Gender, class and space in the field of parenthood comparing middle-class fractions in Amsterdam and London

This paper argues that becoming a parent/carer can be seen as a new field of social relations and suggests how gender is the key mechanism in the reconfiguration of class relations in this field. By conceptualising parenthood as a field, that is a social world with specific stakes and rules, this study suggests that residential decisions and strategies developed by different middle-class households do not solely depend on their class habitus, but also on gendered positions and dispositions in respect to division of labour, child care and school choice. Drawing on interview data from London and Amsterdam, this study re-addresses the issue of middle–class time-space trajectories at a specific period in the life course. We contend that the middle classes are not just differentiated by various orientations of capital (economic versus cultural) but that interaction of class and gender is also key for understanding practices of the middle classes as they enter the field of parenthood. These practices are strongly influenced by labour market and welfare regimes (as the Netherlands/England comparison makes clear). In the new field of parenthood the work of realigning class habitus (through social reproduction) is highly gendered, but to different degrees that are made evident in the different neighbourhood settings. In terms of urban space this points to the significance of the particular neighbourhood structure and opportunities of the city as a whole as well as a more active idea of the role of space in the particular working out of class and gender in specific neighbourhood contexts. Urban space is a situating framework and an active process in trajectories of social reproduction

On pragmatism, assemblage and ANT: assembling reason

In geography the key theoretical registers of assemblage theory and Actor Network Theory have been psychoanalytic-semiotic, materialist and vitalist (emphasising affect). In contrast, this paper indicates the original influence and continued relevance of philosophical pragmatism’s action-oriented approach for assemblage and ANT. It suggests how a pragmatist understanding of human experience, situation and reason offers a different perspective on the nature of emergent and relational space in assemblages and networks. This perspective extends existing pragmatist work in geography to explore the distinctive, hyper-relational spatialities of human activity in a world of acting things, suggesting wider implications for progress in human geography

Habit, experience and environment: a pragmatist perspective

Contemporary discussions of human–environment relations see habits as enabling forces of change (becoming) in contrast to traditional views of habit as routine and restrictive elements of identity (being). Vital life (becoming) is realised in habit through body repetition (Ravaisson) or through material force (Deleuze). This paper argues for the significance of the pragmatist work of John Dewey that shares this dispositional, enabling view of habit, but denies any dualism between life and mechanism. The paper explores Dewey’s idea of habits as mechanisms of natural forms of organisation that have different life force, depending on the situational qualities of environment–human transactions. This approach also implicates habit in problematisation. The paper goes on to discuss the implications of pragmatist thinking for understanding human–environment relations and the place that habits have in intervening in and reforming those relations through social activism and public policy

Power Relations and Social Mix in Metropolitan Neighbourhoods in North America and Europe: Moving Beyond Gentrification?

Research on spatial segregation has suggested that social mix may be a temporary phase in class displacement, where relations between different groups are at best divided or ‘tectonic’, for instance in England. Political and policy discourses, by contrast, tend to uncritically valorize social mix as a means to breaking up concentrations of poverty and providing neighbourhoods with a middle-class voice. In the literature, little attention has been paid to power dynamics in socially mixed neighbourhoods and the implications this may have for understanding theory and policy. The five articles that make up this symposium address the ways in which social and ethnic groups interact in major cities in Europe and North America and, as the title suggests, this involves taking into account power relations, domination and negotiation between the different groups. There is a need to connect the experience of the deployment of power within neighbourhoods (and between them) with the discussions of power mechanisms at work in wider urban processes

