Same-Sex Couples’ Decisions and Experiences of Marriage in the Context of Minority Stress: Interviews From a Population-Based Longitudinal Study

ABSTRACT

In the emerging context of marriage equality, it is important to explore the reasons for and experience of marriage for long-term same-sex couples, including the role of minority stress. In Wave 3 of the population-based, longitudinal CUPPLES Study we interviewed 21 long-term same-sex couples (14 female, 7 male) who resided in 12 different states and who were legally married. Couple members ranged in age from 37 to 84 and reported being together as a couple from 15 to 41 years. Seven couples lived in states that did not recognize their marriage at the time of the interview. Legal protection and social validation emerged as the two primary domains that captured couples’ lived experiences of marriage. Minority stress experiences emerged in the narratives in the context of couples’ long-term commitment, the availability of civil marriage, and couples’ participation in activist efforts on behalf of marriage equality for themselves and others.     

Deciphering the ‘Ethnic Penalty’ of Immigrants in Western Europe: A Cross-Classified Multilevel Analysis

While most previous research on immigrants’ assimilation refers to the residual disadvantage that remains in empirical analyses of economic outcomes as a general ‘ethnic penalty’, this current paper disentangles the ‘ethnic penalty’ by dividing it into four components: individual characteristics, country characteristics, the social environment in host country, and the policy environment in host country. This study tests the effects of these four components on three economic outcomes: employment, labor force participation, and household income. Data from the European Social Survey, the Migrant Integration Policy Index, the UN, and the World Bank are integrated here. Findings show that the main reasons for immigrants’ disadvantage in terms of labor force participation and household income are both origin and host country characteristics, while the effects of ethnic origins, social exclusion, and policies are weaker. However, ethnic origins and social exclusion actually play a central role in determining unemployment of immigrants.     

‘Agricultural Poverty’ and the Expansion of Artisanal Mining in Sub-Saharan Africa: Experiences from Southwest Mali and Southeast Ghana

Why do people engage in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM)—labour-intensive mineral extraction and processing activity—across sub-Saharan Africa? This paper argues that ‘agricultural poverty’, or hardship induced by an over-dependency on farming for survival, has fuelled the recent rapid expansion of ASM operations throughout the region. The diminished viability of smallholder farming in an era of globalization and overreliance on rain-fed crop production restricted by seasonality has led hundreds of thousands of rural African families to ‘branch out’ into ASM, a move made to secure supplementary incomes. Experiences from Komana West in Southwest Mali and East Akim District in Southeast Ghana are drawn upon to illustrate how a movement into the ASM economy has impacted farm families, economically, in many rural stretches of sub-Saharan Africa.     

Corruption and the ‘Paradox of Redistribution’

The existing literature on the determinants of income redistribution has identified a ‘paradox’. Namely, that countries with a high degree of market income inequality redistribute little, which is in disagreement with the median voter theorem. In a first step, this paper outlines several mechanisms that explain why government corruption might be partially responsible for this ‘paradox’. In a second step, different corruption perception indices and an instrumental variable approach are used to provide empirical evidence that indicates a significant negative impact of corruption on redistribution levels for a sample of 148 developing and developed countries. This finding suggests that, next to political and need factors, government corruption explains to some extent the ‘paradox of redistribution’. This is especially true for many developing countries, given that they typically have relatively high degrees of corruption and low levels of redistribution.     

‘We Can All Just Get on a Bus and Go’: Rethinking Independent Mobility in the Context of the Universal Provision of Free Bus Travel to Young Londoners

This paper uses qualitative data from interviews with 118 young Londoners (age 12–18) to examine how the universal provision of free bus travel has affected young people’s independent mobility. Drawing on Sen’s capabilities approach, we argue that free bus travel enhanced young Londoners’ capabilities to shape their daily mobility, both directly by increasing financial access and indirectly by facilitating the acquisition of the necessary skills, travelling companions and confidence. These capabilities in turn extended both opportunity freedoms (e.g. facilitating non-‘necessary’ recreational and social trips) and process freedoms (e.g. feeling more independent by decreasing reliance on parents). Moreover, the universal nature of the entitlement rendered buses a socially inclusive way for groups to travel and spend time together, thereby enhancing group-level capabilities. We believe this attention to individual and group capabilities for self-determination provides the basis for a broader and more child-centred view of independent mobility than the typical research focus upon travelling without an adult and acquiring parental permissions.     

