Children's Perceptions of Families: What Do They Really Think?

The perceptions of 111 New Zealand children from different family structures and cultures were examined. Lone‐parent families, blended families, extended family, non‐residential parents and couples with children were highly endorsed. No great distinctions were made between married and cohabiting couples when the relationship included children. Definitions of family frequently mentioned affective factors. In comparing ethnic groups and family structures some differences were noted, but in general children have many similarities in their family concepts. Comparisons with a recent study of adolescents did not reveal clear‐cut developmental sequences in young people's perceptions. Overall, an inclusive and realistic view of families was expressed. © 2006 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2006 National Children's Bureau.     

People and Pixels 20 years later: the current data landscape and research trends blending population and environmental data

Population and Environment - In 1998, the National Research Council published People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science. The volume focused on emerging research linking changes...     

'Women of the Wild Geese': Irish Women, Exile and Identity in Spain, 1750-1775

This study focuses upon the experiences of first and second generation Irish female migrants in Spain during the mid-eighteenth century. Recent scholarship has sought to place Irish migrants in Europe within a broad context of assimilation. The experience of Irish communities in Spain appears to have been particularly positive, with the Irish as a group being awarded equal citizenship at the beginning of the seventeenth century. However, the gendered experience of Irish assimilation into Spanish society has received limited scholarly attention. This essay analyses the experiences of two groups of Irish women living in Spain: women who lived in religious communities and the female members of one of the most elite families to have migrated from Ireland. The lives of the daughters of Ignatius White reveal the ways in which Irish women worked their way into spheres of power and influence, including the Spanish court. The networks and activities of these women show a crystallisation of the ambitions of many Irish from the first and second generation to be born in Spain. The relationship between these women, their kinship groups and their networks of power and influence offers a positive and successful example of Irish female migrant experience.     

Trusting Strangers: Work Relationships in Four High-Tech Communities

For the last ten years, anthropologists have been studying work, family and technology in Silicon Valley. Using intensive observation and ethnographic interviews, we have investigated the daily life of people in Silicon Valley in an ecosystem of research endeavours we have dubbed the Silicon Valley Cultures Project, supported by grants by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as well as through partnerships with the Institute for the Future. The latter collaborated to conduct ethnographic interviews on the details of work and technologically mediated communications in Bangalore, India, Dublin, Ireland, and the Taipei-Hsinchu corridor in Taiwan, revealing the complexities of global interconnections in families and workplaces. These projects have explored the penetration of work, technology and global interconnections into the daily lives of the people. We used a comparative approach, a multisite research design, to yield different research questions. Cross-site analysis allows us to see that differing social and technical infrastructures shape the way trust is built and maintained. Locating research sites in different locations also emphasizes the problematic nature of technologically-mediated relationships, since networks built at a distance and maintained virtually have risks that locally constructed networks do not. Workers in Silicon places are simultaneously inwardly-focused and embedded in a local context and connected to global economic and communications nodes. Interdependent high-tech work, often using technologically-mediated communication, requires a high degree of trust. The cultural construction of 'trust', and the culturally situated negotiation of trust relationships need to be explored in this context. High-tech knowledge work is done by networks of interdependent global workers that must share information, act under a severe time constraint, and establish effective relationships at a distance. The management of interpersonal and organizational expectations that is embodied in the concept 'trust' is an example of how locally constructed cultural realities are enacted on a global stage.     

Addressing the sex trade in Thailand: Some lessons learned from NGOs, part I1

This is the first in a series of articles stemming from Project Hope International's month long visit to Thailand in June 2002. Project Hope International is a non-governmental organization based in greater Washington, D.C., which fights against child sexual exploitation and trafficking in girls and women into the international sex trade, specifically in Thailand and the United States. Thailand undeniably deals with serious problems of child sexual abuse and exploitation, as well as trafficking of children into the sex trade. However, the sex trade in Thailand today is not the same as it was thirty years ago. There has been a gradual decrease in the numbers of Thai women and girls in the sex trade, and an increase in the numbers of females from neighboring countries in the Mekong sub-region, as well as non-citizen, hill-tribe girls from Northern Thailand. The goals of our research trip to Thailand were threefold: first, we wanted to learn about the current problems of the sex trade and how they have changed over the last ten years; second, we wanted to visit the child welfare centers, and meet the most prominent activists in Thailand who are targeting the political, social, and economic problems surrounding the child sex trade in Thailand; and, finally, we wanted to be able to bring the information we acquired to dispel myths promulgated by many nearsighted NGOs who work on trafficking issues. In this article, problems of researching the sex trade in Thailand are discussed, and a brief overview of the current situation surrounding the trafficking of females into Thailand is provided. In examining the extraordinary efforts of non-governmental organizations and international organizations, we place these issues in the context of how Thailand fits into the broader international anti-trafficking movement. We then provide some information on the most recent court cases that have prosecuted sex offenders and pedophiles and look at some of the reasons why girls get involved in prostitution, albeit on an increasingly voluntary basis in certain regions. Finally, evidence is provided that the government and police are slowly committing themselves to fighting trafficking in females for sexual exploitation. Christina Arnold is an undergraduate in the School of Public Affairs at American University, majoring in Political Science and Justice. Ms. Arnold spent her childhood in Southeast Asia and as a result was drawn to a career in public service. She is the Executive Director of Project Hope International (PHI), a non-for-profit organization, dedicated to combating human trafficking in the U.S. and Thailand by partnering with organization that provide direct services to women and children in their receovery, repatriation, and reintegration processes. She won a $20,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2001 for research on human trafficking in Thailand. Andrea M. Bertone is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Govenment and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is writing her dissertation on the ways in which NGOs and international organizations cooperate in Thailand and Kosovo on anti-trafficking projects. She is also the Associate Director of Project Hope Internation, an NGO in Washington, D.C., working on issues of child prostitution and trafficking in females in Southeast Asia and the United States. She is the author of “International Political Economy and the Politics of Sex,” Gender Issues 18 (1). She is the co-editor of numerous publications published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C. We thank Sudarat Serewat of FACE for her invaluable help and time in Thailand.     

Educating spatial planners for the age of co-creation: the need to risk community,science and practice involvement in planning programmes and curricula

Abstract

Planners are often billed as leaders and change agents of the (un)built environment. It is, however, important to recognize that they are in reality only one of many players in a sea of actors involved in shaping future developments and projects. Plans and interventions today are co-created and in fact co-evolve relying as much on the input, cooperation and actions of inhabitants, users, developers, politicians as on expert planners and a wide variety of other professions. In this introductory section, we, as editors of this special issue, posit that planners therefore require skills for co-creation drawing on science and working with other disciplines. In turn, planning programmes and curricula need to incorporate learning and teaching approaches that prepare students in higher education for working in co-creation settings by purposefully exposing them to learning environments that involve community, science and practice. The collection of papers, which were presented initially at the 2014 Association of European Schools of Planning congress in Utrecht hereafter showcase curriculum developments and pedagogical research of planning educators from different world regions that in the round shed light on a variety of issues and challenges of embedding learning and teaching for co-creation and co-evolution. In particular, we elaborate on the tensions of employing transformational yet high-risk pedagogies in higher education settings that are becoming increasingly risk-averse and streamlined and we suggest an agenda for planning curriculum development.