A space of welcome for (almost) everyone: A study on the tension between Brighton and Bologna’s institutional narratives and practices of welcome

This is a pre-peer review preprint © Mazzilli, 2021. The definitive, peer reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Hospitality and Society, 2021: https://doi.org/10.1386/hosp_00039_1

New-build studentification: a panacea for balanced communities?

Rising concern about the negative impacts of students on “host communities” has triggered debates about the consequences of studentification in the UK. For some commentators, purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) appears the panacea for studentification, as it offers the potential to reintroduce balance to studentified communities by redistributing student populations in regulated ways. This paper explores this contention, drawing upon focus groups and household surveys conducted in the vicinity of a PBSA development in Brighton (UK). The paper concludes that the location of this development in a densely populated neighbourhood has engendered adverse student / community relations, conflict, feelings of dispossession, and displacement of established local residents. It is asserted that future developments of PBSA should be mindful of these issues and their implications for questions of community cohesion, quality-of-life and belonging in established residential communities. These findings are discussed in relation to debates of age differentials, segregation, and new-build gentrification

Putting sexualized labour in the picture: Encoding ‘reasonable entitlement’ in the lap dancing industry

This paper is based on a semiotic analysis of corporate websites in the lap dancing industry. Forming part of a larger ethnographic study of the UK lap dancing industry, it focuses on how the exchange relationship between dancers and customers is shaped by the industry’s online presence. Methodologically, it draws on Hancock’s (2005) semiotic approach to the analysis of organizational artefacts and Brewis’s writing on the importance of understanding how sex work is constructed and perceived (Brewis, 2005; Brewis and Linstead, 2000a, 2003). The paper shows the importance of corporate websites as virtual spaces that landscape customer expectations of the exchange relationship emphasizing how these expectations perpetuate, on the one hand, a very prescriptive range of body images shaping the performance and consumption of lap dancing work, and on the other, an ambiguous suggestion of open-ended possibility. The paper argues that, in combination, this landscaping of prescription and possibility constitutes a powerful organization of anticipation underpinning perceptions of reasonable entitlement within the lap dancing exchange relationship considering how this impacts upon the dancers’ experiences of this relationship. The analysis highlights both the importance of virtual corporate spaces in landscaping interactive service exchanges, as well as the intensification that results from the ambiguity encoded within these spaces, requiring service providers to reconcile anticipation and experience, prescription and possibility, within the exchange relationship

The new geography of food security: exploring the potential of urban food strategies

Food insecurity is increasingly ‘bimodal’, encompassing issues of quantity and quality, under- and overconsumption, in developed and developing countries alike. At a time when most of the world's population lives in cities, food security has also assumed a strong urban dimension, raising new issues of physical and financial access to food. Finally, the recent emergence of a ‘New Food Equation’, marked by food price hikes, dwindling natural resources, land grabbing activities, social unrest, and the effects of climate change, is bringing onto the global food security agenda a range of often interrelated sustainability concerns. Responses to this new geography of food security are increasingly emerging at the local level, particularly in industrialised countries, where municipal governments are recasting themselves as food system innovators. Based on the documentary analysis of 15 urban food strategies from Canada, the USA and the UK, the paper addresses three main questions: What type of ‘foodscape’ do these documents envision, and why? Does the rescaling of food governance coincide with the emergence of a new localistic approach to food security? What type of priorities and concrete measures do city governments identify to deal with the new geography of food security? By highlighting the centrality of the relationships between urban and rural areas and actors as targeted intervention areas, the analysis raises the need for a tighter scholarly and policy focus on ‘connectivities’ – i.e. the role of food exchange nodes and of governance coordination in the design and implementation of more effective food security strategies