amounts to\ud poaching-related soft counter-insurgency, which we capture in the\ud concept of the conservation–security–development nexus. Here,\ud communities become the object of development interventions to\ud ‘win hearts and minds’ and prevent their involvement in poaching,\ud thereby neutralizing the security threats poaching might pose. We\ud close by suggesting future areas of intersection between CMS and\ud the political-ecological work on green militarization in hopes of\ud inciting a deeper engagement.

Do people living in societies rife with police corruption comply with the law because they perceive police as legitimate or because of their feelings of endemic powerlessness (i.e., what Tankebe (2009) refers to as dull compulsion)? Prior studies have shown that compliance is driven primarily by perceptions that authorities and their laws are legitimate and entitled to be obeyed. Using cross-sectional survey data collected from Southwest Nigeria, this study found that perceptions of police effectiveness and procedural justice were related to Nigerians’ self-reported compliance with the law. Importantly, and unexpectedly, neither dull compulsion nor perceptions of police legitimacy were related to Nigerians’ self-reported compliance behaviour. The implications of these findings for policing in postcolonial African societies are discussed.

This paper discusses the processes underpinning the evolutionary development of sport climbing in recent decades, with a particular focus on the impact of its inclusion in the Olympic Games. New institutionalism and resource-dependence theory provide an analytical and explanatory framework for this study. The research adopted a qualitative method strategy comprising a series of interviews and the analysis of documents, reports, press and social media.. The recent inclusion of the sport in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic programme has created challenges, primarily because of strong values inherent within the sport. The research, however, shows that the values of a sport can expand and develop in order to fit the regulatory legitimacy required by inclusion in the Olympic Games. Nonetheless, the research also shows that involvement with the IOC raises questions about who 'owns' the sport.

Finding balance between institutional or bureaucratic inclinations and professional ones is a challenge faced by all occupations that aspire to professional status, but this is especially difficult for the military, owing to its unique role and the unusual pressures that are placed upon armed forces personnel. The military is charged with the delivery of violence for the benefit of wider society and by morally appropriate means. It is unique among professional practices by virtue of the authorised use of abhorrent methods and the requirement for personnel to be prepared to die in the performance of their duties. Further underscoring the special conditions of the military is the supremacy of mission and group over individual interests, such that at times institutional imperatives can dominate. In these circumstances, the cultivation of appropriate professional military character is a complex endeavour, particularly when army personnel must face some of the most challenging conditions imaginable. In this chapter, I shall focus on the British context to argue that though the British Army Officer Corps is a professional practice, it is a precarious one owing to ongoing tension between institutional and bureaucratic factors on the one hand, and a requirement that army officers exercise professional and moral autonomy on the other. Also affecting the professional precariousness of the military are traditional ethical dilemmas of war together with newer ones associated with modern forms of warfare. Ethical aspects of military practice are the main concern of the chapter, insofar as a defining feature of any professional practice is its ethic or code of ethics (Bayles, 1988; Oakley & Cocking, 2002; Wolfendale, 2009).

Antarctica is recognized as being geopolitically and scientifically important, and as one of the regions with the greatest potential to affect and be affected by global climate change. Still, little is known in practice about how climate change will be handled within the main governance framework of the continent: the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). Using qualitative interviews, participant observations and policy document analysis, this paper explores the perspectives of Chilean scientific, political and non-governmental actors regarding the implications of climate change for the current Antarctic governance framework. Results corroborate a misalignment of the climate change agenda and the ATS, stemming from the divergent views displayed by a wide network of actors. From the interviews, two predominant visions emerge: (i) climate change as an opportunity, where actors recognize the role of Antarctica in regulating global climate and stress greater opportunities to conduct Antarctic-based climate change research, the need for strategic international collaboration, and the reinforcement of Chile’s position in Antarctica through science; (ii) climate change as a burden where actors acknowledge climate change as a global problem, largely external to Antarctica, express disbelief regarding the effectiveness of local actions to tackle climate change and do not associate with climate change governance. The study concludes that climate change may become a dividing, rather than a unifying, field of action in Chilean Antarctic governance, reinforcing previously existing geopolitical tendencies.

