The struggling spirit and optimistic attitude in Australian literature

People who know little about Australia are liable to associate Australia to pure bush landscapes. Obviously, bush landscape is the most distinct geographical feature of Australia. It almost becomes a symbol of this new nation. However, bush environment is just an outside element. There exists more important national spirit beneath the bush environment. That is, besides bush landscapes, the struggling spirit and optimistic attitude under a rather harsh condition with bush as the setting are more valuable. Just because of the spirits, the nation is able to keep promoting unceasingly. Then my job is to find the struggling spirit and optimistic attitude in these articles.     

Stuck on a Muddy Road: Frictions of Mobility amongst Urban Toba in Northern Argentina

This article explores how the Toba, an indigenous group in the North of Argentina, shape places and an urban subjectivity in the frictions of their mobility between villages, the urban barrio (neighborhood), and the periurban bush. I argue that the experience of Toba moving to the city is better understood as frictions between the Toba desire to progress in the city, the organization of difference in space, and their multiple movements “back” to the villages. In addition, I analyze their contemporary hunting trips, which take urban Toba to the nearby bush, as a mobility that shapes a form of indigeneity engaged with access to both the city center and the bush. This practice confronts them with ranch owners and police but reconnects the barrio and the bush by traversing them. If frictions emerge between forces that trigger movement and forces that slow that movement down, in the frictions of mobility the Toba have at once shaped their position in the city and overflowed its limits.     

Natural neighborhood networks — Important social networks in the lives of older adults aging in place

Neighborhoods are important places of aging and meaningful contexts of life for many older people. The overall aim of this study was to explore the public life of older people aging in place in order to understand neighborhoods as the material places where public life occurs, networks as the social places of public life, and to examine how these neighborhoods and networks influence the experience of aging and wellbeing. Adopting a friendly visiting methodology, data was collected over an 8-month period using participant observation, visual methods and an innovative interview technique called the “go along method”. Data were analyzed using grounded theory and a coding strategy that integrated textual, visual, and auditory data. Results provide insights into the micro-territorial functioning of neighborhoods and highlight third places and transitory zones as significant sites for older residents. Embedded within these places is a natural neighborhood network — a web of informal relationships and interactions that enhance well being and shape the everyday social world of older adults aging in place.     

Transnational habitus at the time of retirement

ABSTRACT

International mobility requires the shifting of bodies across places, through life courses and stages, creating individual and collective experiences that become taken for granted. They are habitus, which is the durable deployment of an individual’s body in the world, as well as a scheme of perception, thought and action that is present throughout life, including retirement. This study asks what kind of transnational habitus is visible in the narratives of interviewed older adults at the time of retirement. The answer is sought by analysing life stories of mobility from older adults who live or have lived abroad for several years. The multilocal transnational habitus of interviewees rests on their desire to maintain their mobility when retired. However, both their physical and mental international mobility are at risk when faced with an ailing body and mind, and policies allow and restrict the transferability of benefits and accessibility to services.     

House-lot gardens in Santarém,Pará, Brazil: Linking rural with urban

The division between rural and urban sectors of the landscape in many parts of the world is increasingly blurred. House-lot or homegardens offer a perspective on understanding rural-urban linkages since they are frequently a landscape feature in both settings and the exchanges of their products link the two. House-lot gardens are an under-researched component of the agricultural repertoires of smallholders in many parts of the world. Urban house-lot gardens in particular, have until recently not received much attention despite their critical importance to urban livelihoods. This paper presents findings from research on house-lot gardens in rural and urban zones of Santarém, Pará, Brazil, one of Amazonia's largest municipalities. The research demonstrates that garden products are important for household subsistence, but even more importantly product exchanges between rural and urban kin households help sustain critical social networks that subsidize urban life. Gardens are a link between urban and rural settings as products, germplasm, and household members move between the two. People are urban and rural at the same time which demonstrates that households can be multi-local.     

