Em-‘powering' niche innovations: learning from cycling inequalities

This paper aims to situate power in ‘niche innovations’ through an investigation of cycling inequalities in the city of Birmingham. Much research has focused on the sustainability and innovation potential of cycling. However, debates usually revolve around the power relations between cycling and the dominant automobility regime, thus ignoring the possible inequalities embedded within niches. This paper aims to contribute to such analyses by unfolding the multiple inequalities and relations of exclusion that can be embedded in the practice of cycling. Drawing on Mobilities research for the EPSRC Liveable Cities programme, it focuses on the car-dependent city of Birmingham, in order to explore cycling as a practice with various socio-material, infrastructural, political and economic entanglements that can embed, reproduce or generate new socio-spatial inequalities, processes of gentrification and immobilities. Through such analysis, this paper aims to situate power in examining niche innovations. However, it also aims to underline that understanding and addressing such inequalities are central for not only locating cycling in the centre of developing a more sustainable mobility future, but also enabling a more sustainable future for cycling itself

Dissolving the Dichotomies Between Online and Campus-Based Teaching: a Collective Response to The Manifesto for Teaching Online (Bayne et al. 2020)

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching

How sharing can contribute to more sustainable cities

\ua9 2017 by the authors. Recently, much of the literature on sharing in cities has focused on the sharing economy, in which people use online platforms to share underutilized assets in the marketplace. This view of sharing is too narrow for cities, as it neglects the myriad of ways, reasons, and scales in which citizens share in urban environments. Research presented here by the Liveable Cities team in the form of participant workshops in Lancaster and Birmingham, UK, suggests that a broader approach to understanding sharing in cities is essential. The research also highlighted tools and methods that may be used to help to identify sharing in communities. The paper ends with advice to city stakeholders, such as policymakers, urban planners, and urban designers, who are considering how to enhance sustainability in cities through sharing

Sustainable cycling futures: can cycling be the future?

No description supplie

Spectacular foodscapes: food celebrities and the politics of lifestyle mediation in an age of inequality

This editorial introduces a special issue of Food, Culture & Society and works to add a parallel, substantive take on the phenomenon of the food celebrity and the mediated, everyday cultural politics they create. We start by exploring the concept of the foodscape. Specifically, we argue that food celebrities represent a fundamental component of contemporary foodscapes, how they “perform” and function, and the socio-material means by which they are produced. We then explore the key roles and privileges of food celebrity, arguing that the celebrity chef is not the only high-profile, mediating figure at work on the foodscape. Key food celebrity paradoxes are identified and discussed: food celebrities must work to be authentic and aspirational, accessible yet exclusive, responsibilizing but also empowering. We conclude with a short contextualization of the papers in this special issue, and argue for the rich potential of food celebrity scholarship as a way to better understand food inequalitie

Traditional family and women's condition: The reciprocal perception of Turkish and Italians

Community psychology considers gender as a central organizing category for understanding power imbalances and directing social change. The geopolitical events of these last years are heightening the contraposition between Islamic and Western countries with significant effects on ethnic prejudices, including the perception of gender roles and women’s condition. The present study focused on two different Mediterranean countries, an Islamic and Eastern one, i.e., Turkey, and a Catholic and Western one, i.e., Italy. It aimed at investigating the reciprocal perception concerning family and the women’s condition in the two states. Participants were 400 university students, both Turkish (N=199) and Italians (N=201). We performed 2 (Italian vs. Turkish) x 2 (Italy vs. Turkey) mixed ANOVAs for repeated measures testing the significance of the differences between rater countries and rated countries. Findings demonstrated an interesting “mirror effect”: Turkish and Italians perceived their home country in similar way, and similarly different from the country of comparison. Implications are discussed.