Can slum tourism reverse the plight of Johannesburg’s marginalised communities?

As slum tourism takes off in inner city Johannesburg, Fabian Frenzel asks whether it is enough to break the cycle of advanced urban marginality.This post is part of our joint series with the Africa at LSE blog on Social Development Challenges for Africa

Slum tourism in the context of the tourism and poverty (relief) debate

The paper examines the role of slum tourism in poverty relief. To do so, it surveys the state-of-the-art literature on tourism and poverty and investigates the ways in which slum tourism research relates to this literature. Slum tourism research has addressed the question of how the poor may benefit from this practice; however, these efforts have not systematically considered the general debate on tourism and poverty relief. The survey of slum tourism research also contributes to the conceptual development of the tourism-poverty nexus. The predominant choice of approaches in this field relies on quantitative indicators of poverty relief, but these do not sufficiently account for the multi-dimensional character of poverty. The study of slum tourism research points to the multi-dimensional valorisation of poverty in tourism which is an aspect often overlooked in the state-of-the-art research on tourism and poverty

Protest camps

Protest camps are global phenomena, occurring across a wide range of social movements and encompassing a diversity of demands for social change. They are spaces where people come together to imagine alternative worlds and articulate contentious politics, often in confrontation with the state. By taking a closer look at protest camps this book contributes two original insights. Firstly it provides a detailed investigation into the empirical history of protest camps from a global perspective, a story that has never been told before. Protest Camps will discuss a variety of examples of camps, taking the reader across different cultural, political and geographical landscapes of protest. Secondly the book will contribute to the understanding of the role of protest camps in contentious politics. This book argues that protest camps are unique spaces in which activists form collective political identities and enact experimental and experiential forms of democratic politics

Researching political tourists: a case studyapproach

In this article I present the research methodology Iused in my PhD research. I conducted a case studyto examine political tourists within a framework ofparticipant action research (PAR ). Here I explain mychoice of this approach in the light of some of themajor critiques voiced against case studies. Somecritics suggest that findings from case studies don’tallow generalising statements. I also discuss criticalquestions regarding the role of bias and ethicsinvolved in using case-studies. While these two latterones are general concerns with research, they play acentral role in the field researched here. The role ofPAR in the case study is critical to this argument.I explain how I relate to the field and how this relationboth enables a unique perspective but also involvesco-research with the research participants

‘Exit the system’: Crafting the place of protest camps between antagonism and exception

Protest camps have been a prominent feature of social movement activity in the last three decades. More than a means to enable protest in remote locations, protest camps have often been constituted as autonomous and alternative worlds, set antagonistically against the status quo. Protest camps however don’t actually leave the legal and political realm of status quo but are arguable play-acting at doing so. This raises the question of the ontological status of the protest camp in relation to the status quo. Drawing from Agamben’s thesis of the camp as the ‘nomos of modernity’, this article argues that protest camps are in danger of constituting an antagonism that resides on a different ontological plane than the status quo, becoming an exception to it. Rather than contesting the status quo, they might stabilise and strengthen it. Examining data from a series of protest camp, this article analyses how protest campers have been increasingly successful in crafting an antagonism without becoming an exception. It identifies learning processes between different protest camps and shows that new challenges arise in the light of recent successes

Managing international development: (Re)positioning critique in the post-2008 conjuncture

Despite earlier neglect, International Development (ID) has begun to receive some attention from the Critical Management Studies (CMS) community over the last two decades. This paper reviews existing CMS work that engages with ID and outlines directions for future research. Building on extant research and scholarship that has focussed on linkages between managerialism and ID, we identify and discuss in some depth three emerging areas within ID – financialization, evaluation and projectification–that, we argue, merit further critical scrutiny from CMS scholars. We call for a programme of theoretical and grounded empirical research into these three areas in the hope of reinvigorating CMS’ engagement with ID; a programme that would seek to expose the fallacy of the universalizing managerialism that increasingly informs ID projects and organizational practices. In operationalizing this research programme, we draw attention to problems of positionality, drawing on methodological and epistemological debates in Anthropology to inform our argument. We thus highlight the need for grounding CMS research practices in reflective trans-disciplinarity

Assessment of Non-Invasive Blood Pressure Prediction from PPG and rPPG Signals Using Deep Learning

