Shaping the right to education for Roma children: a case study of present practices in Ghent,Belgium

Western European cities are increasingly confronted with Roma immigrants. Societal changes associated with this phenomenon create new challenges for schools. Using a case study, this article sheds light on present practices that shape the right to education for Roma children. Three principal success factors are distinguished: boundary-blurring practices, a lifeworld-oriented approach and commitment. Finally, the relation between promising practices and a rights-based approach to educational justice is discussed.     

Media consumption and self-identification: Hungarian and Slovak case study

The media impact on the process of ethnic identification, particularly with regard to how ethnic minority individuals reflect upon their ethnic origin, is the focus of this article. We analyse the relationships media consumption has with the identity-reflection process using biographical narratives of individuals from two ethnic minority communities in Eastern European countries: Slovaks in Hungary and Hungarians in Slovakia, focusing on how media consumption channels ethnic self-identification of minority individuals in terms of their affinity with their country of origin, their country of residence, and with Europe as a whole. Ethnic minorities in these two countries have been intensely affected by political changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We include analysis of some quantitative data and biographical narratives of ethnic minority individuals from the ENRI-EAST project, with close analysis of six biographical cases.     

Food at home production and consumption: implications for nutrition quality and policy

The production and consumption of food at home is one of the most frequent and ubiquitous of all human activities and yet little is known about some of the basic economic constructs of this activity. Increasing our knowledge of food at home economics is important for improving the nutritional quality of diets and nutritional policies of the United States. This paper reviews the empirical literature on food at home production and consumption and food away from home consumption, demonstrates how the effectiveness of some nutrition policies depends on the magnitudes of a few key parameters, and identifies numerous areas in need of further research.     

Heavy physical work under time pressure: the garbage collection service--a case study

The increased generation of garbage has become a problem in large cities, with greater demand for collection services. The collector is subjected to high workload. This study describes the work in garbage collection service, highlighting the requirements of time, resulting in physical and psychosocial demands to collectors. Ergonomic Work Analysis (EWA) - a method focused on the study of work in real situations was used. Initially, technical visits, global observations and unstructured interviews with different subjects of a garbage collection company were conducted. The following step of the systematic observations was accompanied by interviews conducted during the execution of tasks, inquiring about the actions taken, and also interviews about the actions, but conducted after the development of the tasks, photographic records and audiovisual recordings, of workers from two garbage collection teams. Contradictions between the prescribed work and activities (actual work) were identified, as well as the variability present in this process, and strategies adopted by these workers to regulate the workload. It was concluded that the insufficiency of means and the organizational structure of management ensue a situation where the collection process is maintained at the expense of hyper-requesting these workers, both physically and psychosocially.     

Delicious Delhi: nostalgia,consumption and the old city

This article examines how Old Delhi is represented and recreated in contemporary India. Delhi’s old city was once the locus of pre-colonial Mughal sovereignty. It is now often encountered via nationalist spectacles, mass-media images and consumption practices. Paralleling neo-liberalism’s onset in the 1990s, its street food, bazaar spaces and historical monuments have been avidly appropriated by reigning institutions and classes. Old Delhi suggests that which the new India has left behind; yet this displacement also elicits longing for what has been lost.

This medieval remnant can therefore be considered the site of nostalgia consumed by a globalised middle class. This article presents an ethnography of Old Delhi’s invocation in New Delhi’s cultural landscape, including malls, newspapers, heritage sites, hotels, and food courts. In triangulating among the realms of nationalist nostalgia, middle-class identity and mediated consumption, it emphasises how India’s neoliberal emergence is bound up with the co-opting of the past.     

Transition to university and vigorous physical activity: implications for health and psychological well-being

The authors investigated vigorous physical activity and psychological well-being during transition from high school to first-year university in a sample of 145 Canadian undergraduates. Participants completed retrospective measures assessing vigorous physical activity during their first 2 months at university and their last 2 months at high school as well as measures assessing psychological well-being. According to nationally recommended (US Department of Health and Human Services) standards, two thirds (66.2%) of students reported adequate levels of vigorous activity in high school, whereas significantly fewer (44.1%) met the standard during their first 8 weeks at university. One third of students were active in high school but became insufficiently active once at university; 33% were active at both times; 23% consistently fell short of recommended levels; and only 11% became active once at university. Students who had become insufficiently active reported higher levels of fatigue and lower levels of vigor compared with those who continued to be active.     

