Youth and social justice in UK policy: spaces for youth voice and participation or new hegemonic constructions?

Recent UK youth policy, which has promoted the involvement of young people in designing projects and services, in democratic participation and voluntary action, has generated renewed public and academic interest. While the resulting developments indicate a shift towards including young people more in decisions about their lives, the future of many of these projects is now uncertain, as the new Coalition government prioritises a programme of significantly reduced local spending. Despite discussion on these strategies, little research to date has seriously considered young people’s position in debates on social justice. This article seeks to do this, drawing on recent research with young people in community-based organisations, to consider young people’s perceptions of recent policy initiatives and the extent to which they experience a greater sense of empowerment in the new policy spaces offered

Growing public spaces in the city: community gardening and the making of new urban environments of publicness

The demise of public space in cities across the Global North has received considerable scrutiny from urban scholars in recent years, with accounts of the loss, privatisation and increased regulation of public space prevalent within the academic literature. This paper seeks to complicate these dominant narratives of public space transformation by exploring the complexities of existing public spaces and the emergence of new spaces of publicness in the city. It uses a case study of community gardening in mundane and everyday neighbourhood spaces to provide a more nuanced and progressive reading of the relations between publicness and space in the city. Drawing on empirical materials from recent research on community gardening projects in 15 cities in Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA, the paper highlights how community gardening is creating new environments of publicness across public, private and in-between spaces that complicate both the end of public space discourse and conventional understandings of public space within urban studies

The case for harmonizing the international regulation of mining

There is a clear need for international coordination of standards and policies in the mining sector. This Perspective addresses how harmonization may help to reduce arbitrage and promote natural resource investment in a way that minimizes negative impacts on communities and maximizes development gains

The Dynamics of the Housing Market in Rural Wales

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DX182652 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Investigating The Use Of Quadrupolar Nuclei for NMR-Based Quantum Information Processing

In this thesis, we apply quantum logic gates to a two-qubit register using the techniques of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR spectroscopy). We create a lyotropic solution of sodium decyl sulfate (SDS), deuterium oxide (D2O), and decanol in the nematic phase, which functions as our quantum register. Using sequences of single-quantum selective pulses, we generate pseudopure initial states. Using SR, a MatLab-based spin response simulator, we check that the pulse sequences produce the appropriate pseudopure states. We then apply a CNOT quantum logic gate to each initial state. Each pseudopure state reacts as expected to the CNOT gate: while some extra excitations occur, they are generally small compared to the rest of the spectrum. These extra excitations may be the result of imperfect phase cycling in our pseudopure pulse sequences, which would leave non-zero coherences between states. These coherences could interfere with the resulting NMR spectra, producing the addition observed excitations

Community, rurality, and older people: critically comparing older people's experiences across different rural communities

Recent years have witnessed renewed academic interest in community as both an organizing concept and empirical case study. While previous work on community was largely limited to descriptive accounts of people's interactions in particular places, recent research has provided broader and more critical understandings of community by making connections between social imaginaries and social actions. This paper contributes to this work by applying a multilayered critical theory approach to the study of community. Starting from a general position that views community as a set of cognitively stabilized ideas and expectations, this approach compares discourses at different social levels of community in terms of how they unfold over time. The paper then applies this approach to experiences of community amongst older people in three rural places in England and Wales. Drawing on materials from interviews with older people and stakeholders, the paper explores the extent to which institutional discourses of community include different points of view and interpersonal discourses draw on reflective discourses. The empirical study highlights how community represents both a social system and a space in which individuals learn to live with others in the context of common practices and rule systems. It is also clear from the study that civil society and state actors need to develop new ideas, resources and practices to transform ageing from a demographic descriptor of rural places to an essential component of a shifting rural community discourse

Migrant workers and migrant entrepreneurs: changing established/outsider relations across society and space?

Drawing on Elias and Scotson's theory of established/outsider relations, in this paper we argue that migrants can be outsiders in one spatial context and established in another simultaneously. Our empirical focus is the situations and experiences of migrant workers from Central and Eastern Europe in four towns across Wales. While their position as outsiders is reinforced in the occupational spaces of meat-processing factories, outside the workplace a small but growing number of migrants are engaging in entrepreneurial activities that create new spaces of cultural diversity. We argue that this is having a wider affective impact on established/outsider relations

Rural mobilities: Connecting movement and fixity in rural places

Recent work within mobilities studies has pointed to the ways in which mobility shapes people's identities and everyday lives. Mobility is also inherently geographical in nature, not only in the sense that movements of people and objects transcend space but that the ubiquity of mobility within society raises important questions about the fixities of place. Much of the recent geographical scholarship on mobilities has focused on the city, with ‘the urban’ constructed as the archetypal space of hyper-mobility. Less attention has been given to mobilities in the context of rural spaces and places. In this paper, we suggest that mobility represents an equally important constituent of rural lifestyles and rural places. Our contention is that the stabilities of rurality, associated with senses of belonging, tradition and stasis, are both reliant on and undermined by rather complex forms of mobility. We draw on empirical materials from a recent community study in rural Wales to reveal the nature of these mobilities, including the diverse range of movements of people to, from and through rural places, the difficulties associated with practising everyday mobilities in rural settings, the increasing significance of virtual forms of mobility associated with the roll-out of digital technologies across rural spaces, and the complicated relationship between rural mobilities, immobilities and fixities

Environmental injustice and post-colonial environmentalism: opencast coal mining, landscape and place

In this article we use a case study of opencast coal mining in the southern valleys of Wales to explore the ordinary and everyday spatialities of environmental injustice. Responding to recent geographical critiques of environmental justice research and engaging with post-colonial studies of landscape and environment, we provide an account of environmental injustice that emphasises competing geographical imaginaries of landscape and ‘ordinary political injustices’ within everyday spaces. We begin with a discussion of how historical environmental injustices in Wales have been framed within nationalist politics as a form of colonial exploitation of the country’s natural resources. We then make use of materials from recent research on opencast mining in South Wales to examine local understandings of and everyday encounters with mining, highlighting contradictory discourses of opencast mining, landscape and place, and the injustices associated with mining developments in this regio

Assessing Information Technology and Business Alignment in Local City Government

Top executives are interested in more transparent and formalized structures, applicable measurements, and clear justification of alignment. Limited or improper information technology governance (ITG) affects the business strategy that will ultimately influence the overall business alignment in local city government agencies (LCGAs). The problem addressed in this study was the lack of information regarding LCGAs IT/business strategic alignment maturity model (SAMM) level and the LCGAs\u27 employment size. The purpose of this survey study was to evaluate 48 LCGA participants in the Southwestern part of the United States and compare their alignment perceptions with their cities\u27 employment size. The theoretical framework for this study was based on ITG and business strategy as measured by the SAMM instrument. An online survey was used for data collection and data results were analyzed using descriptive statistics and an Analysis of Variance. After using the SAMM instrument, the current snapshot maturity level of LCGAs was 2.49 out of a maximum 5.0 level. Results illustrated no significant relationship between LCGAs alignment maturity levels and a city\u27s size. This study empowers positive social change by providing LCGAs 6 incremental steps to improve the overall alignment maturity level in areas of transparent and formalized structures, applicable measurements, and improved alignment measures