Relationships between rural inhabitants and their landscapes in areas of intensive agricultural use: A case study in Quebec (Canada)

An understanding of the relationships between local populations and the landscape is crucial for reintroducing the multifunctional character of landscapes in areas of intensive agricultural use. This study proposes to identify and compare the relationships that local populations, both farmers and non-farmers, maintain with their landscapes in areas of intensive agricultural use based on a detailed case study in Quebec, Canada. It relies on the dialectical conceptual model of individual–landscape interactions and introduces the notion of “community of relationships to the landscape” to compare populations. Following semi-structured interviews, we performed an analysis of the links between the attributes of the valued landscape, the motives for having those values and the practices tied to those values. This led to distinguish between four main types of relationships with the landscape: the hedonistic relationship, the emotional relationship, the utilitarian relationship, and the relationship with the social environment. Then, on the basis of the relative weight of each relationship and the interactions between the multiple relationships that local inhabitants have with the landscape, four communities of relationships to the landscape were identified, most including both farmers and non-farmers. Beyond the apparent uniformity of the landscapes in areas characterized by intensive agriculture, the results highlight the diversity of the local populations and confirm the heuristic significance of the notion of community of relationships to the landscape. Finally, our analysis of the differences with regard to values and visions between the communities suggests that the vitality of these rural areas can only be ensured by recognizing, maintaining and possibly increasing the current diversity of communities.     

Marriage and the housing careers of naval wives

The analysis of female biography is problematic, straddling as it does the public world of work and the private domain of home. In recent years the development of life course analysis has encouraged a greater awareness of the variability and complexity of most women's lives. Within this context discussions of the home have centred on domestic relationships, on marriage and parenting. Less discussed have been the implications of tenure and accommodation for domestic responsibility and domestic labour. The home is an arena for family life. Housing is the basis of home-making and many of the responsibilities of housework and maintenance devolve on women as home-makers. The interrelationship between housing and the domestic relationships of women was explored in a research project concerned with the wives of Royal Navy personnel. The marriage patterns and housing careers of these women revealed a biographical pattern that was distinctive and largely uniform. This pattern was the product of an occupationally-related structure of housing options and the wider pressures towards home-ownership. This pattern shaped the domestic responsibilities of the naval wives and their relationships with husbands and children and had implications for their patterns of employment and family formation.     

Being in the City: The Sociology of Urban Experiences

Though urban sociologists tend to study the growth and development of cities, there is a venerable yet often marginalized tradition that addresses the embodied experience of urban life. Studies of urban experiences have recently begun to flourish due, in part, to the rise of sensory scholarship. Recognizing the connections between urban experiences and sensory stimulations provides nuanced ways to explore the actions and interactions between individuals and their relationships to and with urban places. Relying on a diverse literature of recent studies that focus on cities as dense sensory environments, this article shows the significance of studying city life at the experiential and sensory levels. First, a few seminal early works are discussed, with specific emphasis on Georg Simmel. Then, each of the five bodily senses and their correlated sensescapes – seescapes, soundscapes, smellscapes, tastescapes, and touchscapes – are presented in order to show individuals and groups use their senses to experience and make sense of the city. The article concludes with a brief discussion of methods and few suggestions to encourage future analyses of the everyday embodied and emplaced practices and interpretations of being in the city.     

The architectural form and landscape as a harmonic entity in the vernacular settlements of Southwestern Saudi Arabia

