Pedaling Power: Bicycles,Subjectivities and Landscapes in a Settler Colonial Society

Abstract

Mobilities across contested terrains are key to the formation of settler societies. This paper explores how safety bicycles were drawn into the Australian settler project at the turn of the twentieth century, just as the six independent colonies were federating into the Commonwealth of Australia. As recently imported objects, bicycles afforded settler men unprecedented mobility across remote landscapes that had not been smoothed by the infrastructures of the ‘old world’. In those years of national formation, bicycles were received as objects that could fill ‘empty’ land with people, things, activities and stories, at the same time as they generated masculine, settler subjectivities. A practice approach to settler mobilities helps to tease out the entanglements between bicycle ‘overlanding’ and two fundamental imperatives of settlerism: transforming indigenous places into settler places and creating ‘nativised’ settler subjectivities.     

Education,Happiness and Wellbeing

Answers to the questions ‘Does education influence happiness and if so, how and how much?’ depend on how one defines and operationalizes ‘education’, ‘influences’ and ‘happiness’. A great variety of research scenarios may be constructed from our three essential variables. What public policies one ought to adopt and implement regarding the influence of education on happiness depends minimally on which of the great variety of research scenarios one adopts and maximally on lots of other things as well. My personal preference is for a robust definition of the three terms. Because human beings are complex organisms, an adequate construction of the idea of human wellbeing must also be complex. Therefore, any discipline-driven, reductionist definition that pyschologizes, medicalizes, economizes, geneticizes, socializes or politicizes the idea should be avoided.     

Unlikely hikers? Activism,Instagram, and the queer mobilities of fat hikers,women hiking alone,and hikers of colour

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates a nascent, primarily online community of so-called ‘unlikely hikers’, united in the premise that hiking is good for everyone’s mental and physical health and that diversity can and should extend to outdoor spaces including national parks. However, the ways in which hikers have hitherto been represented in outdoors media, advertising, and wider social imaginaries present potent barriers to participation. The paper traces the discursive origins and positioned ideologies of ‘the outdoors’ in former British settler colonies, particularly the USA, showing how national parks maintain legacies of frontier colonialism and default understandings of legitimate outdoorspeople as necessarily White, able-bodied, straight, and male. These legacies are then traced through four years of online ethnographic data (2015–2018), comprising multimedia narratives of fat hikers, solo women hikers including lesbian women, and hikers of colour as they relate their outdoor experiences on Instagram and related podcasts, blogs, and magazine articles. The discussion is theorized using Holman Jones and Harris’s notion of queering and Urry’s mobilities paradigm, and ‘queer mobilities’ is proposed as part of an activism and amplification aimed at queering the trail both within and beyond academic spaces.     

How colonisation determines social justice and Indigenous health—a review of the literature

Disparities in health status persist for Indigenous people in Australia. In the bid to reduce the disparity gap, the concept of achieving social justice is central to advancing the services and systems that can challenge inequitable circumstances within a nation. Colonisation is well known as the underlying factor influencing the social injustices that result in inequitable health for Indigenous people. A literature review was conducted identifying how the colonial impact on social justice is described in the relationships with the health of Indigenous Australians. A comprehensive search strategy was developed, including four broad search terms of ‘Indigenous people’ and ‘health status’ and ‘colonisation’ or ‘social justice’, and applied within five databases. Publications were limited to Australia, dated from 1 January 2000 to 31 December 2014. The literature acknowledging the effect that colonisation has on Indigenous Australians includes evidence from oral and political histories, and social determinants frameworks. There was a general consensus that the impact of colonisation on the health of Indigenous people is highly complex and that the legacies are experienced intra-generationally and inter-generationally. There is paucity in the evidence that examines the associations of colonisation and its impact on social injustice. Because social justice is considered central to equitable practices across all sectors in society (health, education, legal etc.), questions are raised about the magnitude of the effect that colonisation has on health disparities and importantly how the desideratum to tackle disparities that have stemmed from colonisation are adequately addressed.     

