The accidental youth club: skateboarding in NewcastleGateshead.

Skateboarders re-invent and interrogate the physical structure of cityscapes as they use spaces, buildings and objects for skating. However skaters are routinely regarded by the civic and business interests who dominate city centre planning and regeneration as, at best, a nuisance and at worst an unruly and dangerous blight. This paper reports findings from a research project involving skaters which begins to unpick this stereotype. A participatory methodology combining mapping, interviews and observation was used to identify spots used by skaters in Newcastle and Gateshead (North East England). The key spots were characterized using Woolley & Johns’(2001) criteria: trickability, accessibility, sociability and compatibility. Findings reveal two further 12 factors – temporal and relational dimensions – are crucial the journeys skaters embark on. Sociability was the one constant factor defining favoured spots. The study revealed a sociable, entrepreneurial, creative skate scene. Far from being a problem the skaters add to the social capital of the cityscape. Our findings suggest rather than designing out skaters from the city the civic authorities should work with skaters to sustain their scene as a positive benefit to city regeneration

Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data

This paper presents summary statistics on the occupations of taxpayers in the top percentile of the national income distribution and fractiles thereof, as well as the patterns of real income growth between 1979 and 2005 for top earners in each occupation, based on information reported on U.S. individual income tax returns. The data demonstrate that executives, managers, supervisors, and financial professionals account for about 60 percent of the top 0.1 percent of income earners in recent years, and can account for 70 percent of the increase in the share of national income going to the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution between 1979 and 2005. During 1979-2005 there was substantial heterogeneity in growth rates of income for top earners across occupations, and significant divergence in incomes within occupations among people in the top 1 percent. We consider the implications for various competing explanations for the substantial changes in income inequality that have occurred in the U.S. in recent times. We then use panel data on U.S. tax returns spanning the years 1987 through 2005, to estimate the elasticity of gross income with respect to net-of-tax share (that is, one minus the marginal tax rate). Information on occupation allows us to control for other influences on income in a flexible way using interactions among occupation, position in the income distribution, stock prices, housing prices, and the business cycle. We also allow for income shifting across years in response to anticipated tax changes, for the long-run effect of a tax reform to differ from the short-run effects, for heterogeneous mean-reversion across incomes, and for heterogeneous elasticities across income classes. In a specification that does all this, we estimate a significant elasticity of 0.7 among taxpayers in the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution. Outside of the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution, we find no conclusive evidence of a positive elasticity of income with respect to net-of-tax shares. We find that the estimate for the top 0.1 percent is not robust to controlling for a spline in lagged income that is very flexible at the upper reaches of the income distribution, suggesting that the method used to allow for income dynamics is very important. Allowing for income shifting across years in response to anticipated tax changes has important consequences for the estimates.income distribution, behavioral response to taxation

Assessing the climate vulnerability of the world’s natural and cultural heritage

Climate change is the fastest-growing global threat to the world’s natural and cultural heritage. No systematic approach to assess climate vulnerability of protected areas and their associated communities has existed—until now. The Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) is scientifically robust, transparent, and repeatable, and has now been applied to various World Heritage properties. The CVI builds upon an established Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) framework to systematically assess vulnerability through a risk assessment approach that considers the key values of the World Heritage property in question and identifies key climate stressors. The CVI process is then used to assess the climate-related vulnerability of the community (including local residents, domestic visitors, and international tourists) associated with the World Heritage property considering economic, social, and cultural connections. Climate impacts are increasingly adding to a wide range of compounding pressures (e.g., increasing tourism, infrastructure development, changing land use practices) that are affecting places, people, customs, and values. Applications of the CVI to date have led to commitments to integrate outcomes into relevant management plans, and to periodically repeat the process, enabling responsive management to changing future circumstances. The CVI has also demonstrated its potential applicability for protected areas beyond World Heritage properties. The CVI process engages local community members in determining impacts, provides opportunities for identifying adaptation and impact mitigation within the community, and aids broader communication about key climate issues

Nudging leads consumers in Colorado to shop but not switch ACA Marketplace plans

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) dramatically expanded the use of regulated marketplaces in health insurance, but consumers often fail to shop for plans during open enrollment periods. Typically these consumers are automatically reenrolled in their old plans, which potentially exposes them to unexpected increases in their insurance premiums and cost sharing. We conducted a randomized intervention to encourage enrollees in an ACA Marketplace to shop for plans. We tested the effect of letters and e-mails with personalized information about the savings on insurance premiums that they could realize from switching plans and the effect of generic communications that simply emphasized the possibility of saving. The personalized and generic messages both increased shopping on the Marketplace’s website by 23 percent, but neither type of message had a significant effect on plan switching. These findings show that simple “nudges” with even generic information can promote shopping in health insurance marketplaces, but whether they can lead to switching remains an open question