Vällingby – one of the first post-war suburbs in Stockholm – became a well-known and much visited development, a prominent place in the geographical imaginations of many planners and architects during the 1950s and 1960s. This article will consider the ways in which Vällingby was ‘showcased’ to planners and architects outside of Sweden during this period. It will demonstrate how this was achieved through three practices in particular: (1) the hosting of visitors to Vällingby; (2) the promotion of Vällingby by those governing and marketing the development; and (3) the reporting of the development in English language planning and architect journals. In so doing, the article will speak to the academic literature on policy mobilities and two important concepts within it: informational infrastructures and the extrospective city.

This paper considers the intimate exchanges taking place in a space whose public/private designation is indistinct; the prison visiting room. Drawing on extensive research with serving prisoners, their visitors, and prison staff in the UK, and using as an interpretive lens recent geographical conceptualizations of comfort as affective complex, it seeks to better understand how the spaces provided for prison visitation affect the ‘doing’ of intimacy in ways that arguably detract from the potential benefits of prison visitation in supporting the well-being of both prisoners and visitors. The paper suggests that the bodily practices involved in achieving comfort-as-condition-of-possibility may simultaneously undermine the propensity for the resultant corporeal comfort to deliver this effect.

How can we articulate what art does in rural community development? Drawing on a one-year experimental study combining ethnography and artistic fieldwork on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in the north east of England (referred to hereafter as Holy Island), we explore the ways art works in the context of neo-endogenous forms of community development. We propose that the art experience is catalytic to processes of community engagement, personal and collective reflection, revealing relationships (or even disconnects) between the community as well as between the community and the natural environment. Such reflexive processes are characteristic within ideal frames of rural development that place the community at the heart of the development decision making. We argue therefore that art as a process within a community development strategy reveals the complexity of rural community or in other words ‘reads’ the community where development initiatives are being established. Community-led or ‘bottom-up’ perspectives are commonplace in rural development processes, well discussed within ideal models such as neo-endogenous or networked rural development (Lowe et al. 1998; Shucksmith 2000). Similarly, the role of arts is increasingly now promoted as a vehicle to rural development (Balfour and Alter 2015; Markusen 2006; Bell and Jayne 2010). However, this usually refers to understanding arts in positive or economic terms (Gibson 2010a, 2010b; Arts Council England 2005). This literature does not account for art as a practice on its own terms (an example from arts practice: Crawshaw and Bowman, 2007). Surprisingly perhaps, while these debates draw on theoretical discussions within economic and social geography, planning and rural studies, there is very little intersection with the field of art studies. This chapter aims to fill this gap, evidenced by our interdisciplinary collaboration across art and rural studies backgrounds.We draw inspiration on the relational perspectives of art practice from art studies. As proposed by Hennion and Grenier (2000: 351) instead of looking at works of art, we rather shape our study to trace the way artworks work. To contribute a nuanced articulation of the effects mobilised by art in rural development processes, through exploratory ethnographic research, we trace associations at the micro level: we are concerned with what art does in practice. To discuss the relational nature of communities, we draw on rural studies and in particular the framework for ‘reading communities’ suggested by Ruth Liepins (2000a, 2000b). In tracing associations, we notice how art impacts on community meanings, practices, and spaces and structures amidst complex relational networks. As such we make a specific contribution to the understanding of art in community development: through tracing the micro relationships of art in rural development, we propose art as a ‘relational reading’ of the community.

The paper illustrates how a culture of violence is perpetuated and reproduced in South Korea through schooling and argues that peace education could help transform a culture of violence to a culture of peace. Critical ethnographic methods and a framework of peace education were applied to a sample of secondary schools in South Korea to argue that a disturbing culture of violence and learned helplessness were present; this comprises themes of direct and indirect violence through iljin (a group of students who are considered key perpetrators of school violence); a colonized false ideology and resistance to social justice. More positively, findings are also used to generate possibilities for pedagogical change based on peace education – an approach that proves useful both as an analytical frame for examining peace-violence relations in education and society and as an essential pedagogy for progressing towards peace in South Korean schools.