Eating in: home, consumption and identity

Food is perhaps one of the most mundane and taken for granted parts of our everyday life, yet the ways we think about shopping, cooking and eating are actually intensively reflexive. This paper uses the example of food to explore questions of identity in relation to the specific cultural location of 'the home'. Using case study examples the paper illustrates some of the complex ways in which identities, throughout the lifecourse, are produced, articulated and contested through food consumption and the spatial dynamics of cooking and eating. In doing so the paper demonstrates that households, rather than being single units of food consumption, can be sites of multiple and sometimes contradictory consumption practices and that it is necessary to understand how patterns of eating are negotiated and contested within households in order to understand how the home functions as a 'consumption site'.     

Risking the rural: nature, morality and the consumption of unpasteurised milk

The BSE crisis, concern over genetically modified foods, and E. coli and Salmonella food scares have prompted widespread public disquiet over food safety. For consumers, this has led to a demand for new ‘safer’ foods which are usually ‘local’, ‘natural’ and/or organic. Research into reactions to food risk has to a large degree focussed on this ‘quality turn’. In doing so, there is a danger of failing to fully problematise risk and providing a dualistic appreciation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ natures, rather than exposing nature's fluid and multiple identities. Moreover, it suggests that consumers always attempt to minimise risk and do not challenge the need to change their behaviour. Instead, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from an English village, the paper uses a case study of unpasteurised milk to analyse why rural consumers continue to buy foods labelled by official scientific discourses as ‘risky’. The paper argues that food risks in rural areas are configured by a concern to protect a rural identity from one implicated in scientific discourses of safety. These identity-related definitions of risk are also constructed by various moral behaviours which are integral to the process of becoming rural. In particular, the paper shows that these moral behaviours include establishing relations with specific forms of nature, maintaining community relations and adopting rural knowledgeabilities which together configure food safety and define rural status.     

A case study of physical activity among older adults in rural Newfoundland, Canada

The purpose of this study was to assess rural older adults' perceptions of leisure-time physical activity and examine these perceptions from a historical perspective. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 inhabitants (mean age 82 years) of Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and subjected to inductive analysis. Member-checking interviews were conducted with 5 participants. Findings indicated that beginning in childhood, participants were socialized into a subculture of work activity. As a result of these historical and social forces, leisure-time physical activity did not form part of the participants' lives after retirement. Strategies for successful aging involved keeping busy, but this "busyness" did not include leisure-time physical activity. Results demonstrated the importance of developing a broader understanding of how past and present-day contexts can influence participation in leisure-time physical activity.     

Consuming conventions: sustainable consumption, ecological citizenship and the worlds of worth

In light of the recognition that current patterns of consumption in the developed world are environmentally damaging, the question of sustainable consumption has become increasingly prominent in public and policy discourse. This paper joins an emerging body of work that critiques the behaviorist perspectives that currently dominate the field and specifically, a case is made for using conventions theory (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991) to complement the ‘social practices’ approach to consumption, sustainability and everyday life. Drawing on a qualitative study of persons who identified themselves as attempting to live in ways that are environmentally more friendly, the analysis first explores the ways in which sustainable consumption intersects and overlaps with other practices and imperatives. Attention is paid to the competing demands of day to day living and the ways in which cultural conventions work - or not - to legitimate practices of sustainable consumption. The second part of the analysis discusses the citizenship relations that are articulated through practices of sustainable consumption and here, attention is paid to the conventions that underpin the imperative to reduce the environmental impacts of personal consumption. Taken together, I consider the possibility that environmental conventions might be emerging from the empirical material alongside the ways in which these might operate in support of sustainable consumption. To conclude I suggest that the experiments in practice encountered here are unlikely to generate the conventions through which sustainable forms of consumption can be normalized and integrated into everyday lives.     

Demography of domestic dog population and its implications for stray dog abundance: a case study of Omsk,Russia

Urban Ecosystems - In cities of Russia, stray dog populations have been conserved for a long time, despite natural mortality and constant catching. We suggested that the overpopulation of owned...     

Sure Start Local Programmes: implications of case study data from the National Evaluation of Sure Start

This paper is based on case study data on Sure Start Local Programmes collected within the Implementation Module of the Department for Education and Skills commissioned National Evaluation of Sure Start, between 2002 and 2004. Part one describes and discusses some key challenges for programme stakeholders which are associated with the optimum delivery of services for children and families, including managing partnerships; meeting the needs of a diverse community; and targeting. Part two explores the relevance of these findings for future government policy for children and families; and concludes by highlighting the value of an emphasis on ‘building knowledge’.