I write what we like: A textual analysis of Fallist microblogging

Fallists belong to a constellation of radical student activist movements that pledge to disturb and reimagine South African society. Rather than restricting themselves to coordinated forms of collective action, Fallists’ advance their “revolution-as-becoming” within a context of everyday resistance (Haynes & Prakash, 1991; Molefe, 2015). In this dissertation, I propose that Fallists form an “emerging networked counterpublic” made up of individual activists that enact everyday forms of resistance on Twitter (Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2016:399). This dissertation explores the use of Twitter by a microblogger who has emerged organically as a “crowdsourced elite” among Fallists (Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). I contend that this microblogger exemplifies the repertoires of communication and resistance that pervade within Fallist networks on Twitter (Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2016). The microblogger is identified through methods of observation and social network analysis (SNA). “#whitetip,” a Twitter hashtag network that exemplifies Fallist communication and resistance, informs the interpretive content analysis that follows. This analysis is conducted on the tweets that the microblogger broadcast between 1 April and 30 September 2016. Tweets are categorised according to “evaluative frames” that emerged inductively during the course of analysis. I find that “resentment,” “pride and care,” and “play” made up the vast majority of evaluative frames. The microblogger employs the platform in a manner that disturbs dominant understandings of public sphere communication: the microblogger’s tweets are evaluative rather than deliberative, and assert a marginal, embodied subjectivity (Papacharissi, 2014; Warner, 2002)

Young Adult Religiosity: Evaluating the Influence of Individual Differences Upon Religious Expression and Religious Maturity

Research has suggested that individual differences may influence one\u27s preference for a specific mode of religious expression. A large proportion of research conducted within this domain has focused on personality as a significant indicator of individual differences. The majority of researchers have incorporated the Eysenck or Myers-Briggs models of personality. The present study evaluated the influence of the \u27five factor\u27 model of personality and emotional intelligence upon religious expression and religious maturity. A sample of 171 undergraduate students completed a questionnaire comprised of the following four instruments: the NEO-FFI personality test (Costa & McCrae, 1992), the 33-item self report Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS) (Schuttle et al., 1998), the Religious Expression Scale (Boan, 1978), and the Quest Scale (Batson & Schoenrade, 1991). A significant association was found between both personality and religious expression and emotional intelligence and religious expression. A significant relationship was also found between the personality dimension of openness and religious maturity as measured by Quest. Furthermore, a multiple regression analysis indicated that out of personality, emotional intelligence and religious expression, the social/emotional component of religious expression predicted high scores on religious maturity. Generally the results are consistent with previous research suggesting that individual differences influence the experience and self report of religious expression and religious maturity. Based on these findings, implications and suggestions for educational practice are provided

Geographies of Skateboarding - Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead, UK

This map is the result of a year-long research project on the geographies of skateboarding in Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead, UK. Skateboarders are often seen as invaders of urban space, subverting it for their own purposes, contrary to the normative actions of others. In the capitalist system, abstract space is created in which behaviour is prescribed and dictated, often for commercial consumption practices. Borden (2001) has suggested that the act of skateboarding the city rejects this use of urban space by implicitly critiquing space and architecture as a commodity. Through the reproduction of space as a play zone, skateboarders offer no monetary exchange value for the time which they spend at a location. This frequently leads to conflict with those seeking to control urban spaces designed for capitalist consumption

Introduction to special section 2 : anthropology and character

The authors thank The Ladislav Holy Memorial Trust for sponsoring the original Anthropology of Character conference, held at the University of St Andrews in 2016The introductory essay to this second special section on Anthropology and Character seeks to extend an exploration of the relevance of the character concept, in part by looking beyond its exclusive attribution to the human subject. While continuing to develop the insights of previous discussions about both the emic and etic status of the concept, in obvious fields such as the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of Christianity, the authors here ask what difference it makes to begin analysis with a description of non‐human characters. This includes calling our attention to the objects of character – its specific materialisations. By reflecting on various examples offered by the special section's contributors, such as the characterful nature popularly assigned to animals, to scientific units of behaviour and to historic places and buildings, new questions are identified for an emergent project on Anthropology and Character. This leads to a broader examination of characterisation as an enactment on the page (or stage) but also in the world, and on the role of audience (or reader) in the recognition of a character's distinctiveness. Finally, we ask what consequences these reflections might have for the ways in which we treat characterisation as a feature of anthropological writing.PostprintPeer reviewe