© 2016 Regional Studies Association. Leadership and systems of governance: the constraints on the scope for leadership of place-based development in sub-national territories. Regional Studies. A triadic conceptualization of leadership, governance systems and central–local relations is constructed in order to aid understandings about the influence of systems of governance on the scope for place-based leadership. Deploying the dual concepts of ‘permissibility’ and ‘acceptability’ provides an innovative analytical device for deciphering the actually existing nature of place-based leadership. Recently initiated public–private partnerships in one of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) most centralized countries are analysed to articulate characteristics of controlling mechanisms of the national system of governance which shape the degree of autonomy of leadership of city and regional development in sub-national terrains.

This article offers a study of the Hackney Flashers' project Who's Holding the Baby? (1976–1978). The agitprop series documented the establishment of an independent nursery in North London, while providing analysis of the profoundly gendered and classed nature of such work. This historical example illustrates with striking accuracy transformations to the urban landscape of London over the past four decades, in particular pointing towards the critical entanglement between collective art practice, liberal voluntarism and processes of gentrification. The article therefore raises a set of problems: To what extent does feminised social reproduction labour and care voluntarism assuage or challenge the normative functioning of urban public space? What is the relationship of cultural to economic capital, and how is gender relevant to these forms of value? Has the potential of creative, urban protest tactics been exhausted? Drawing from writings across cultural geography and art history, the article proposes that a historical consideration of the Hackney Flashers opens up a pressing discussion around shifts in the organisation of social reproduction since the 1970s.

This article explores some of the hidden background behind the highly praised school results in South Korea. An ethnographic case study is used to cast light on how schooling is actually experienced by South Korean students. Two main results are reported from these data. First, evidence is presented of damaging cultural elements such as internalised norms of resistance and conformity, symbolised helplessness, studying without any interest in controversial issues, an internalised culture of “dealing” and widespread playing with mobile phones, sleeping and applying make-up in class. Second, evidence is presented of an institutionalised school violence involving mechanisms of control, abusive and violent everyday language, explicit school violence and delinquent/deviant behaviour. The article concludes that there is something unique and deeply disturbing about institutionalised violence in South Korean schools and that the abysmally low subjective wellbeing levels of pupils are no coincidence.

An exploration of space, site, and practices. Reflections on destination gyms as a way of envisaging intercultural actor-training programmes at a UK HEI.

Cohousing communities’ participatory processes take place from the preliminary phases of the development process when the group is expected to collaborate and negotiate its private stakes with those of the whole community. Even after the establishment of the community, every choice regarding the common spaces has to be discussed and approved by the whole group. Results obtained from qualitative research on cohousing in England show how the internal dynamics of the Community Project are highly different from an “ordinary” condominium, mainly because it is an “intentional community.” At the same time, the case study shows that when some constitutive features of the participatory process are not respected, the community dynamics are negatively influenced. Theoretically, the cohousing formula produces a cooperative and communitarian organization rationally constituted in order to ensure not only livelihood, but also a higher quality of life and higher degree of socialization inside and outside the community. Practically, it requires a great effort of inhabitants in terms of intentionality, time, financial resources, and willingness to collaborate and negotiate private stakes. The Community Project represents evidence of the difficulty in reaching equilibrium between creating an “open” community and preserving the privacy typical of a condominium.

Chapter Highlights From the late nineteenth century football has cultivated consumers. The multi-national adoption of neo-liberalism in the 1980’s contributed towards the intensification of the consumer experience in football. Whilst there is no single consumption theory, there are a number of complimentary, overlapping and sometimes contradictory theoretical explanations that can be applied to football. Some theories emphasize the position of capitalist exploitation in football, whilst others place consumers as communicators and rational decision makers.