Tribal membership requirements and the demography of ‘old’ and ‘new’ Native Americans

This paper examines the twentieth-century population recovery of Native Americans with reference to urbanization, intermarriage, and differing definitions of the Native American population from census and tribal enrollment data. The recent increase in the Native American population reflected in regular US decennial censuses since 1960 is discussed in terms of changing self-identification of individuals as Native American. Also discussed are criteria for enrollment in Native American tribes, particularly blood quantum requirements. Census enumerations are compared with tribal enrollment data, and it is illustrated that a large proportion of those identifying as Native American in the census are not enrolled in Native American tribes. Special attention is given to how Native American tribal enrollment criteria might impact future population size.     

Everyday mobilities and the construction of subjective spiritual geographies in ‘Non-places’

Traditional geographic approaches depict sacred spaces, religion and spirituality as places of stillness and tranquillity, this paper challenges such fixity and instead uses the mobilities lens to analyse the dynamic and fluid nature of contemporary spirituality. It builds on recent work that draws on mobilities and geographies of religion by shifting focus away from the extraordinary journeys of pilgrimage to the ordinary, the mundane and everyday routines and movements; trips for economic, recreational or utilitarian purposes. The findings illustrate the activities that people do when they are on the move that can be related to their personal sense of spirituality and the ways in which religion interweaves in the movements and routines of everyday life and mobilities – from the radio playing in the car to the use of meditation. Often, activities became associated with specific parts of the journey and are threaded together to form ‘subjective spiritual geographies’ and significant elements of individual spirituality challenging secular pre-conceptions of mobilities time-spaces and characterisation of ‘non-places’.     

Stopping the ‘War on the Car’: Neoliberalism,Fordism, and the Politics of Automobility in Toronto

Abstract

This article interrogates the politics of automobility in Toronto under the regime of mayor Rob Ford, who came to power in 2010 promising to ‘stop the war on the car.’ The election of Ford, and the thrust of his subsequent agenda, came as a surprise to many in the city, due to Toronto’s reputation as a cosmopolitan diverse transit-friendly global city. The Toronto case study allows for the analysis of the relationships between Fordism, automobility, and the politics and rationalities of neoliberalism. Instead of seeing neoliberalism as something external or imposed, its contested politics are rooted in diverging social and economic interests directly derived from Fordism and the system of automobility, with opposing political-economic factions both drawing on different elements of neoliberalism. Authoritarian populist neoliberal regimes like the Ford administration in Toronto, and the roll-back austerity they promote, are not antithetical to automobile Fordism, but on the contrary represent an attempt to protect and reinvigorate it in the face of the forces of de-industrialization and financialization. As such they receive their support from social groups irrevocably invested in the continuation, and irrationalities, of the Fordist system of automobility. This has implications for how the politics of neoliberalism might unfold in the future.     

Perceptions of Fortune and Misfortune in Older South African Households: Social Assistance and the ‘Good Life’

It is commonly assumed that better living standards will boost subjective well-being. The post-apartheid South African government subscribes to this idea; its social policies aim to provide ‘a better life for all’. Since the coming of democracy in 1994, the state has built over 3 million houses and supplied electricity and clean water to poor households. By 2009, an estimated 43 % of households were beneficiaries of social grants. The question is whether this investment in services and social assistance translates into higher well-being of citizens. It is argued that older people’s experience of positive change in their life circumstances can be taken as a litmus test of progress in society. The paper reports results of a sample survey conducted in 2009 that inquired into the living circumstances and well-being of 1,000 older low-income households in two provinces linked by a labour migration route. Older households were defined as ones with a member 55 years and older. The sample was drawn among three approximately equal-sized subgroups: Rural black households in the former ‘homelands’ of the Eastern Cape Province, and black and coloured households in Cape Town in the Western Cape Province. The majority of the households in the survey had been interviewed in an earlier survey conducted in late 2002. Both material and non-material changes had occurred in the household situation over the 6-year period between 2002 and 2009. Access to housing and infrastructure had improved but financial difficulties and debts continued to plague many of the surveyed households. Rural black households appeared to be worst off among the three categories of older households with the lowest level of living; coloured households best situated with the highest level of living. Urban black households, many of whom were immigrants to Cape Town, appeared to have experienced the greatest fluctuations in their material circumstances between 2002 and 2009 and a mix of fortune and misfortune. Results indicated that social grants, which provided a modicum of financial security and peace of mind, made the crucial difference between fortune and misfortune for vulnerable households. Securing a social pension and other grants appeared to be the main route to good fortune for the rural households in the study. Households in Cape Town required wage income in addition to grant income to get by in the city. This mix of income sources diluted urban households’ dependence on social assistance. Regression model results suggest that income and financial security play a significantly more important role in boosting the well-being of low-income older households than access to services. Pooling of income, a common practice in pensioner households, contributed significantly to household satisfaction.     