Challenging Neo‐Malthusian Deforestation Analyses in West Africa's Dynamic Forest Landscapes

Many influential analyses of West Africa take it for granted that ‘original’ forest cover has progressively been converted and savannized during the twentieth century by growing populations. By testing these assumptions against historical evidence, exemplified for Ghana and Ivory Coast, this article shows that these neo‐Malthusian deforestation narratives badly misrepresent people–forest relationships. They obscure important nonlinear dynamics, as well as widespread anthropogenic forest expansion and landscape enrichment. These processes are better captured, in broad terms, by a neo‐Boserupian perspective on population–forest dynamics. However, comprehending variations in locale‐specific trajectories of change requires fuller appreciation of social differences in environmental and resource values, of how diverse institutions shape resource access and control, and of ecological variability and path dependency in how landscapes respond to use. The second half of the article présents and illustrates such a “landscape structuretion” perspective through case studies from the forest–savanna transition zones of Ghana and Guinea.     

Proximate Population Factors and Deforestation in Tropical Agricultural Frontiers

Forest conversion for agriculture expansion is the most salient signature of human occupation of the earth's land surface. Although population growth and deforestation are significantly associated at the global and regional scales, evidence for population links to deforestation at micro-scales—where people are actually clearing forests—is scant. Much of the planet's forest elimination is proceeding along tropical agricultural frontiers. This article examines the evolution of thought on population–environment theories relevant to deforestation in tropical agricultural frontiers. Four primary ways by which population dynamics interact with frontier forest conversion are examined: population density, fertility, and household demographic composition, and in-migration.     

A Matter of Utility? Rationalising Cycling,Cycling Rationalities

Abstract

This paper discusses how dominant policy paradigms promote a ‘utility’ model of transport, prioritising the destruction of distance and the minimisation of time spent travelling. It suggests that within low-cycling countries, this framing has reinforced the policy marginalisation of cycling, which is cast as having problematic associations with leisure and pleasure. Hence, while the multiple benefits of cycling might seem to mandate policy support, these benefits (including health and equity impacts) seem tainted by association with cycling’s non-transport connotations. The paper analyses interview data from the ESRC Cycling Cultures project to explore how cyclists and cycling stakeholders negotiate the landscape of ‘utility cycling’. It examines how people appeal to a ‘utility narrative’, while often simultaneously appealing to considerations that apparently contradict it. Conclusions for cycling and broader transport policy are drawn.     

Towards a conceptualisation of woman centred care — A global review of professional standards

BackgroundWoman centred care is purported to underpin Midwifery philosophy. However, the evidence and focus of this concept within midwifery professional standards has yet to be verified. Further to this, woman centred care is, at this time, mostly depicted as a way of assisting, supporting and interacting with a woman and her family. It is however, without a substantive universally accepted definition.ObjectiveThis study aimed to review midwifery standards documents. An organised and targeted methodology was conducted to identify the approaches to woman centred care that currently underpin midwifery governance.MethodsA comprehensive and specific search for ‘woman centred care’ was conducted across a global collection of midwifery standards. A professional document was included if it represented either or all of the underpinnings of midwifery education, contained statements related to standards of practice, overall governance or any equivalence. Individual documents were initially searched for the words ‘woman centred care’, followed by ‘women centred care’, ‘patient/person centred care’ and ‘client centred care’.FindingsAn extensive review of 142 documents was undertaken. These included: thirty independent nations, thirty represented by the European Midwives Association and a further twenty-one identified through the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM). The World Health Organisation (WHO), yielded midwifery information from a further sixty-one nations. The phrase ‘woman centred care’ was located within 3.5% of the documents reviewed. Overall, five examples were found that directly referred to the actual phrase ‘woman centred care’ and one to the use of ‘person centred care’. Therefore, it was established, that at the time of this review, there was limited formal depiction of the concept of woman centred care.     