Exploiting photoplethysmography signals (PPG) for non-invasive blood pressure (BP) measurement is interesting for various reasons. First, PPG can easily be measured using fingerclip sensors. Second, camera based approaches allow to derive remote PPG (rPPG) signals similar to PPG and therefore provide the opportunity for non-invasive measurements of BP. Various methods relying on machine learning techniques have recently been published. Performances are often reported as the mean average error (MAE) on the data which is problematic. This work aims to analyze the PPG- and rPPG based BP prediction error with respect to the underlying data distribution. First, we train established neural network (NN) architectures and derive an appropriate parameterization of input segments drawn from continuous PPG signals. Second, we use this parameterization to train NNs with a larger PPG dataset and carry out a systematic evaluation of the predicted blood pressure. The analysis revealed a strong systematic increase of the prediction error towards less frequent BP values across NN architectures. Moreover, we tested different train/test set split configurations which underpin the importance of a careful subject-aware dataset assignment to prevent overly optimistic results. Third, we use transfer learning to train the NNs for rPPG based BP prediction. The resulting performances are similar to the PPG-only case. Finally, we apply different personalization techniques and retrain our NNs with subject-specific data for both the PPG-only and rPPG case. Whilst the particular technique is less important, personalization reduces the prediction errors significantly

Riots ‒ Zur Verortung eines unscharfen Phänomens

Bei riots handelt es sich um unscharfe Phänomene, die von urbanen Jugendaufständen bis zu gewaltvoll eskalierenden Demonstrationen reichen. Auch der Begriff riot ist trotz seiner teils regen Verwendung in Medien und Wissenschaft nach wie vor diffus und unscharf. Neben diesen konzeptionellen Leerstellen gibt es in den Sozialwissenschaften bisher kein klar umrissenes Forschungsfeld zu riots. Auch der Sozialen Bewegungsforschung gelingt es nicht, riots als Protestphänomene zu fassen. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Lücken im Forschungsstand versucht sich der vorliegende Text an einer wissenschaftlichen Verortung von riot als Phänomen und als Begriff. Dabei werden zwei zentrale Aspekte der bisherigen sozialwissenschaftlichen Debatte zu riots untersucht: das Verhältnis zwischen riots und Gewalt sowie das Verhältnis zwischen riots und dem Politischen

Juvenile ecology drives adult morphology in two insect orders

Most animals undergo ecological niche shifts between distinct life phases,but such shifts can result in adaptive conflicts of phenotypic traits. Metamor-phosis can reduce these conflicts by breaking up trait correlations, allowingeach life phase to independently adapt to its ecological niche. This process iscalled adaptive decoupling. It is, however, yet unknown to what extentadaptive decoupling is realized on a macroevolutionary scale in hemimeta-bolous insects and if the degree of adaptive decoupling is correlated with thestrength of ontogenetic niche shifts. It is also unclear whether the degree ofadaptive decoupling is correlated with phenotypic disparity. Here, we quan-tify nymphal and adult trait correlations in 219 species across the wholephylogeny of earwigs and stoneflies to test whether juvenile and adulttraits are decoupled from each other. We demonstrate that adult head mor-phology is largely driven by nymphal ecology, and that adult head shapedisparity has increased with stronger ontogenetic niche shifts in some stone-fly lineages. Our findings implicate that the hemimetabolan metamorphosisin earwigs and stoneflies does not allow for high degrees of adaptive decou-pling, and that high phenotypic disparity can even be realized when theevolution of distinct life phases is coupled

Favela tour virtual: Sobre mobilidades turísticas em favelas no contexto da pandemia de Covid-19 = Favela virtual tour: Tourism mobility in favelas in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic

Seletas favelas do Rio de Janeiro se consolidaram como atração turística no contexto dos megaeventos. No entanto, desde 2016, uma série de crises econômicas e políticas se desdobraram e provocaram uma redução acentuada do número de turistas. Com a pandemia do novo coronavírus, em 2020, a situação se agravou e os projetos de turismo em favelas foram paralisados. Nesse contexto, o grupo de pesquisadores e autores deste artigo, em parceria com moradores de favelas engajadas no turismo, iniciou um projeto para a produção de tours virtuais com o objetivo de manter as favelas no fluxo turístico global, ainda que de forma virtual. Nesse sentido, este artigo descreve um dos resultados dessa iniciativa, quatro tours virtuais realizados em favelas do Rio em 2020, e analisa o que precisou ser mobilizado para converter as favelas turísticas em atrativos virtuais. = Some favelas in Rio de Janeiro have become a tourist attraction. However, since 2016, a series of economic and political crises in Rio have caused a sharp reduction in the number of tourists, as well as in investments to these areas. With the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the situation worsened and tourism projects in favelas were paralyzed. The authors of this article in partnership with favela residents initiated a project to stage virtual tours aiming to keep favelas within the global tourist flow. The article discusses the outcomes of the project, referring to four virtual tours conducted in Rio's favelas in 2020, analyzes what is needed to convert tourist favelas into virtual attractions