School choice and the city: geographies of allocation and segregation

Urban research has increasingly acknowledged the significance of the social and spatial composition of schools in the broader socio-spatial dynamics of cities overall. With increasingly marketised education systems, parental choice of school is a key mechanism affecting wider urban processes such as gentrification. Most research into school choice in cities concentrates on the dynamics of choice (how and what parents say they choose). Fewer studies deal with the relationship between choice and the subsequent allocation of pupils to schools. This paper reports the findings of an international systematic review of the connections between parental choice and pupil allocation in school choice systems across the globe. We find that school choice is associated with higher levels of segregation of pupils from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds between schools. This finding is consistent across all types of choice mechanism, in different countries and cities, and across choice systems that have been in place for different lengths of time. The reasons behind the observed relationship are, however, highly localised and contextual, including particularities of the choice mechanism, social composition of neighbourhoods and mix of school types in a city. Increases in between-school segregation may lead to schools being more homogeneous in their social composition, with broader implications for social cohesion and educational inequalities in cities. Relating the findings to the broader urban school literatures, we suggest that scales and geographies of allocation are critical in understanding the dilemmas and dynamics of choice, the resultant inequalities, and any proposed interventions or solutions to reduce these inequalities

The situations of urban enquiry: thinking problematically about the city

In the context of debates about the epistemological and ontological coherence of concepts of critical urban studies, we argue that urban concepts should be conceptualized problematically. We do so by aligning Michel Foucault’s genealogical work on problematization with John Dewey’s pragmatist understanding of problem formation and responsiveness. This approach brings into view the degree to which debates about urban futures are shaped by a variety of critical perspectives that extend beyond the academy and activism. We elaborate this argument through examples of global urban policy formation and practices of neighbourhood change. Approaching urban concepts problematically suggests a move away from the idea of critique as a form of scholastic correction towards an appreciation of the contested fields of practice in and through which critical understandings of urban problems emerge

The transition to parenthood in urban space: continuity and disruption of embodied experience and spatial practice.

This paper explores the impacts of the transition to parenthood on the relationship between (from a Bourdieusian perspective) habitus and field in social reproduction. The paper is based on a longitudinal study of white middle-class gentrifier households in Amsterdam before and after childbirth. The study reveals the disruptive (as well as re-configurative) impact of parenthood as transition, even for this relatively privileged group (in terms of legitimated habitus and spatial discretion and mobility). Our findings strongly suggest the highly gendered nature of this transition, and also reveal the significance of spatial dimensions of this gendered experience – from embodiment all the way through to changing relationships in urban space. These impacts suggest parenthood as a distinct ‘field’ of social struggle and emphasise the significance of gender and spatial experience in understanding habitus-field relations, alongside the more acknowledged temporalities of social reproduction

School Choice in London and Paris - A Comparison of Middle-class Strategies

Education is one major public service in which quasi-markets and other choice-based mechanisms are now established methods of delivery. The types of school people choose, and the extent to which their choices are realized, have a fundamental impact on the outcomes of any mechanism of school choice. In this article, we provide a comparative analysis of the school choice strategies of middle-class families in London and Paris. We draw on approximately 200 in-depth interviews carried out across the two cities. This enables us to investigate the extent to which middle-class school choice strategies transcend the institutional context provided by both the local (state and private) schools market and national education policy in England and France. We discuss these findings in the context of current school choice policy and consider their implications for future policy design

Unbiased Cosmological Parameter Estimation from Emission Line Surveys with Interlopers

The galaxy catalogs generated from low-resolution emission line surveys often contain both foreground and background interlopers due to line misidentification, which can bias the cosmological parameter estimation. In this paper, we present a method for correcting the interloper bias by using the joint-analysis of auto- and cross-power spectra of the main and the interloper samples. In particular, we can measure the interloper fractions from the cross-correlation between the interlopers and survey galaxies, because the true cross-correlation must be negligibly small. The estimated interloper fractions, in turn, remove the interloper bias in the cosmological parameter estimation. For example, in the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) low-redshift ($z<0.5$) [O II] $\lambda3727${\AA} emitters contaminate high-redshift ($1.9<z<3.5$) Lyman-$\alpha$ line emitters. We demonstrate that the joint-analysis method yields a high signal-to-noise ratio measurement of the interloper fractions while only marginally increasing the uncertainties in the cosmological parameters relative to the case without interlopers. We also show the same is true for the high-latitude spectroscopic survey of Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) mission where contamination occurs between the Balmer-$\alpha$ line emitters at lower redshifts ($1.1<z<1.9$) and Oxygen ([O III] $\lambda5007${\AA}) line emitters at higher redshifts ($1.7<z<2.8$).Comment: 36 pages, 26 figure