Man-made Care: Community Care and Older Male Carers

Correspondence to Mike Fisher, Department of Social Work, University of Bristol, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN. Summary Recent evidence about the extent of caring for older peopleby older people themselves, and about the importance of spousecare, has challenged existing debates about gender and care.Male carers, particularly older husbands, have been ‘discovered’.This paper attempts to reconceptualize the debate about genderand caring to take account of these developments, particularlyto develop an understanding of the caring activities of oldermale carers and to elaborate the implications for communitycare policy. The evidence suggests there are circumstances where men acceptthe obligation to care, undertake intimate personal care, andderive identity and reward from their caring work, driven bysimilar motives and experiencing similar struggles as women.Rather than seeking maximum distinction between the motivesand experiences of women and men carers, the paper suggeststhat one important way to promote non-sexist community careis to explore the conditions where men's caring is undertakenand how it can be understood and developed.     

Geometries of ‘global’ evangelicalism

In this article, I explore the power dynamics at play in religious place‐making. I critically discuss the uneven co‐configurations of imaginaries of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ within global evangelicalism. Specifically, I analyse the recent recording of a live album by the famous charismatic Australian band Hillsong United (of Hillsong Church) at various locations in Israel‐Palestine, which was followed by a concert tour in Israel. Palestinian evangelical Christians were critical of this endeavour, for they felt that it marginalized and excluded them from their global evangelical faith family. The frictions between the Palestinian evangelical community and Hillsong United illustrate how dominant evangelical actors create an imagination of the ‘local’, which enters the imaginary of global evangelicalism (and bears material consequences). In the article, I thus argue that privileged financial and cultural resources and travel regimes lead to specific notions of geometries of power in global evangelicalism.     

Understanding the geographical development of social movements: a web‐link analysis of Slow Food

Slow Food (SF) is a global, grassroots movement aimed at enhancing and sustaining local food cultures and traditions worldwide. Since its establishment in the 1980s, Slow Food groups have emerged across the world and embedded in a wide range of different contexts. In this article, we explain how the movement, as a diverse whole, is being shaped by complex dynamics existing between grassroots flexibilities and emerging drives for movement coherence and harmonization. Unlike conventional studies on social movements, our approach helps one to understand transnational social movements as being simultaneously coherent and diverse bodies of collective action. Drawing on work in the fields of relational geography, assemblage theory and webometric research, we develop an analytical strategy that navigates and maps the entire Slow Food movement by exploring its ‘double articulation’ between the material‐connective and ideational‐expressive. Focusing on representations of this connectivity and articulation on the internet, we combine methodologies of computation research (webometrics) with more qualitative forms of (web) discourse analysis to achieve this. Our results point to the significance of particular networks and nodal points that support such double movements, each presenting core logistical channels of the movement's operations as well as points of relay of new ideas and practices. A network‐based analysis of ‘double articulation’ thus shows how the co‐evolution of ideas and material practices cascades into major trends without having to rely on a ‘grand', singular explanation of a movement's development.     

Research and Disability in a Local Community

This paper describes a study of the experience of disability in a local community. The study unfolded within a carefully constructed and collaborative framework, so that the people in whose interests the study was focused could inform its process, and take opportunities to benefit from it and each other. Outcomes included the establishment of a local support group, a family support project involving the University and the local community, and considerably developed understandings of neighbourhood support and the experiences of disability, most specifically from the point of view of carers. Finally, a model of community support service was proposed. In conclusion, the paper highlights the processes of local collaboration and research. It describes research in which the actions taken and proposed to improve local supports were informed by the ongoing processes of research, and in turn the research process itself was informed by the local experiences of participants.     

Multinational Corporations and the Competition for Media Influence in Developing Countries

The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first objective should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. —Thomas Jefferson, 1787