The paper aims to describe the architectural form and landscape as a harmonic entity in vernacular settlements of southwestern Saudi Arabia. The qualities of vernacular settlements and their integration and responsiveness to the physical, social, economic and cultural environment are demonstrated in this study. The socio-economic activities and customs in southwestern Saudi Arabia are presented as part of the historical process. The paper looks at the major elements of the vernacular villages and landscape as cultural-specific images. While appreciating this, the author laments the way this harmony has been disrupted not least aesthetically as a consequence of modernism which had an impetus on changing life style and social expectation. The cultural-specific images involve direct relationships between the architectural and urban forms as systems and events that are taking place in or around that form. One thesis is that each element of the vernacular village and landscape is linked to an image that shapes and influences human behavior and appreciation, thereby helping to shape larger environmental patterns. Beyond the meaning that specific elements inherit, they have functional and economic values. As a result, their visual qualities are believed to be effective in enhancing behavior through their visual attributes. One of the most important conclusions is that, there are many features of modern village extensions and landscape elements that enhance the interaction with the physical environment that ordinary citizens value, and there are elements of the vernacular villages and landscape that people regret to lose, such as ‘qasabahs', weekly markets, cultivation of terraces, etc. This is inspite of today's, modern planning and design techniques that are being sought to produce new architectural forms and landscape elements. Any attempt to substitute vernacular forms without taking into account the values that the older forms held is considered a failure of adopted modernist attitudes.     

城市化之终结——新型城市理念与城市化的反思

城市的增长和发展一直与城市体系中的特定节点相联系。然而,在众多大城市的功能区合并形成连绵的城市地区的大环境下,这种联系的意义并不大。当一个国家有85%以上的城市人口,城市化进程不再像我们以往所理解的那样,因此传统的分析手段也无法满足需求。本文以丹麦为考察对象,探讨以单个城市和城乡二元制为基础的传统城市分析方法的局限性。文章提出采用一个与大城市地区之中的本地化进程相关的替代概念,进一步论证如何通过流动性的增加和劳动市场的扩大来解释过去25年丹麦的城市增长模式。     

The Work of Rural Professionals: Doing the Gemeinschaft‐Gesellschaft Gavotte

Abstract This paper considers how rurality affects the work of professionals. Sociologists have paid little attention to possible rural‐urban differences in work styles and no study exists which compares the rural experience of those in different professions. I review the literature describing the work of various rural professionals and examine interview data from rural clergy to see whether rural professionals differentiate their work from that of their urban peers. The comparison across occupations reveals several common concerns, including the need to do similar work with fewer resources, the necessity of adapting protocols and codes of conduct to rural settings, and the challenge of dealing with dual relationships. I argue that conventional standards of professional behavior reflect an urban bias and that rural life problematizes the notion of professionalism. Those who work in rural places are caught trying to dance between the “tunes” of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft society.     

Being and Landscape: An Ontological Inquiry into a Japanese Rural Community

This essay aims to reflect on the idea of landscape and our relationship with it by taking the Japanese notion of furusato (native place) in its ontological dimension. Grounded in Heidegger’s ‘phenomenology of Being’ and ‘ontology’, a phenomenological understanding of fieldwork experience in a Japanese rural community will be developed in order to rethink both the furusato and the ‘Being-landscape’ relation. As a consequence, we will be concerned not with how people speak about landscape, but with how the landscape speaks through people. What will be brought to light are the landscape’s moral and relational dimensions: namely, (i) the responsibility towards both our communities and future generations and (ii) a more-than-physical understanding of landscape that alerts us to our belonging to a common world comprised of relationships and tasks.     

Living in virtual communities: an ethnography of human relationships in cyberspace

This paper outlines some of the issues involved in the development of human relationships in cyberspace. Set within the wider context of the Internet and society it investigates how geographically distant individuals are coming together on the Internet to inhabit new kinds of social spaces or virtual communities. People 'live in' and 'construct' these new spaces in such a way as to suggest that the Internet is not a placeless cyberspace that is distinct and separate from the real world. Building on the work of other cyberethnographers, the author combines original ethnographic research in Cybercity, a Virtual Community, with face-to-face meetings to illustrate how, for many people, cyberspace is just another place to meet. Second, she suggests that people in Cybercity are investing as much effort in maintaining relationships in cyberspace as in other social spaces. Her preliminary analysis suggests that by extending traditional human relationships into Cybercity, they are widening their webs of relationships, not weakening them. Human relationships in cyberspace are formed and maintained in similar ways to those in wider society. Rather than being exotic and removed from real life, they are actually being assimilated into everyday life. Furthermore, they are often moved into other social settings, just as they are in offline life.     

