Abstract This article engages directly with a group of individuals who reside in and among the margins of an urban municipal park, through a 16-month critical ethnography. Facing abject poverty, ...threats from law enforcement, and trials of living outdoors, these 'Hillside residents' cite the local health department as a primary source of potential displacement from the place they call home. 'Health', in this context, references three interconnected features of contemporary urban homelessness: the material interactions associated with living outdoors, the litter that occasionally accumulates in the area, and human solid waste. Health also has specific discursive constructions on the Hillside, where the individuals living there are presented as unclean, particularly vis-à-vis the 'natural' unbuilt world in which they live. A logic of sanitizing the unclean means that 'cleaning' moves beyond the material imposition of humans on nature, or nature on humans. Instead, cleaning speaks to a societal problem: a need to cleanse society of unwanted social detritus, to create a healthy society. 'Cleanliness' creates an optimum, healthy urban experience to facilitate the transactions of contemporary consumer and financial capitalism, providing a new and central facet of global neoliberal restructuring, having particularly devastating effects for the lowest classes. Political ecology is leveraged to consider the roles of material and discursive cleanliness as an agent of health in the social reproduction of capitalism, creating natures and subjects that further support it. Key words: urban homelessness, cleanliness, political ecology of health
Biopolitics is the power to control life. In the early global reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people's daily labor functions have been placed into stark relief, with a tripartite typology ...forming between those labor functions that are "essential," those labor roles that have been lost, and those that have transitioned to an online format. For those whose labor has maintained, as well as those who seek to return to pre-COVID-19 labor conditions, a crude biopolitical calculus takes place where the functioning of our capitalist political economy is weighed against the maintenance of life itself. The current pandemic exposes and highlights many of the unsustainable fault lines characteristic of contemporary capitalism, where the uneven exploitation of labor renders lives associated with some labor functions as more expendable than others. This places us in political-economic crisis, where we have choices to enact more just, equitable, and sustainable systems moving forward.
Researchers’ subjective positionalities are often presented as explanatory factors in the interpretation and analyses of ethnographic experiences. In geographic and anthropological ethnographies, ...positionalities are often benignly disclosed to readers under the auspices of being better able to understand specific subjective backgrounds, or the lenses, through which researchers engage with participants, places, and the overall subject matter. While positionality statements have become standard in qualitative research, there is not sustained development of the dynamic nature of positionality as way to better understand, analyze, and theorize through a research project. To contextualize this methodological argument, I draw from ethnographic engagement with a community of individuals facing homelessness who reside in tents and other rudimentary structures in a public municipal park. My own dynamic positionalities are positioned as both a lens through which I understand the “Hillside residents” and also evolving analytical tools that complicate assumed understandings of class and relationships to nature.
•High-contrast proximity between cities and wildland may be a model for resilience•A novel urban-wildland juxtaposition (UWJ) metric is calculated for 36 U.S. cities•Cities with high UWJ scores are ...negatively correlated with levels of obesity and diabetes
As human populations become concentrated in larger, more intensely urbanized areas connected through globalization, the relationships of cities to their surrounding landscapes are open to social, ecological, and economic reinterpretation. In particular, the value of access to nature in the form of nearby undeveloped wildland to urban populations implies a relatively novel type of synergistic city-region relationship. We develop a robust and replicable metric – the urban-wildland juxtaposition (UWJ) – that quantifies critical dimensions of the juxtaposition of the urbanicity of cities with the quantity of nearby unbuilt wildlands, based on the spatial proximity and relative intensities of these two contrasting system types. Using a distance-decay gravity model, this analysis provides documentation on the calculation of the UWJ and its component metrics, urbanicity (U) and wildland (W) and then presents U, W, and UWJ metrics for 36 urbanized areas representing all regions of the U.S., providing the basis for comparisons and analysis. We explore the potential of the metric by testing correlations with “creative class” employment and public health measures. The UWJ has implications and potential applications for demographic, economic, social, and quality-of-life trends across the U.S. and internationally.
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Community engagement curricula and course design can provide substantial experiences for both community members and participating students. Using a case study approach, this research focuses on four ...steps in this process: initial community relationship forming, engaging in community service, transitioning to civic engagement, and developing a community-based research program. Narrative examples from student course evaluations position these community-based experiences as transformative for multiple parties. Institutional structures are presented as helpful entrees to engagement for students, while noting that community relationships provide contextualized, powerful, and meaningful relationships, supporting recommendations for emerging and existing community engagement programs.
Issues of trustworthiness in qualitative leisure research, often demonstrated through particular techniques of reliability and/or validity, is often either nonexistent, unsubstantial, or unexplained. ...Rather than prescribing what reliability and/or validity should look like, researchers should attend to the overall trustworthiness of qualitative research by more directly addressing issues associated with reliability and/or validity, as aligned with larger issues of ontological, epistemological, and paradigmatic affiliation. In reviewing contemporary qualitative research methodologies, we present a variety of reliability and validity techniques that might lead to increased trustworthiness in analysis and representation of findings. Qualitative leisure scholars are encouraged to align paradigmatic assumptions, theoretical orientations, methodological practices, analytical techniques, and representational practices to engage trustworthiness techniques that can be assessed for quality and credibility. This conceptualization offers a useful pedagogical model and supports common language of qualitative preferred practices, while providing space and openness for growth, development, improvisation, and critique.
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