‘Walking out’: the mobilities of love

ABSTRACT

In this article, I propose that mobility performs a crucial role in the production and sustenance of intimate relationships and focus, in particular, on courtship practices and their modern-day equivalents. I pursue this discussion through close readings of literary and autobiographical texts from the nineteenth century through to the millennium, and by means of a framework that triangulates the work of Tim Ingold, David Seamon and Henri Bergson. My focus here is on how the mobilities we practice during the everyday routines of courtship – i.e. the paths we make, the routes we take, the roads we travel, the journeys we repeat, the transport we use – come to characterise the relationship concerned and impact upon its progress. Both Ingold’s work on ‘lines’ and Seamon’s on ‘place-ballet’ are conceptually suggestive in this regard and speak to recent work in mobilities/cultural geography on the significance of patterns of movement in the praxis of relationships.     

Post‐colonial Pakistani Mobilities: the Embodiment of the ‘Myth of Return’ in Tourism

This paper examines post‐migration mobilities of a Pakistani diaspora (Luton, UK) by identifying the embodiment of the ‘myth of return’ in tourism participation to the homeland, Pakistan. The interpretive ethnographic accounts re‐consider the ‘myth of return’ concerning the emigration and immigration nexus. The continuation of traditions such as duties and obligations transmitted through the myth in tourism are analysed. The paper argues that the ‘myth’ is imperative to understanding the meanings the Pakistani community attaches to tourism motivations. The conclusion argues that the ties between post‐colonial diasporas and the homelands can be explained through post‐migration tourism mobilities.     

Examining the rhythms of ‘urban elements’ on walking and driving routes in the city

ABSTRACT

The article follows Kevin Lynch’s renowned formulation of ‘urban elements’ to examine the mobilities, experiences and materialities on ordinary routes in the city. Utilizing route narratives and participant-produced visual data, the article focuses on various identifiable micro-temporalities and mobility rhythms on repeated walking and driving routes, building on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of ‘rhythmanalysis’. The article examines how a framework built around rhythm and urban elements can add to the analysis of contemporary urban sites from the perspectives of situated mobile contexts, noting sequences and polyrhythmia as central temporal characteristics in the body?environment relations.     

Mobility of ‘the defeated’: internal migration and social advancement in a post-civil war society

The article examines the relationship between the movement across space and social mobility by analyzing the conditions for internal migration in Spain during the years of the Franco regime. Specifically it reflects on the ways in which migration from the countryside into self-constructed shantytowns in the greater Madrid area was perceived by migrants themselves, and on the strategies that enabled migration to be carried through. By focusing on the challenges that internal migration posed to the spatial practices and mobility regimes of the dictatorship, the article also explores the relationship between spatial movement, social mobility and political repression within the context of a nationalist dictatorship.     

‘Don’t Stop Me Now’: Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in the Bourne Saga

This article explores the search for identity of the main character of the Jason Bourne movies in the light of contemporary critical theories on mobility and cosmopolitanism. This theoretical framework is combined with close textual analysis of the films in order to explore the visual and narrative mechanisms that the three Bourne movies starring Matt Damon use in order to, first, capture the protagonist’s lost sense of self and, second, construct a new cosmopolitan hero for the mainstream. As I argue, Bourne’s unrelentless journey across borders encapsulates some of the paradoxes of our highly mobile times, while also calling attention to certain shortcomings and inadequacies of the ‘national paradigm’, to make sense of an individual’s existence within contemporary societies.     

Negotiating the ground: ‘mobilizing’ a divided field site in the ‘post-conflict’ city

ABSTRACT

While an exploration of mobility patterns in ‘post-conflict’ societies has much to tell us about how division is produced through ordinary activities, less work has considered the practical application of a mobilities ‘lens’ during fieldwork in such contexts. Negotiating the ground in highly polarized contexts presents a unique array of challenges, but also offers opportunities to make use of mobile methodologies. This paper discusses the advantages of GPS-based technologies and walking interviews to a recent activity-space segregation study in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and reflects on methodological issues posed by the ‘post-conflict’ field site.