Experiencing space–time: the stretched lifeworlds of migrant workers in India

In the relatively rare instances when the spatialities of temporary migrant work, workers’ journeys, and labour-market negotiations have been the subject of scholarly attention, there has been little work that integrates time into the analysis. Building on a case study of low-paid and insecure migrant manual workers in the context of rapid economic growth in India, we examine both material and subjective dimensions of these workers’ spatiotemporal experiences. What does it mean to live life stretched out, multiplyattached to places across national space? What kinds of place attachments emerge for people temporarily sojourning in, rather than moving to, new places to reside and work? Our analysis of the spatiotemporalities of migrant workers’ experiences in India suggests that, over time, this group of workers use their own agency to seek to avoid the experience of humiliation and indignity in employment relations. Like David Harvey, we argue that money needs to be integrated into such analysis, along with space and time. The paper sheds light on processes of exclusion, inequality and diff erentiation, unequal power geometries, and social topographies that contrast with neoliberalist narratives of ‘Indian shining

Size effect on fracture energy induced by non-locality

Experimental results available in the literature indicate that the nominal fracture energy of concrete (defined as total work of fracture divided by the ligament area) depends on the size of the specimen. Theoretical modelling of the size effect on nominal fracture energy based on a non-local constitutive model is attempted in this paper. The influence of various details of the integral-type non-local formulation, e.g. of the specific form of non-local averaging in the vicinity of a physical boundary, is studied and a physical explanation is provided. The numerical results are compared to experimental data for notched compact tension specimens, and conclusions are drawn for individual formulations. It is shown that the best agreement with experimentally observed trends is achieved if the notch is modelled as a layer of completely damaged material. Fitting of the size effects on both strength and fracture energy permits a unique identification of the model parameters

Digital Periphery? A Community Case Study of Digitalization Efforts in Swiss Mountain Regions

Rural economies have undergone major changes in recent years as traditional rural economic sectors declined and shifted. At the same time, digital technologies emerged and rural communities experience profound transformations. In this chapter, we analyze how technological change leads to changing rural economies in a Swiss mountain community. Although Switzerland has one of the highest national coverage of broadband in the world, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the transformation of its rural economy due to digitalization. The community case study’s 46 qualitative interviews show that digital connectivity in peripheral mountain communities is experienced differently by various actors. On the one hand, digitalization offers new economic opportunities to larger businesses, larger hotels, schools and health service providers. On the other hand, particularly smaller businesses struggle with the high cost of becoming digital and their owners tend to become more cautious and stressed as competition and price transparencies in the digital economy become intensified. In terms of spatial aspects, we argue that digitalization reduces cognitive distance between core and periphery while physical distance between the urban and the rural still exist