INFRASTRUCTURE AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE IN THE NETWORKED UNIVERSITY

Many people believe that information technology will bring massive structural changes to the university. This paper draws on concepts from both computer science and social theory to explore what these structural changes might be like. The point of departure is the observation that the interaction between information technology and market economics creates incentives to standardize the world. Standardization can be a force for good or evil, depending on how it is done, and this paper develops normative ideas about the relation between the forces of standardization and the places in which university teaching is done. Information technology allows these places to be more diverse than in the past, and a good rule of thumb is that the places in which learning occurs should be analogous in their structure and workings to the places in which the learned knowledge will be used. Universities can support this increased diversity of learning places with appropriate structural reforms, including decentralized governance and explicit attention to certain aspects of the university organization, such as media services and the career centre, that, historically, have been marginalized.     

Community college web sites as tools for fostering dialogue

This research brief reports the results of an analysis of community college Web sites as places for fostering dialogic relationships with key publics. Our research suggests that community colleges have created easy to use, information sites that appeal to a variety of publics. With a more attention to the dialogic potential of the Internet, community colleges can better adapt to the needs of their various publics.     

Singing in Dangerous Places (Flores,Lamaholot, Indonesia)

At the eastern tip of Flores Island (Indonesia), there is a people whose members sing in special places, both inhabited and uninhabited, and at special times. Approximately four times a year, songs and dances are performed around a group of stones, in the dancing place. Singers move around these stones all night until dawn. They also sing in front of special trees when going out to their fields, or standing in circles around posts, stones or altars set up on the cultivated land. All these locations are named ‘dangerous places’. They are as far flung as seashores and forests. What relationships with these places do humans enter into? What kind of history and stories do these places mark? What potency do they bear? This paper shows that singing brings people into relationships with various categories of beings at certain places in every ceremonial domain of this peninsula.     

Cancer as a Life Transition: A Relational Approach to Cancer Wellness in Women

Receiving a diagnosis of cancer is a traumatic event and changes one's life forever. The period of initial diagnosis and treatment is indeed a life transition, regardless of the prognosis. It precipitates a change in self-perception, physically, emotionally, and interpersonally. It changes how a woman sees herself, her family, and her world. Simultaneously the woman is confronted with many decisions to make regarding treatment options and the management of personal, familial, and work related responsibilities. People have the opportunity to reflect on old decisions and to make new decisions. Inevitably one is confronted by mortality. The management of this illness is done in the context of a complex network of relationships with family, friends, coworkers, doctors, other medical personnel, and clergy. Often it is the clinical social worker who is in the position of facilitating access to and participation in resources for care. Many women join healing communities or wellness centers to find a model of care and achieve a state of well-being that utilizes and encourages the support of these relationships. Understanding the importance and impact of these relationships can help clinical social workers facilitate cancer wellness in their clients and advocate better on their behalf. The intent of this paper is to understand the concept of cancer wellness as a relational approach and to promote its place in integrative clinical social work practice.     

Suburban landscape: Views of New Jersey artists 1

Suburban landscape predominates within New Jersey; people live in one suburb and drive to a job in another. Research on community ideologies suggests, however, that even suburban residents have vague images of suburbs. Vague images can mean, in turn, that the state's visual artists produce few images that incorporate the newly‐created suburban landscape that they see every day. Research on art worlds also suggests little encouragement for work that depicts the newer suburbs. Consistent with this, only a few of the visual artists living in New Jersey who have put slides in three large slide files include work that deals with the newer suburban landscape or with the process of creating suburbs. Instead, artists who depict New Jersey landscape concentrate on the state's “natural” landscape or on the state's older industrial suburbs. The privacy of newer suburbs no doubt also contributes to this pattern. In suburbs, even places designed for crowds, such as retail malls, are private.