DIY culture and extended milieux: LETS, veggie boxes and festivals

The wave of DIY culture and environmental innovation sweeping through the UK is not restricted to isolated sites of high profile protest, such as the Newbury bypass. Based on fieldwork in the South West of England, consisting of in-depth interviews, participant observation, focus groups and a postal survey, we argue that networks such as those around festivals, LETS and organic food box schemes contribute to green milieux, which encourage ecological and cultural innovation of everyday life. We suggest that this creative social and ecological margin may be viewed as extended milieux combining global and local aspects. Local social relations and identities are reconfigured in new reflexive ways that utilize, criticise and even contribute to globalization, while developing new senses of locality and community.     

Affective and aesthetic dimensions of contemporary social movements in South West England

The paper examines contemporary social movement activity within South West England. It is argued that much social movement analysis has been too nation‐state orientated, that it has too readily framed diverse contemporary practices within a narrow, politically reductive and instrumentally rational frame. Increasingly, aesthetic and affective dimensions of everyday life must be examined if any coherent theoretical account of such activity is to be offered. Altering relations between states and their citizens in a global age and the emergence of an extended civil society are linked to a weakening of the capacity of nation states to manage identity formation. A series of excursuses link theoretical analysis of the expressive dimensions of the region's social movement activity, to these more extended global transformations.     

On Weighing Gains and Investments at the Margin of Risk Regulation

Analysts have long noted an apparent discrepancy in the level of investment seemingly necessary to meet "acceptable" levels of public safety. At the margin of risk regulation, i.e., where safety determination is judged acceptable, the traditional cost-benefit calculus appears to contribute obvious rationale to the final political decision. Efforts are now being made to introduce a measure of consistency into the application of risk-cost benefit analysis to radiological protection. This paper reviews these efforts from a UK perspective. It also looks at how the issue was treated in a public setting through the Sizewell B Public Inquiry.     

Researching women’s leadership in Asia and the Pacific – reflections on feminist research approaches in design and in practice

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) and partners have navigated the complexities and, sometimes competing, priorities, of feminist research methodology and values, in our practice. It demonstrates how, ultimately, decision-making processes along the way have been guided by the feminist values that underpin the research designs and the assertion that the process is as important as the outcome. We reflect in particular on the design and practice of two research projects undertaken by IWDA with partner women’s rights organisations in Asia Pacific. Under the Women’s Action for Voice and Empowerment programme, the projects – the Women’s Leadership Pathways research project and the Public Perceptions of Women as Leaders research project – explore the enablers and barriers to women’s leadership, from both public and private perspectives. The designs of both projects are mindful of hierarchies of authority and knowledge within the research processes that reinforce the status quo and power dynamics between the ‘expert’ and the ‘subject’ of the research. They also challenge the dynamics of power around the production and ownership of knowledge in academic spaces. They do this through collaborative designs that are locally led and owned, and through a strong valuing of women’s voices in research.     

Empower,inspire, achieve: (dis)empowerment and the Paralympic Games

This paper undertakes a critical examination of the International Paralympic Committee’s desire to use the Paralympic Games as a vehicle to empower individuals with a disability. We achieve this by applying Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological concepts of habitus and capital to semi-structured interviews conducted with Paralympic stakeholders. Interviewees included current and former Paralympians, active and retired disability sport administrators, social researchers of disability and disability sport, and disability rights advocates. The paper starts by highlighting the distinctive cultural context of the Paralympic Movement, before exploring the potential for the Paralympic Games to act as a source of empowerment, through the creation of sporting and lifestyle role-models. Findings suggest Paralympians are considered most likely to gain empowerment from the Paralympic Games, yet their specific impairment, athletic lifestyles and failure to identify as ‘disabled’ were identified as potentially limiting the ability of the Paralympic Games to empower others.     

A semi-markov approach to stochastic compartmental models

In the past, various methods using either differential equations or differential-difference equations have been used to analyze stochastic compartmental models. In this paper a semi-Markov process approach is used to provide a framework for analyzing such models. The distribution function of the number of particles in each of the compartments is derived along with the stationary distributions. Various models found in the literature arising from biological and reliability applications are analyzed here using the semi-Markov process technique.