Research into young people and healthy eating has focussed on identifying the ‘barriers’ to healthy eating and on developing interventions to address them. However, it has tended to neglect the ...emotional, social and symbolic aspects of food for young people, and the roles food might play in adolescence. This paper explores these issues, reporting findings from a qualitative study which explored the meanings and values young people attached to food choices, particularly in school and peer contexts. As part of a larger study into young people’s relationships with food brands, 12 focus groups were conducted with young people aged 13–15 in the North East of England. The focus groups found that young people used food choices to help construct a desired image, as a means of judging others, and to signal their conformity with acceptable friendship and peer norms. Importantly, the findings suggested that the social and symbolic meanings associated with healthy eating conflicted with processes and values which are of crucial importance in adolescence, such as self-image and fitting in with the peer group. In other words, it was emotionally and socially risky to be seen to be interested in healthy eating. Interventions need not only to make healthy eating easier and more available, but also to address young people’s emotional needs for identity and belonging.
► Young people use food products and brands to project a desired identity, to signal their belonging, and to judge others. ► Making the ‘wrong’ food choices when with their peers can expose young people to ridicule and marginalisation. ► Healthy products and brands are perceived ambivalently, and have negative connotations. ► Choosing healthy foods is emotionally and socially risky for young people. ► Healthy eating interventions need to understand and address young people’s emotional needs for identity and belonging.
Abstract
In this paper we introduce the concept of ‘domestic colonisation’ as a contribution to the literature on critical geographies of home. This provides a lens to focus on the ways in which ...domestic spaces might be exploited and/or dominated though familiar relationships. With reference to two research projects in North East England, we explore everyday occupations and sieges of home‐spaces by neighbours as a means of reinforcing positions of relative social advantage. We show how these experiences become overwhelming through the intrusion of home‐spaces and (with it) the life worlds of already structurally vulnerable(ised) communities. Domestic colonisation allows us to think through both the damage done through/to the home and connections beyond those spaces. To do this we focus on ‘home takeovers’ (or ‘cuckooing’) and ‘hate relationships’. Our work on cuckooing shows how the occupation and control of the home by those who re‐produce and seize upon structurally vulnerable(ised) people, is a process which re‐configures the home as an exploitable resource. Understandings of home and intimate social relationships as ‘private’, combined with complexities regarding culpability, conceal the damage done in contexts of diminished social infrastructure. With reference to our work on hate relationships, we outline how homes are a means of identifying and targeting those who become subjected to a range of hateful acts. This produces everyday spaces of siege and entrapment that control, immobilise and are difficult to escape. Formal interventions are unable to adequately support those victimised through lack of recognition, misrecognition as atomised disputes and a tendency to (re)move those victimised. We end by questioning how we might better address the needs of those subjected to such harms, with an emphasis on the relational production of the home.
Short Abstract
In this paper we introduce the concept of ‘domestic colonisation’ as a contribution to the literature on critical geographies of home. This provides a lens to focus on the ways in which domestic spaces might be exploited and/or dominated though familiar relationships. With reference to two research projects in North East England, we explore everyday occupations and sieges of home‐spaces by neighbours as a means of reinforcing positions of relative social advantage.
: Multi‐scalar or multi‐site power relations offer two contrasting ways of understanding the shifting geography of state power. In this paper, we argue for a different starting point, one that ...favours a topological understanding of state spatiality over more conventional topographical accounts. In contrast to a vertical or horizontal imagery of the geography of state power, what states possess, we suggest, is reach, not height. In doing so, we draw from Sassen (2006, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press) a vocabulary capable of portraying the renegotiation of powers that has taken place between central government in the UK and one of its key city regions, the South East of England; one that highlights an assemblage of political actors, some public, some private, where negotiations take place between elements of central and local actors “lodged” within the region, not acting “above”, “below” or “alongside” it. The articulation of political demands in such a context has less to do with “jumping scale” or formalizing extensive network connections and more to do with the ability to reach directly into a “centralized” politics where proximity and reach play across one another in particular ways.
This paper argues that trust cannot be taken for granted in long-term participatory research and promotes greater consideration to conceptualizing the trusting process as fluid and fragile. This ...awareness by researchers can reveal to them how the passing of time shapes and reshapes the nature of trusting relationships and their constant negotiation and re-negotiation. The paper draws together literature from different disciplines on the themes of trust, temporality and participatory research and outcomes from interviews and workshops undertaken for The Trust Map project to focus on two key moments that reveal the fragility of trust. These are the subtlety of disruption and trust on trial and trust at a distance. We discuss how trust was built over time through processes of interaction that were continually tested, incremental and participatory.
At a time when seabird populations have experienced steep declines and the movement of diverse species into cities has become a globally important issue, the paper examines the contested presence of ...an urban seabird colony in North East England. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper details how avian claims to space have prompted fraught debates on coexistence, urban planning, and socio‐environmental futures that reveal an inherently ambivalent politics. While normally a coastal breeding bird, the paper argues that the Tyne kittiwakes – and their use of window ledges, drain‐pipes, streetlights, rooftops and road infrastructure – have become a familiar part of the region's urban life. However, while their presence has reworked understandings of public space, urban belonging, and oceanic boundaries, urban regimes of control and normative notions of the city continue to inhibit a more expansive urban politics capable of accommodating difference and responding to environmental change. Through attention to practices of deterrence, shifting forms of urban decision‐making, and the emergence of the kittiwake as a regional icon, the paper documents the conditions that limit coexistence despite a change in attitudes towards the colony and environmental futures more broadly. In this context, the paper raises fundamental questions about how to support coexistence amid ambivalence without resorting to normative forms of species valorisation. Attending to ambivalence and the difficulty of creating and sustaining ethical modes of coexistence, the paper reflects on the implications of the research for urban futures, local geographies of the sea, and the multispecies city.
