Linking urban design to sustainability : formal indicators of social urban sustainability field research in Perth, Western Australia

The making of a livable urban community is a complex endeavor. For much of the 20th Century plannersand engineers believed that modern and rational decision-making would create successful cities. Today, political leaders across the globe are considering ways to promote sustainable development and the concepts of New Urbanism are making their way from the drawing board to the ground. While much has changed in the world, the creation of a successful street is as much of an art today as it was in the 1960s.Our work seeks to investigate 'street life' in cities as a crucial factor towards community success. What arethe components of the neighborhood and street form that contributes to the richness of street life? To answer this question we rely on the literature. The aim of the Formal Indicators of Social Urban Sustainability studyis to measure the formal components of a neighborhood and street that theorists have stated important in promoting sustainability. This paper will describe how this concept helps to bridge urban design and sustainability. It will describe the tool and show how this was applied in a comparative assessment of Joondalup and Fremantle, two urban centers in the Perth metropolitan area

Offenders' Crime Narratives across Different Types of Crimes

The current study explores the roles offenders see themselves playing during an offence and their relationship to different crime types. One hundred and twenty incarcerated offenders indicated the narrative roles they acted out whilst committing a specific crime they remembered well. The data were subjected to Smallest Space Analysis (SSA) and four themes were identified: Hero, Professional, Revenger and Victim in line with the recent theoretical framework posited for Narrative Offence Roles (Youngs & Canter, 2012). Further analysis showed that different subsets of crimes were more like to be associated with different narrative offence roles. Hero and Professional were found to be associated with property offences (theft, burglary and shoplifting), drug offences and robbery and Revenger and Victim were found to be associated with violence, sexual offences and murder. The theoretical implications for understanding crime on the basis of offenders' narrative roles as well as practical implications are discussed

Performance of psychiatric hospital discharges in strict and tolerant environments

Community mental health professionals are greatly concerned with the type of social environment most conducive to helping patients remain outside psychiatric institutions and improving the quality of their lives in the community. This paper examines the tolerance of deviance characterizing significant others in the patient's environment as it relates to community tenure and selected measures of performance and quality of life of the older patient in the community. A possible role is suggested for differential tolerance of deviance in the lives of patients discharged from psychiatric hospitals. Although it would appear that patients may return to the hospital at a higher rate from low tolerance environments, it may be that for patients who remain in the community, the quality of life may be better in low tolerance environments in terms of social interaction and life satisfaction. The deviance model is of value in the continuing efforts to understand the role of the social environment in the community life of discharged patients .Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44295/1/10597_2005_Article_BF01435737.pd

'I like this interview; I get cakes and cats!':the effect of prior relationships on interview talk

Research interviews are a form of interaction jointly constructed by the interviewer and interviewee, what Silverman (2001: 104) calls 'interview-as-local-accomplishment'. From this perspective, interviews are an interpretative practice in which what is said is inextricably tied to where it is said, how it is said and, importantly, to whom it is said (Holstein and Gubrium, 2004). The relationship between interviewer and interviewee, then, is fundamental in research interviews. But what happens when the relationship between interviewer and interviewee is not only that of researcher-informant but also involves other roles such as colleague and friend? In this article we will show how prior relationships are invoked and made relevant by both parties during educational research interviews and how these prior relationships therefore contribute to the 'generation' (Baker, 2004: 163) of interview data. © 2010 The Author(s)

Labelling, Deviance and Media

Labelling theory is a perspective that emerged as a distinctive approach to criminology during the 1960s, and was a major seedbed of the radical and critical perspectives that became prominent in the 1970s. It represented the highpoint of an epistemological shift within the social sciences away from positivism – which had dominated criminological enquiry since the late-1800s – and toward an altogether more relativistic stance on the categories and concepts of crime and control. It inspired a huge amount of work throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and still resonates powerfully today. This short chapter maps out some of the ways in which labelling, deviance, media and justice interact at the levels of definition and process. It presents an overview and analysis of key mediatised labelling processes, such as the highly influential concept of moral panics. It discusses how the interconnections between labelling, crime and criminal justice are changing in a context of technological development, cultural change and media proliferation. The conclusion offers an assessment and evaluation of labelling theory’s long-term impact on criminology

Thinking the unthinkable: Imagining an ‘un-American,’ Girl-friendly, Women- and Trans-Inclusive Alternative for Baseball

The purpose of this article is twofold: to capture the injustice inherent in the gendered bifurcation of baseball and softball via the prism of critical feminist sport studies; and to begin to imagine a girl-friendly/women-and trans-inclusive future for baseball that is less fertile for cooptation into post-911 United States security state discourses. In this article I link the "unthinkability" of the occupational segregation of baseball in North America to the dominance of the ideology of the two sex system and European disasporic morality. To illustrate the extent of this occupational segregation via the gendered bifurcation of baseball and softball, I draw on feminist sport studies to examine the exemplars or "texts" of three Canadian brother/sister baseball softball duos: Jason Bay and Lauren Bay Regula; Brett and Danielle Lawrie; and Mathew and Katie Reyes

From Aristotle to Arendt : a phenomenological exploration of forms of knowledge and practice in the context of child protection social work in the UK

This paper attempts to explore the relationship between different forms of knowledge and the kinds of activity that arise from them within child protection social work practice. The argument that social work is more than either ‘science’ or ‘art’ but distinctly ‘practice’ is put through a historical description of the development of Aristotle’s views of the forms of knowledge and Hannah Arendt’s later conceptualisations as detailed in The Human Condition (1958). The paper supports Arendt’s privileging of Praxis over Theoria within social work and further draws upon Arendt’s distinctions between Labour, Work and Action to delineate between different forms of social work activity. The author highlights dangers in social work relying too heavily on technical knowledge and the use of theory as a tool in seeking to understand and engage with the people it serves and stresses the importance of a phenomenological approach to research and practice as a valid, embodied form of knowledge. The argument further explores the constructions of service users that potentially arise from different forms of social work activity and cautions against over-prescriptive use of ‘outcomes’ based practice that may reduce the people who use services to products or consumables. The author concludes that social work action inevitably involves trying to understand humans in a complex and dynamic way that requires engagement and to seek new meanings for individual humans

Dementia as Zeitgeist: Social problem construction and the role of a contemporary distraction

The global impact of dementia on social, political, economic and health systems is of contemporary concern. As the world’s population ages, differentially, across countries in the Global North and Global South, dementia research and care has become embedded in primary mandates for action within the agendas of governments and health research and service organisations. Using notions of social problem construction and sociologies of legitimacy this paper seeks to explore dementia as Zeitgeist that has captured imaginations but as such is contingent and therefore precarious building an edifice that may be limited and may occlude dangers for people living with dementia. This paper argues for an applied sociological approach that recognises precarity and seeks to embed a sustainable praxis-focused axiology at macro, meso and micro levels in respect of approaches to dementia

‘I found out the hard way’: Micro-political workings in professional football

This paper examines the micro-political experiences of Adam (a pseudonym), a newly appointed fitness coach at a Football Association Premier League Club, in his search for acceptance by senior colleagues. Data were collected through a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews, before being subject to a process of inductive analysis. Goffman’s (1959, 1963) writings on impression management and stigma, Ball’s (1987) micro-political perspective, and Garfinkel’s (1967) notion of status degradation are primarily utilised to make sense of Adam’s perceptions and actions. The findings point to the value of developing coaches’ micro-political understandings, and of including their formal facilitation within given professional preparation programmes. Doing so, it is argued, would better equip coaches for the problematic realities of their practice