Alice Mah

Devastation but also Home: Place Attachment in Areas of Industrial Decline

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the phenomenon of place attachment to “home” in two areas of industrial decline: Walker, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), and Highland, Niagara Falls, New York (USA). The research contributes to theoretical and empirical literatures from sociology, anthropology, geography, environmental psychology, and material culture studies on notions of place, community, memory, and home. Despite socioeconomic deprivation and material devastation in areas of industrial decline, houses and neighborhood spaces can become invested with notions of family and community unity, nostalgia for a shared industrial past, and stability amidst socioeconomic change. Place attachment to “home” is particularly painful during times of post-industrial transition: in the case of Walker, peoples homes are under threat of demolition with imminent City-Council-led regeneration of the community; and in the case of Highland, houses are located on contaminated and economically unviable land. Drawing in both cases on semi-structured interviews with a range of local people between 2005 and 2007, this article argues that narratives of place attachment—of “devastation but also home”—reveal some of the contradictions and uncertainties of living through difficult processes of social and economic change.

Environmental justice in the age of big data: challenging toxic blind spots of voice, speed, and expertise

In recent years, grassroots environmental justice activists have increasingly used big data techniques for monitoring, recording, and reporting toxic environmental exposures. Despite the promise of big data for environmental justice, there is a need to address structural barriers to making toxic environmental exposures visible, and to avoid over-relying on new digital methods and techniques as a panacea for problems of voice. The emphasis of real-time analysis in crowdsourced and participatory big data is good at tracking the immediate aftermath of environmental disasters, but it misses slower-burning environmental problems that emerge over time. While big data more generally may have implications for understanding toxic exposure landscapes across different temporal and spatial scales, it is complex, difficult to analyze, and faces significant problems of reliability. There are three key blind spots of the ethos and practice of big data in relation to environmental justice: voice, speed, and expertise. In the context of increasing pressure to embrace new tools and technologies, it is also important to slow down and to reflect on the wider implications of the age of big data.

The Dereliction Tourist: Ethical Issues of Conducting Research in Areas of Industrial Ruination:

Dereliction tourism is the act of seeking out abandoned industrial sites as sites of aesthetic pleasure, leisure or adventure. Drawing on research in areas of industrial ruination in Russia, the UK and North America, this article examines the role of the ‘dereliction tourist’ as a way of critically reflecting on the ethics of ‘outsider’ research. Ethical problems are associated with both dereliction tourism and ethnographic research in areas of industrial decline, including voyeurism, romanticization, and the reproduction of negative stereotypes about marginal people and places. However, both dereliction tourism and ethnographic research also share more positive ethical possibilities through offering alternative ways of imagining places and raising social justice awareness of issues related to deprivation and blight. Through considering the ambivalent figure of the dereliction tourist in relation to ethnography, this article advances a way of being in the research field through intrinsic ethical reflection and practice.

Human Rights and Ethical Reasoning: Capabilities, Conventions and Spheres of Public Action

This interdisciplinary article argues that human rights must be understood in terms of opportunities for social participation and that social and economic rights are integral to any discussion of the subject. We offer both a social constructionist and a normative framework for a sociology of human rights which reaches beyond liberal individualism, combining insights from the work of Amartya Sen and from French convention theory. Following Sen, we argue that human rights are founded on the promotion of human capabilities as ethical demands shaped by public reasoning. Using French convention theory, we show how the terms of such deliberation are shaped by different constructions of collectively held values and the compromises reached between them. We conclude by demonstrating how our approach offers a new perspective on spheres of public action and the role these should play in promoting social cohesion, individual capabilities and human rights.

Moral judgements and employment policies in Birmingham (1870‐1914): multiplying the categories and treatments of the “undeserving”

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the justifying arguments of various Birmingham organisations between 1870 and 1914 in classifying and treating the unemployed. Using a capability approach, the paper will examine how employment policies in Birmingham during this period promoted or limited capabilities of work, life and voice. Finally, implications for labour market policies today will be discussed.Design/methodology/approach – The theoretical framework for this paper will draw on the capability approach to a persons well‐being, developed by Amartya Sen and on theoretical and empirical developments of the capability approach by other authors such as Bonvin and Salais. This paper is based on historical archival research and analysis.Findings – Birmingham was an exemplar of municipal social reform in late nineteenth century England, with the development of a range of public services such as education, electricity and public transport. However, the citys vision of civic reform was closely co...

Research on environmental justice in China : limitations and possibilities

This note focuses on current sociological research being conducted in China on the concept of environmental justice. It critically reviews how the concept has been used in the Chinese context since the 1990s, evaluating some of the possibilities and limitations of the concept. We argue that environmental justice is a useful concept in the context of China, due to its resonance with environmental concepts and axes of social mobilization (particularly in relation to procedural justice and law), its capacity to address social as well as environmental issues of structural inequality together, and its resonance with shared ideas of social justice within Chinese legal traditions. However, the concept of environmental justice also has clear limitations. Practically, environmental justice has been used predominantly in the academic sphere in China, with very little take-up in civil society discussions about the environment.