More Than a ‘Little Act of Kindness’? Towards a Typology of Volunteering as Unpaid Work

Definitions of volunteering are widespread and complex, yet relatively little attention is given to volunteering as unpaid work, even though it intersects with the worlds of paid employment and the domestic sphere, cutting across individual/collective and public/private spaces. This article advances a typology of volunteering work (altruistic, instrumental, militant and forced volunteering/’voluntolding’) that illuminates the complexity and dynamism of volunteering. Using qualitative data from a study of 30 volunteers to explore practices of volunteering as they unfold in daily life, the typology provides much-needed conceptual building blocks for a theory of ‘volunteering as unpaid work’. This perspective helps transcend the binaries prevalent in the sociology of work and provides a lens to rethink what counts as work in contemporary society. It also invites further research about the effects of ‘voluntolding’ on individuals and society, and on the complex relationship between volunteering work and outcomes at a personal and collective level

Food, Ethics and Community: Using Cultural Animation to Develop a Food Vision for North Staffordshire

Eating ethically involves a plethora of activities, being both a contingent and a challenging practice (Williams et al, 2015). The desire to be more ethical in our food choices is connected to anxieties over food consumption, including how and what we should be eating (Ashley et al, 2004), the conditions of production and distribution, highlighted through various food scares from BSE to horse meat in burgers (Jackson, 2010) and the amount of food that gets wasted in the process (Evans, 2014). Such are the range of issues that it becomes hard for consumers to identify a precise focus for the anxiety beyond a general ‘lack of confidence in food’ (Osowski et al, 2012:58) with the result that they feel unsure as to how to respond (Benson,1997)

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Indigenous built structures and anthropogenic impacts on the stratigraphy of Northern Australian rockshelters: insights from Malarrak 1, north western Arnhem Land

Malarrak 1 is currently the northernmost excavated rockshelter on the Australian mainland, located in the Wellington Range in north western Arnhem Land. The site contains a rich late Holocene deposit, with extensive contact rock art, stone artefacts, shell, bone, contact materials, ancestral human remains, and other cultural material. Excavation of the Malarrak 1 rockshelter and analysis of its sediments revealed many impacts on site formation processes within the deposit. We attribute the disturbance to possible erosion or sediment deposition during periods of intense rainfall and also to the construction of timber structures within the site. This is supported by modern and historical observations and is the focus of this paper. The extent of the disturbance to Malarrak 1 provides a cautionary tale for other excavations in the region that may be affected by similar Indigenous site occupation, as these anthropogenic activities enhance the risk of further impacts arising from biological and geomorphological processes that can impinge on the stratigraphic integrity of the cultural deposits.This work was funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Project program [LP0882985] with contributions from the Linkage Partners Bushfires Council NT and the Department of Sustainability, Environment Heritage and Water. Daryl Wesley was also supported by Australian Research Council fellowship DE170101447 ‘People, Animals and Ochre’. Ian Moffat was supported by Australian Research Council fellowship DP160100703 ‘The Drumbeat of Human Evolution: Climate Proxies from Rockshelter Sediments’

Indigenous built structures and anthropogenic impacts on the stratigraphy of Northern Australian rockshelters: insights from Malarrak 1, north western Arnhem Land

Malarrak 1 is currently the northernmost excavated rockshelter on the Australian mainland, located in the Wellington Range in north western Arnhem Land. The site contains a rich late Holocene deposit, with extensive contact rock art, stone artefacts, shell, bone, contact materi- als, ancestral human remains, and other cultural material. Excavation of the Malarrak 1 rock- shelter and analysis of its sediments revealed many impacts on site formation processes within the deposit. We attribute the disturbance to possible erosion or sediment deposition during periods of intense rainfall and also to the construction of timber structures within the site. This is supported by modern and historical observations and is the focus of this paper. The extent of the disturbance to Malarrak 1 provides a cautionary tale for other excavations in the region that may be affected by similar Indigenous site occupation, as these anthropo- genic activities enhance the risk of further impacts arising from biological and geomorpho- logical processes that can impinge on the stratigraphic integrity of the cultural deposits

Who Really Cares? Introducing an “Ethics of Care” to Debates on Transformative Value Co-creation

This paper introduces an “ethics of care” lens to the literature on Transformative Services Research (TSR) to understand how service users and providers co-create transformational value and well-being. In considering six food poverty organizations—categorized as market-oriented, faith-oriented, or neighborhood-oriented—the authors argue that the intention behind enacting an ethics of care drives different possibilities for transformative value. The analysis is organized in line with Tronto’s (1993; 2001) phases of caring, and makes connections between values that drive the organization’s work, emerging subjectivities, practices that unfold as a result, and ultimately the value that is co-created. The findings show that caring relations must be considered “in situ,” as an organization’s values and practices are what determine the potential for transformative value

Who really cares? Introducing an ‘Ethics of Care’ to debates on transformative value co-creation

This paper introduces an “ethics of care” lens to the literature on Transformative Services Research (TSR) to understand how service users and providers co-create transformational value and well-being. In considering six food poverty organizations—categorized as market-oriented, faith-oriented, or neighborhood-oriented—the authors argue that the intention behind enacting an ethics of care drives different possibilities for transformative value. The analysis is organized in line with Tronto’s (1993; 2001) phases of caring, and makes connections between values that drive the organization’s work, emerging subjectivities, practices that unfold as a result, and ultimately the value that is co-created. The findings show that caring relations must be considered “in situ,” as an organization’s values and practices are what determine the potential for transformative value