Work, labour and mobility: opening up a dialogue between fmobilities and political economy through mobile work

This paper demonstrates how mobilities perspectives might contribute to debates in political economy on labour and work, by interrogating mobility’s relation to work and labour. The paper makes four interventions. It offers (1) an overview of the literature on mobile work, working with mobilities concerns to develop a typology grounded in movement in geographical space. (2) It then examines how different types of mobile work are coordinated. Coordination is achieved by devices, some of which (timetables and algorithms) choreograph movement in space and time whilst others (e.g. signals, tachographs, apps) control, record and evaluate movement. Focusing on coordination devices allows for mobile labour to be differentiated from mobile work. In platform-mediated mobile work the governance of work through dashboards of mobility, and the consolidation and marketization of mobility data from mobile workers, turns mobile work to mobile labour, and the relation of labour and mobility from one of contingency to dependency. The paper further shows (3) how coordination devices shape the conditions of mobile work and the affective experience of working on-the-move in space and time. As a condition of more jobs is that they are done on-the-move, a consequence (4) is that labour activists recognise the conditions of mobility in employment

England’s municipal waste regime: challenges and prospects

This paper provides a synthetic account of England’s municipal waste regime at the end of the 2010s, drawing on quantitative data (WasteDataFlow), a dataset of 1604 local authority waste management contracts and an archive assembled from publicly available minutes and papers of 125 (or ~40%) of England’s 348 local authorities. In technical-material terms, the regime, previously heavily dependent upon landfill, is now characterised by energy-fromwaste and recycling and/or composting in fairly equal measure. This infrastructural transformation, enacted over some 20 years, has been underpinned by the financialization and marketization of England’s municipal waste. Residual waste has been constituted as a financial asset whilst both residual waste and materials collected for recycling are the basis for further commodity production. The corporate landscape is dominated by large, European-based transnationals. As well as documenting the regime and its emergence, the paper highlights, and accounts for, the multiple challenges it now faces – chiefly, the technical failure of residual waste solutions which necessitate a continued reliance on landfill for some councils, the collapse of the export markets on which England’s resource recovery has depended, and a radically changed policy landscape that seeks to move England towards a more circular economy. It concludes by urging the need for a far ranging discussion of the role of local authorities in this new policy landscape, whose waste infrastructure, procured in response to a linear economy, is argued both to threaten, and be threatened by, these new policy directions

Performing Academic Practice: Using the Master Class to Build Postgraduate Discursive Competences

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Geography in Higher Education on 27/04/2010, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03098260903502695How can we find ways of training PhD students in academic practices, while reflexively analysing how academic practices are performed? The paper’s answer to this question is based on evaluations from a British–Nordic master class. The paper discusses how master classes can be used to train the discursive skills required for academic discussion, commenting and reporting. Methods used in the master class are: performing and creative arts pedagogical exercises, the use of written provocations to elicit short papers, discussion group exercises, and training in reporting and in panel discussion facilitated by a meta-panel discussion. The authors argue that master classes have the potential to further develop advanced-level PhD training, especially through their emphasis on reflexive engagement in the performance of key academic skills

University for the Creative Arts staff research 2011

This publication brings together a selection of the University’s current research. The contributions foreground areas of research strength including still and moving image research, applied arts and crafts, as well as emerging fields of investigations such as design and architecture. It also maps thematic concerns across disciplinary areas that focus on models and processes of creative practice, value formations and processes of identification through art and artefacts as well as cross-cultural connectivity. Dr. Seymour Roworth-Stoke

Opening up the participation laboratory: the co-creation of publics and futures in upstream participation.

How to embed reflexivity in public participation in techno-science and to open it up to the agency of publics are key concerns in current debates. There is a risk that engagements become limited to “laboratory experiments,” highly controlled and foreclosed by participation experts, particularly in upstream techno-sciences. In this paper, we propose a way to open up the “participation laboratory” by engaging localized, self-assembling publics in ways that respect and mobilize their ecologies of participation. Our innovative reflexive methodology introduced participatory methods to public engagement with upstream techno-science, with the public contributing to both the content and format of the project. Reflecting on the project, we draw attention to the largely overlooked issue of temporalities of participation, and the co-production of futures and publics in participation methodologies. We argue that many public participation methodologies are underpinned by the open futures model, which imagines the future as a space of unrestrained creativity. We contrast that model with the lived futures model typical of localized publics, which respects latency of materials and processes but imposes limits on creativity. We argue that to continue being societally relevant and scientifically important, public participation methods should reconcile the open future of research with the lived futures of localized publics

The employment of migrant nannies in the UK: negotiating social class in an open market for commoditised in-home care

Migrant women are important sources of labour in the commoditised in-home childcare sector in many regions of the UK. Jobs in this sector, which include nannies as well as au pairs, babysitters, housekeepers and mothers' helps, are often low paid and low status with pay and conditions being determined by employers' circumstances and whims. This article draws on primary data and secondary sources to illustrate the ways in which employers compare migrant nannies with British nannies and other childcare workers in terms of the social class and formal education levels of different groups, with the aim of explaining why migrants are perceived as high-quality candidates for what are often low-paid, low-status jobs. I argue that employers negotiate inter-class relations in this gendered form of employment by understanding their relationship with the migrant nannies they have employed in the context of broader global inequalities—these inequalities are then reproduced and reaffirmed in private homes and across UK culture and society

Circular economy inspired imaginaries for sustainable innovations

In this chapter, Narayan and Tidström draw on the concept of imaginaries to show how Circular Economy (CE) can facilitate values that enable sustainable innovation. Innovation is key for sustainability, however, understanding and implementing sustainable innovation is challenging, and identifying the kind of actions that could direct sustainable innovations is important. The findings of this study indicate that CE-inspired imaginaries enable collaboration and by relating such imaginaries to common and shared social and cultural values, intermediaries could motivate actors into taking actions that contribute to sustainable innovation.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Doing the 'dirty work of the green economy: Resource recovery and migrant labour in the EU

Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’, focused around recycling, by 2020. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of: first, stopping wastes being ‘dumped’ on poor countries; second, reusing them and thus decoupling economic prosperity from demands on global resources; and third, creating a wave of employment in recycling industries. European resource recovery is represented in academic and practitioner literatures as ‘clean and green’. Underpinned by a technical and physical materialism, it highlights the clean-up of Europe’s waste management and the high-tech character of resource recovery. Analysis shows this representation to mask the cultural and physical associations between recycling work and waste work, and thus to obscure that resource recovery is mostly ‘dirty’ work. Through an empirical analysis of three sectors of resource recovery (‘dry recyclables’, textiles and ships) in Northern member states, we show that resource recovery is a new form of dirty work, located in secondary labour markets and reliant on itinerant and migrant labour, often from accession states. We show therefore that, when wastes stay put within the EU, labour moves to process them. At the micro scale of localities and workplaces, the reluctance of local labour to work in this new sector is shown to connect with embodied knowledge of old manufacturing industries and a sense of spatial injustice. Alongside that, the positioning of migrant workers is shown to rely on stereotypical assumptions that create a hierarchy, connecting reputational qualities of labour with the stigmas of different dirty jobs – a hierarchy upon which those workers at the apex can play