Seeking Construct Validity in Interpersonal Trust Research: A Proposal on Linking Theory and Survey Measures

This paper highlights the under-emphasised connection between theoretical conceptualisations and empirical operationalisations in the field of trust research. The paper proposes a matching of specific surveys measures with conceptualisations in order to work towards a more theoretically-informed empirical study of interpersonal trust. The work examines five widely-used survey measures of trust, and considers whether they are likely to operationalise conceptualisations of trust that are broadly more ‘strategic’ or more ‘moralistic’ in nature. It is argued that these trust questions, which are frequently used interchangeably, are likely to differ substantially from each other in terms of their conceptual underpinnings. This expectation is tested by examining the association between interpersonal trust and gender across seven UK social surveys. Findings indicate that the trust questions indeed have different associations with gender, providing support for the idea that some questions map more closely onto ‘strategic’ conceptualisations of trust, whilst others map more closely onto ‘moralistic’ conceptualisations. Implications of these findings are explored in the context of the search for construct validity in trust research.     

The Politics of Scaling,Timing and Embodying: Rethinking the ‘New Europe’

This paper explores ways in which we can fruitfully analyse and theorize ‘New Europe’ through migration, in so far as migration is an integral part of the way the world is imagined, and as such impacts on how individuals, communities, nations or multi/international formations such as the European Union imagine themselves and their (co)inhabitants. The article discusses three theoretical strands that relate to the forces of spatiality (scaling), temporality (timing and histories) and corporeality (embodying and ‘the European people’). These must be read as interwoven and impacting on each other in varying ways that are not linear, coherent or permanent. By bridging critical migration studies with mobilities studies, this essay calls for a reconsideration of the fluidity, accessibility and desirability of the assumed mobile world, while it also thinks about migration in relation to the ways in which ‘mobility’ has been variously established as a universal ‘right’.     

How is internal migration reshaping metropolitan populations in Latin America? A new method and new evidence

Internal migration is a key driver of patterns of human settlement and socio-economic development, but little is known about its compositional impacts. Exploiting the wide availability of census data, we propose a method to quantify the internal migration impacts on local population structures, and estimate these impacts for eight large Latin American cities. We show that internal migration generally had small feminizing, downgrading educational, and demographic window effects: reducing the local sex ratio, lowering the average years of schooling, and raising the share of working-age population due to an increased young adult population. Over time, a rise in the proportion of males and a drop in the share of the young adult population moving into cities reduced the feminizing and demographic window effects. Concurrently, a rise in the average years of schooling associated with people moving into cities attenuated the downgrading impact of internal migration on local education levels.     

A Benefit Recipiency Approach to Analysing Differences and Similarities in European Welfare Provision

In comparative welfare state research, the question of how to measure and understand cross-country differences and similarities in extents of public welfare provision has led to a major discussion about the indicators that could be used for this purpose. Much scholarly attention approaching this so-called ‘dependent variable problem’ concentrates on social expenditure or on social rights data as indicators of ‘welfare stateness’ or ‘welfare generosity’. However, recently, micro-level data on benefit receipt as another promising but hitherto underused indicator was brought into this discussion. The article at hand extends existing knowledge about the conceptual, methodological and empirical potentials and challenges of this alternative indicator compared to the two prevailing indicators. For the empirical analysis, it uses cash benefit recipiency data from the EU-SILC to investigate differences and similarities in extents of public welfare provision between 29 European countries for the period 2003–2012. The study reveals parallels to findings from research in which indicators of social expenditure and social rights are applied, but it also adds new insights beyond their cost and paper reality. This is mainly the case where priority is given to household-related assistance benefits rather than individual insurance benefits. The main conclusion of the paper is that the benefit recipiency indicator—despite not being flawless and requiring further research—complements existing knowledge on differences and similarities in welfare provision by European welfare states.     

Measuring the Success of Sustainable Development Indices in Terms of Reporting by the Global Press

A variety of indices have been applied to the performance of nation states, both for research and as aids to help guide policy and intervention. While the literature on indices is extensive, the focus to date has been almost entirely on technical issues of index creation. However the success of an index is arguably related at least in part to the use of that index by policy makers and managers. While cause-effect can be difficult to determine, one approach is to measure ‘success’ in terms of the reporting of indices by an intermediary group such as the media, and this paper assesses the reporting of 24 indices by newspapers worldwide until 2012. The results suggest that index success is influenced by a number of factors, including the time it has existed, its focus, extent and quality of publicity, adaptability in terms of the scope for others to change the content and methodology of the index and resonance in terms of the match with ideas/culture/behaviour of people. The paper makes a case for a new research field that seeks to investigate the meaning and factors involved in ‘success’ of indices and how these should help with index development.     