At a time when seabird populations have experienced steep declines and the movement of diverse species into cities has become a globally important issue, the paper examines the contested presence of an urban seabird colony in North East England. Drawing on ethnographic research on the Tyne kittiwakes and the people who live and work alongside them, the paper details how avian claims to space have prompted sometimes fraught debates on coexistence, urban planning, and socio‐environmental futures. Attending to ambivalence and the difficulty of creating and sustaining ethical modes of coexistence, the paper finishes by reflecting on the implications of the research for urban futures, local geographies of the sea, and the multispecies city.
Aim
This article explores the views of current nursing leaders in the National Health Service on the actions and resources that are required to develop and maintain nursing leadership talent.
...Background
Although there is considerable talent and expertise within the nursing leadership community, numerous unfilled vacancies and gaps have been identified in competence and capability, with a national analysis indicating that nearly a third of National Health Service director posts are filled by interim appointments or are vacant. Nursing director posts are amongst those vacant for the longest periods.
Method
Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with NHS directors of nursing, chief nurses, directors of quality and their deputies in south‐east England to explore the characteristics of their roles, development needs, barriers to applying for posts or staying in their posts, future talent identification, and support networks.
Results
Nursing leadership roles are perceived as demanding, poorly remunerated, isolating, and representing a major increase in responsibility and career risk. Too much development is currently informal.
Conclusions
Talent identification and support need to be timely, structured, experientially based, and focused on building resilience and confidence. Coaching, mentoring, and support networks are considered crucial.
Implications
Nursing leadership talent needs to be formally identified, developed and supported within organisations and networks should be maintained to reduce professional isolation and counter negative perceptions.
This paper considers the tensions between individual and collective experiences, responses and framings in gender-based violence (GBV). I explore three concepts that aid understanding of GBV - ...isolating, collective trauma and commoning - and question their utility in understanding trauma and the process of survival. The arguments are evidenced with survivors' testimony from a participatory action research project on experiences of trauma from GBV. First, the isolating of survivors, taking multiple forms, is not just 'how it is', but a condition created and exploited by perpetrators and buttressed by social perceptions and practices to reduce access to sources of support. Second, I consider whether GBV might be thought of as collective trauma, a concept from Black and postcolonial literatures to describe structural traumas that are communal in nature. I explore the collective aspects of experiencing, surviving and rebuilding from GBV, and resonances and discontinuities with this notion of collective trauma. Third, commoning emphasises mutual aid in resistance to violence, and better reflects diverse experiences of GBV. It offers an alternative promise of collective care in an era of shrinking and neoliberalising service provision, illuminating existing practices by which GBV survivors and feminist organisations work to make and remake survival.
This paper contributes to the levelling up (LU) debate by examining the case of the North-East of England, a region with long-standing and deep-seated historical issues of inequality. It will ...determine if centrally directed LU policies are appropriate and necessary interventions by charting the evolution of UK policy shifts and impacts on the region. In analysing the past failed policies and current situation, including the Devolution Deal, the authors point to some of the critical challenges and opportunities still facing regional leaders. It concludes by arguing that the region is at an impasse and calls for a regional summit to agree on regional priorities and more robust and effectively targeted strategies for the future. Overall, the paper suggests that without the correct policy interventions and the capacity to deliver them, levels of inequality will persist.
This paper examines the nature of linkages between core competence of a firm and key characteristics of its product/output and thus presents an alternative theoretical framework for innovation and ...regional development. Within this framework, it is the externally observable characteristics of what a firm produces, rather than its internal functions, that establishes whether a distinct core competence potentially exists, in order to operationalize it for R&D and innovation activities. To demonstrate potential applications of this framework, a literature-based- questionnaire was designed to collect primary data from 330 firms located in North East England, a peripheral region of the UK. Collected data were subjected to a detailed statistical analysis to estimate the conditional probability that a firm has a core competence, given the presence of one or more of its key output/product characteristics. Based on this approach, the paper presents a theoretical/empirical framework for the promotion of innovation via enhancement of a firm's core competence, and improvement in its output/product characteristics. This framework might be employed as a strategic management tool (1) by a firm to help in allocation of scarce resources for innovation and innovation management and (2) by regional policymakers for targeting and assisting firms in peripheral regions to enhance regional development via firms' innovation and exporting activities.
: In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises—and has impacted upon—national patterns of distributional ...(in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio‐spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in this paper is to extend research which explores the spatial politics of mobilisation, by attending to the multi‐scalar dynamics embedded in the enactment of environmental justice (EJ) in north‐east England. It is an approach that is indebted to recent work on the scalar politics of EJ, and also to the network ideas associated with actor‐network theory (ANT)‐inspired research on human–nature relations. Our account provides preliminary reflections on the potential for an “assemblage” perspective which draws together people, texts, machines, animals, devices and discourses in relations that collectively constitute—and scale—EJ. To conclude, and building upon this approach, we suggest future research avenues that we believe present a promising agenda for critical engagement with the production, scaling and politics of environmental (in)justice.
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