Informal Employment

The myth surrounding negative connotation of informal employment / informal economy work engagement is one that needs to be revisited as research ventures must be pursued in the direction of encouraging those engaged in it to feel quite elated about their boldness in becoming actively involved in economic development activities. Equally, sensitive approaches should be pursued in pursuance of government statutory obligations in addressing core services like expenditures connected with education and health for example, which can only be achieved through revenue raised from genuine contributions made by the workforce, be it through formal or informal work engagement

Promised Land? Immigration, Religiosity, and Space in Southern California

This article looks at how immigrants and their supporters appropriate and use religious space and other public spaces for religious and socio-political purposes in Southern California. While the everyday living conditions of many immigrants, particularly the unauthorized Latino immigrants, force unto them an embodied disciplinarity that maintains spatialities of restricted citizenship, the public appropriations of space for and through religious practices allow for them -even if only momentarily -to express an embodied transgression. This practice in public space helps realize spaces of freedom and hope, however ephemerally. Potentially, these rehearsing exercises can help revert internalized disempowering subjectivities and create social empowerment. Negative stereotypes about immigrants held by the larger public can also be challenged through these spatial practices, as the public demonstrations make visible the invisible. We focus on “Posadas Without Borders” and “the New Sanctuary Movement,” considering both the role of progressive civic and religious institutions in supporting immigrants and the agency of the immigrants themselves. The theoretical analysis builds on concepts drawn from a conversation between geography and religious and theological studies. We use a triangulated methodological approach that includes observation and participant observation, content-analysis of multimedia, interviews, and intellectual advocacy for the immigrant movement. The cases discussed here show that progressive religious groups and coalitions can be important allies to progressive planners, geographers, and policy makers in advancing social and environmental justice for the disenfranchised. They also show that the theological underpinnings of such groups share a lot in common with planning epistemologies for the just city

Forgotten Plotlanders: Learning from the survival of lost informal housing in the UK.

Colin Ward’s discourses on the arcadian landscape of ‘plotlander’ housing are unique documentations of the anarchistic birth, life, and death of the last informal housing communities in the UK. Today the forgotten history of ‘plotlander’ housing documented by Ward can be re-read in the context of both the apparently never-ending ‘housing crisis’ in the UK, and the increasing awareness of the potential value of learning from comparable informal housing from the Global South. This papers observations of a previously unknown and forgotten plotlander site offers a chance to begin a new conversation regarding the positive potential of informal and alternative housing models in the UK and wider Westernised world

A qualitative investigation into the impact of domestic abuse on women’s desistance

While criminological literature, criminal justice practice, and to a lesser extent, state policy have acknowledged a link between women’s criminalisation and gendered violence (MoJ, 2018; Österman, 2018; Prison Reform Trust, 2017; Roberts, 2015), there has been much less acknowledgement of the role of historical and contemporaneous experiences of violence in the desistance scripts of criminalised women. Combining findings from two research projects exploring gender and desistance, this article argues that (i) criminalised women’s experiences of gendered violence are such that any exploration of gender and desistance which does not acknowledge this is incomplete, (ii) coercion and control can inform women’s entry into the criminal justice system, (iii) expressions of agency and resistance in abusive interpersonal relationships can also inform women’s offending, yet (iv) women’s experiences of desistance from crime can mask the harm they face in coercive, controlling, and violent relationships. Thus, the article argues for a reframing of desistance from crime as desistance from harm both theoretically and in practice, and considers what this might entail

Contesting the financialization of urban space: Community organizations and the struggle to preserve affordable rental housing in New York City

As cities have become both site and object of capital accumulation in a neoliberal political economy, the challenges to community practice aimed at creating, preserving, and improving affordable housing and neighborhoods have grown. Financial markets and actors are increasingly central to the workings of capitalism, transforming the meaning and significance of mortgage capital in local communities and redrawing the relationship between housing and urban inequality. This article addresses the integration of housing and financial markets through the case of "predatory equity," a wave of aggressive private equity investment in New York City's affordable rental sector during the mid-2000s real estate boom. I consider the potential for community organizations to develop innovative, effective, and progressive practices to contest the impact of predatory equity on affordable housing. Highlighting how organizations employed discursive and empirical tactics as well as tactics that reworked the sites, spaces, and structures of finance, this research speaks to the political possibility of contemporary community practice

Mutation analysis of VSX1 and SOD1 in Iranian patients with keratoconus

Purpose: To evaluate mutations in the visual system homeobox gene 1 (VSX1) and superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) genes with keratoconus (KTCN), direct sequencing was performed in an Iranian population. Methods: One hundred and twelve autosomal dominant KTCN patients and fifty-two unaffected individuals from twentysix Iranian families, as well as one hundred healthy people as controls were enrolled. Genomic DNA was extracted from whole blood sample. Then to study the possible linkage between KTCN and six known loci linkage analysis was performed using 12 short tandem repeat (STR) markers. Also, the entire coding region and intron-exon boundaries of VSX1 and SOD1 were amplified by the PCR technique in each proband. Subsequently, PCR products were subjected to direct sequencing. Co-segregation analysis of the identified mutation was conducted in the family members. An Amplification Refractory Mutation System PCR (ARMS-PCR) was additionally employed for detection of the identified mutation in healthy controls. Results: Linkage analysis of aforementioned loci did not detect evidence for linkage to KTCN. Direct PCR sequencing revealed two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs; g.1502T>G and g.9683C>T), as well as two missense mutations that have been previously reported (R166W and H244R) in VSX1. We also found three undescribed SNPs (g.4886G>A, g.4990C>G, and g.9061T>A) in SOD1. The R166W and H244R mutations were co-segregated in affected family members but not in those that were unaffected. Moreover, the ARMS-PCR strategy did not detect the identified mutations in controls. Conclusions: Our data suggest a significant association between KTCN patients and VSX1 genetic alterations (p.R166W and p.H244R). Although our findings support VSX1 as a plausible candidate gene responsible for keratoconus, other chromosomal loci and genes could be involved in KTCN development. Taken together, our results suggest that p.R166W and p.H244R could have possible pathogenic influences on KTCN