Return Visits as a Marker of Differentiation in the Social Field

Abstract

This article sets out to examine how differences within a migrant community are expressed through return visits, and particularly through visitors’ narratives about their country of origin. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Burundians living in Norway and the UK, I argue that the Burundian social field is characterized by two opposing positions regarding the possibility of return, and that the political field in the country of settlement plays an influential role in how those two positions are defined. Two narratives called ‘instability and alienation’ and ‘progress and opportunities’ from return visits are used to express support for one or the other of these two positions. I also argue that Bourdieu’s conceptualization of social practice is highly relevant for migration research because it allows for analysing differences within a migration community, and that the advantages of combining habitus, capital and field should be further explored, both theoretically and comparatively.     

Happy life-expectancy

One of the aims of social indicator research is to develop a comprehensive measure of quality-of-life in nations that is analogous to GNP in economic indicator research. For that purpose, several multi dimensional indexes have been proposed. In addition to economic performance, these also acknowledge the nation's success in matters like schooling and social equality. The most current indicator of this type is the ‘Human Development Index’. In this approach QOL is measured by input; the degree to which society provides conditions deemed beneficial (‘presumed’ QOL). The basic problem is that one never knows to what extent the cherished provisions are really good for people. An alternative is measuring QOL in nations by output, and consider how well people actually flourish in the country. This ‘apparent’ QOL can be measured by the degree to which citizens live long and happily. This conception is operationalized by combining registration based estimates of length-of-life, with survey data on subjective appreciation-of-life. Life-expectancy in years is multiplied by average happiness on a 0–1 scale. The product is named ‘Happy Life-Expectancy’ (HLE), and can be interpreted as the number of years the average citizen in a country lives happily at a certain time. HLE was assessed in 48 nations in the early 1990's. It appears to be highest in North-West European nations (about 60) and lowest in Africa (below 35). HLE scores are systematically higher in nations that are most affluent, free, educated, and tolerant. Together, these country-characteristics explain 70% of the statistical variance in HLE. Yet HLE is not significantly related to unemployment, state welfare and income equality, nor to religiousness and trust in institutions. HLE does not differ either with military dominance and population pressure. The conclusion is that HLE qualifies as the envisioned comprehensive social indicator. It has both clear substantive meaning (happy life-years) and theoretical significance (ultimate output measure). HLE differentiates well. Its correlations fit most assumptions about required input, but also challenge some. The indicator is likely to have political appeal.     

Steering Towards Happiness in The Netherlands

As in many other countries, the economic crisis is being felt in the Netherlands. Is that a good moment for a government to develop a policy to increase happiness? Is it actually possible to raise the level of happiness in the Netherlands? The Dutch are after all already happy, and the objective quality of life in the Netherlands is also high, so there would seem to be little scope for making them even happier. It is also questionable whether the government should be playing the role of a ‘happiness machine’, which seeks to promote individual happiness, or whether it would do better to act as a ‘misfortune mitigator’ which seeks to minimise the negative elements in people’s lives. In this article we attempt to answer these questions on the basis of Dutch initiatives designed to promote happiness in the areas of municipal policy, welfare, health care, work and education. We come to the conclusion that happiness policy is already deeply embedded in Dutch society. The Dutch government is indeed a happiness machine. It could act rather more as a misfortune mitigator, given the gains to be made at the bottom of the ‘happiness ladder’, in particular. Mental resilience emerges in all initiatives as an important factor in increasing happiness. Programmes to boost mental resilience can be started as early as primary school.     

