From Buses to BRT: Case Studies of Incremental BRT Projects in North America, MTI Report 09-13

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) uses different combinations of techniques to improve service, such as bus-only lanes and roads, pre-boarding fare collection, transit priority at traffic signals, stylish vehicles with extra doors, bus stops that are more like light rail stations, and high frequency service. This study examines five approaches to BRT systems as implemented by public transit agencies in California, Oregon, and Ontario. The case studies as a group show that BRT can be thought of as a discretionary combination of elements that can be assembled in many different combinations over time. Every element incrementally adds to the quality or attractiveness of the service. This latitude provides transit agencies with many benefits, including the ability to match infrastructure with operating requirements. For example, a BRT service can combine operations serving free flowing arterial roads in the fringes of the downtown with dedicated lanes in areas closer to city center where congestion is greatest. Buses can operate both on and off the guide way, extending the corridors in which passengers are offered a one-seat ride with no transfer required. Transit agencies also can select specific BRT components and strategies, such as traffic signal priority and increased stop spacing, and apply them to existing local bus operations as a way to increase bus speeds and reduce operating costs. The specific elements selected for a BRT route can be implemented all at once, or in incremental stages either or both geographical extensions or additions of features. All of the case studies showed ridership improvements, but the Los Angeles Metro Rapid bus system illustrates the wide geographic coverage, improved ridership, and moderate cost per new rider that is possible with an approach that includes fewer BRT features spread over more miles of route. Quantitative results from the case studies suggest that incremental improvements, applied widely to regional bus networks, may be able to achieve significant benefits at a lower cost than substantial infrastructure investments focused upon just one or a few corridors

The adorned feminine body: a qualitative exploration of media representations of tattooed women in the UK

In this study, we explore how women with tattoos are portrayed in digital media. With a focus on the construction of femininities, we present a media analysis of digital articles and associated imagery published between September 2013 and February 2014 where women with tattoos are discussed and portrayed. A comprehensive search was conducted, with twenty five articles identified. The poster will focus on five of those articles, which are analysed through the means of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. Our analysis explores how women with tattoos are constructed, analysing textual and visual representations in the digital media, to consider its implications for our understanding of femininities and embodiment in contemporary neoliberal British culture. The findings of the study contribute to our understanding of women with tattoos, by considering the 'fashion' aspect of body art, and the notion that there is a right and wrong way to be tattooed. There is also a clear difference between tasteful, discreet tattoos, and tattoos that are considered inappropriate. Think links to ideas of self-expression through decoration of the skin

'Please don't put the whole dang thing out there!': a discursive analysis of internet discussions around infant feeding

The promotion of breastfeeding is an important focus of intervention for professionals working to improve infant health outcomes. Literature in this area focuses largely on ‘choices’ and ‘barriers to breastfeeding’. It is our argument, however, that women’s cultural context plays a key role in infant feeding ‘choices’. In this paper, we explore contested representations of infant feeding and infant feeding choices in public debates conducted on a large British parenting website. We identify dominant constructions of women who breastfeed or bottle feed, social representations of both forms of infant feeding, and explore the relationship between constructions of infant feeding choices and constructions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ motherhood. To sample dominant representations of infant feeding circulating in UK culture, two threads were chosen from the debating board of a busy online parenting community (105 and 99 individual posts respectively). Participants on the threads were largely women. A feminist informed Foucauldian discourse analysis was used to deconstruct the intersecting constructions of gender, childhood and motherhood implicit in public discussions about infant feeding choices. This analysis functions to trouble the individualist assumptions underpinning the notion of infant feeding ‘choices’, considering the cultural context within which British mothers ‘choose’ how to feed their babie

Safe and unsafe spaces? Using drawings and photos to explore children's sense of safety in domestic violence

Objectives: Dominant professional and academic discourses position children who have experienced domestic violence as passive observers of abuse, ‘wounded’ by the things they have seen (Øverlien 2013). Challenging this representation of children, this paper explores how children represent embodied and spatial experience of violence, including a consideration of how children use their material experiences to produce resistant embodied agency. Method This paper is based on interviews with 107 children, in 4 European countries (Italy, Greece, Spain and the UK), focused on their experiences of coping and of maintaining a sense of agency, in families where domestic violence occurs. These interviews included use of photo-elicitation, free drawing, and guided drawing - including family drawing and spatial mapping (Bridger, 2013; Gabb and Singh, 2014), to facilitate young people’s expression of difficult to articulate experiences. The interviews were analysed using Denzin’s Interpretive Interactionism. Results: Visual methods facilitated children’s critical reflections on their experiences of embodiment, and how they used spaces and places within and outside the violent home environment. Three themes are considered: children’s experiences of displacement and disruption (the un-homing of the home), their accounts of creating safe spaces within their home, and use of space as a form of escape and resistance to abuse and control. Conclusions and Implications Findings suggest that children are capable and active agents, resourceful and inventive in their capacity to use, produce and construct physical, embodied and relational spaces for security, comfort and healing during and after living within violent and volatile contexts. The practical applications of these findings are considered

Laugh it up or laugh it off: the use of humour within the fire service as a way of constructing, managing and coping with emotionality

Historically, much research has focused on the use of humour, especially following traumatic events. Within organisational research, emotions are positioned as either instrumental to doing the job, or damaging to task effectiveness; either way this involves some sort of performance. Thus, individuals with emotionally challenging job roles must find ways to manage difficult or traumatic events, whilst still being deemed ‘professional’. Much research positions humour as a discursive tool to enable individuals to talk about feeling. Some researchers argued joking is a way of expressing these damaging or ‘toxic’ emotions, in a culturally masculine way. The current research using interviews with fifteen fire fighters, explored how fire fighters manage emotionality within their job roles. One clear theme that emerged was the use of humour as a strategy to construct, make sense of, and manage emotionally stressful events. This research therefore expanded further on the previous work, exploring how humour enabled them to make sense of emotionality

Homophobia in Catholic schools: An exploration of teachers’ rights and experiences in Canada and Australia

Little is known about the experiences of non-heterosexual educators in Catholic schools. This international comparative analysis reveals previously unreported data from Australian and Canadian qualitative studies that examine the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) teachers, and LGBTI Allies from Australia and Canada who are currently teaching or have taught in Catholic schools. Bringing their work together for the first time, the two lead researchers compare their investigations and reveal disheartening similarities with religiously inspired homophobia despite differing legal and policy contexts of the two countries. These two studies reveal that LGBTI teachers, and LGBTI Allies, rely on their personal beliefs and local school community culture and policies to understand their equality rights and this has significant implications for the field of education

Children’s experiences of domestic violence and abuse: siblings’ accounts of relational coping

This article explores how young people see their relationships, particularly their sibling relationships, in families affected by domestic violence, and how relationality emerges in their accounts as a resource to build an agentic sense of self. The ‘voice’ of children is largely absent from domestic violence literature, which typically portrays them as passive, damaged and relationally incompetent. Children’s own understandings of their relational worlds are often overlooked, and consequently existing models of children’s social interactions give inadequate accounts of their meaning-making-in-context. Drawn from a larger study of children’s experiences of domestic violence and abuse, this paper uses two case studies of sibling relationships to explore young people’s use of relational resources, for coping with violence in the home. The paper explores how relationality and coping intertwine in young people’s accounts, and disrupts the taken for granted assumption that children’s ‘premature caring’ or ‘parentification’ is (only) pathological in children’s responses to domestic violence. This has implications for understanding young people’s experiences in the present, and supporting their capacity for relationship building in the future