A Community of Strangers? Mobile Media,Art, Tactility and Urban Encounters with the Other

Abstract

This article is concerned with detailing key instances where mobile media (especially mobile gaming and mobile media art) have been used to make connections with relative and complete strangers. The article is divided into three parts. The first examines two key examples of past experimental design that explicitly explored questions of mobility and difference. The second section details more contemporary experimental engagements with mobile technologies that seek to perform urban encounters with ‘the Other’. The third and final part of the article reads both sets of experimental work through the lens of (poststructuralist) philosophical engagements with the concepts of community and difference.     

Capabilities and Choices: Do They Make Sen’se for Understanding Objective and Subjective Well-Being? An Empirical Test of Sen’s Capability Framework on German and British Panel Data

In Sen’s Capability Approach (CA) well-being can be defined as the freedom of choice to achieve the things in life which one has reason to value most for his or her personal life. Capabilities are in Sen’s vocabulary therefore the real freedoms people have or the opportunities available to them. In this paper we examine the impact of capabilities alongside choices on well-being. There is a lot of theoretical work on Sen’s capability framework but still a lack of empirical research in measuring and testing his capability model especially in a dynamic perspective. The contribution of the paper is first to test Sen’s theoretical CA approach empirically using 25 years of German and 18 years of British data. Second, to examine to what extent the capability approach can explain long-term changes in well-being and third to view the impact on subjective as well as objective well-being in two clearly distinct welfare states. Three measures of well-being are constructed: life satisfaction for subjective well-being and relative income and employment security for objective well-being. We ran random and fixed effects GLS models. The findings strongly support Sen’s capabilities framework and provide evidence on the way capabilities, choices and constraints matter for objective and subjective well-being. Capabilities pertaining to human capital, trust, altruism and risk taking, and choices to family, work-leisure, lifestyle and social behaviour show to strongly affect long-term changes in subjective and objective well-being though in a different way largely depending on the type of well-being measure used.     

Dutch Liberation Festivals: A Vehicle to More Politically Active Young Citizens,or Merely the Same Selective Audience?

Social Indicators Research - This article follows up on claims made on the motivating role of national commemorations for young people’s political participation. Cross-sectional data from a...     

Are Gay Men and Lesbians Discriminated Against When Applying for Jobs? A Four-City,Internet-Based Field Experiment

An Internet-based field experiment was conducted to examine potential hiring discrimination based on sexual orientation; specifically, the “first contact” between job applicants and employers was looked at. In response to Internet job postings on CareerBuilder.com®, more than 4,600 resumes were sent to employers in 4 U.S. cities: Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco. The resumes varied randomly with regard to gender, implied sexual orientation, and other characteristics. Two hypotheses were tested: first, that employers' response rates vary by the applicants' assumed sexuality; and second, that employers' Response Rates by Sexuality vary by city. Effects of city were controlled for to hold constant any variation in labor market conditions in the 4 cities. Based on employer responses to the applications, it was concluded that there is no evidence that gay men or lesbians are discriminated against in their first encounter with employers, and no significant variation across cities in these encounters was found. Implications of these results for the literature on hiring discrimination based on sexual orientation, the strengths and limitations of the research, and the potential for the Internet-based field experiment design in future studies of discrimination are discussed.     

A room of one’s own or room enough for two? Access to housing and new household formation in Sweden, 1968–1992

Familistic and individualistic theories both provide explanations for recent declines in family household formation. Securing access to housing plays a key role in new household formation for both these theories. Familistic theories hypothesize a positive relationship between access to housing and new family household formation. Individualistic theories hypothesize a positive relationship between access to housing and nonfamily household formation. Here I test these hypotheses in Sweden by modeling leaving home for family and nonfamily household formation using the Swedish Family Survey and supplemental housing data. I find significant support for the familistic notion that greater access to housing increases the likelihood of family household formation. I fail to find support for the individualistic theory.

<Emphasis Type="Bold">Women’s Progress for Men’s Gain? Gender-Specific Changes in the Return to Education as Measured by Family Standard of Living, 1990 to 2009–2011</Emphasis>

This study investigates gender-specific changes in the total financial return to education among persons of prime working ages (35–44 years) using U.S. Census data from 1990 and 2000, and the 2009–2011 American Community Survey. We define the total financial return to education as the family standard of living as measured by family income adjusted for family size. Our results indicate that women experienced significant progress in educational attainment and labor market outcomes over this time period. Ironically, married women’s progress in education and personal earnings has led to greater improvement in the family standard of living for married men than for women themselves. Gender-specific changes in assortative mating are mostly responsible for this paradoxical trend. Because the number of highly educated women exceeds the number of highly educated men in the marriage market, the likelihood of educational marrying up has substantially increased for men over time while women’s likelihood has decreased. Sensitivity analyses show that the greater improvement in the family standard of living for men than for women is not limited to prime working-age persons but is also evident in the general population. Consequently, women’s return to education through marriage declined while men’s financial gain through marriage increased considerably.