Using a gender perspective to explore forest dependence in rural HIV/AIDS-affected Malawian households

Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, forest resources play a crucial role in enabling households to control and adapt to HIV/AIDS; however, little is known about how the disease impacts the gendered use of forest resources. This exploratory study characterizes how the dependence on forest resources changes for female and male respondents in HIV/AIDS-affected households in Malawi through three phases: before HIV was known to be present; during HIV-related morbidity; and after AIDS-related mortality. The results presented for female and male respondents in this paper are strikingly similar, and many respondents report that there are no longer any traditional gender roles for household tasks due to HIV/AIDS. Therefore, we question the thinking around gender-specific forest-related interventions for HIV-affected people. Moreover, given the gendered knowledge base that must surround resource use, what do these changes in traditional roles mean for sustainable forest resource use in the future? Further research on knowledge transmission around these resources is warranted.     

Measuring World Better Life Frontier: A Composite Indicator for OECD Better Life Index

The OECD Better Life initiative recently released a comprehensive set of 11 indicators of well-being covering a group of countries. Each individual indicator corresponds to a key topic that is essential to well-being. However, the problem of aggregating them is left to users of this dataset. Using these as individual indicators, we propose a composite indicator of overall well-being, which is intended to measure the performance of each country in terms of providing well-being to its people. The ‘benefit of the doubt’ approach (BOD), a well-known aggregation tool based on a weighed sum, assigns the most favourable weights for each entity under investigation. BOD may also be considered to evaluate the performance of each entity in terms of its efficiency. Regarding individual indicators as outputs, it constructs the benchmark production frontier from observed individual indicators. A composite indicator based on BOD equals the distance between each entity’s individual indicator and the production frontier, indicating its efficiency. It is widely considered that the well-being of a country’s people stems from its productive base, which is characterized by capital assets and social infrastructures. Thus, the productive base can be considered the input used to produce well-being, which is reflected by individual indicators. Therefore, when we apply BOD to aggregate individual well-being indicators across countries, we implicitly assume that all countries have the same productive base, as BOD addresses only the output and neglects the input. This inaccurate assumption leads to a distorted performance measure. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), in which BOD has its roots, is a tool to measure the efficiency of each entity by allowing for differences in inputs as well as outputs across entities. DEA also measures efficiency by using the distance to the production frontier; however, unlike BOD, DEA constructs the production frontier more accurately by utilizing the information of inputs as well as outputs, leading to a better performance measure. We apply DEA to aggregate 11 individual well-being indicators into a composite indicator using the World Bank’s estimates of each country’s productive base. The composite indicator based on BOD is distributed similarly to and is highly correlated with the existing Human Development Indicator (HDI). It is also positively correlated with GDP per capita. On the other hand, we show that the composite indicator based on DEA is negatively correlated with HDI as well as GDP per capita.     

Conditional Solidarity: Social Class,Experiences of the Economic Crisis,and Welfare Attitudes in Europe

The aftermath of the Global Financial and Economic Crisis of 2007/2008 turned out as a veritable “stress test” for European welfare states. Aiming to stabilize citizens’ living conditions and mitigate socio-economic hardship, European governments have engaged in active crisis management. Yet, the protective capacities of European welfare states vary, as does individuals’ exposure to crisis-induced social risks. Hence, the crisis has impacted countries and the members of different social classes unequally. Against this backdrop, this paper asks how Europeans’ perceptions of the personal impact of the crisis are associated with their welfare attitudes, focusing on variations between social classes and across nations. Using cross-sectional Eurobarometer survey data from 2010 for 27 European countries, I find that perceived crisis impact is associated with greater support for welfare state responsibility and redistribution. However, this association is not homogeneous but moderated by an individual’s class position as well as national economic conditions and social spending levels. More specifically, on the individual level, perceived crisis impact is associated with more favourable welfare attitudes not only among its traditional supporters—such as the working class or the unemployed—but also among its traditional opponents, notably the self-employed. Furthermore, where social spending is higher, welfare state support is less strongly related to perceived crisis impact, suggesting that more encompassing welfare states mitigate the subjective impacts of the crisis. However, redistribution appears to be slightly more contested between those affected and those not affected by the crisis under better economic conditions. Given the challenges facing welfare states across Europe, it remains to be seen how stable a basis of popular support can be formed on these grounds.