Katie McQuaid

Intergenerational Community-Based Research and Creative Practice: Promoting Environmental Sustainability in Jinja, Uganda

ABSTRACT This article critically reflects on the methodological approach developed for a recent project based in Jinja, Uganda, that sought to generate new forms of environmental knowledge and action utilizing diverse forms of creative intergenerational practice embedded within a broader framework of community-based participatory research. This approach provided new opportunities for intergenerational dialogue in Jinja, generated increased civic environmental engagement, and resulted in a participant-led campaign to share knowledge regarding sustainable biomass consumption. We term this approach intergenerational community-based research and creative practice. We discuss the advantages of this model while also reflecting throughout on the challenges of the approach.

Violent continuities: telling stories of one sexual minority life in the African Great Lakes region

This article examines the multi-layered continuities of violence experienced, navigated and narrated by those in the Great Lakes region from the perspective of one life. Drawing on the unfolding life stories of Alex, a sexual minority refugee in Uganda, it focuses upon the complex predicament of persecution and marginalisation of the region’s sexual minorities, as they navigate protracted political conflict, displacement and wider intersecting forms and sources of violence. This article aims to draw attention back to the lived realities of violence as they are interpreted and articulated through time and space in situated acts of speaking. An ethnographic life stories approach compels us to consider the agency of those who navigate complex constellations of intersecting and multiple forms of violence woven through the fabric of everyday life, the social topographies within which people navigate and the wider sociocultural, political and legal dimensions within which they live.

Placing ‘sustainability’ in context: narratives of sustainable consumption in Nanjing, China

Abstract This article examines how ordinary people practice the notion of ‘sustainable consumption’ in relation to their everyday lives and experiences of the wider environment and how these understandings relate to public discourses of sustainability in contemporary China. The paper is based on an empirical analysis of 129 narrative interviews with local residents in urban Nanjing, collected as part of an interdisciplinary and international comparative research project. It argues that in popular narratives, a combination of ‘being green’ – living a healthy lifestyle which has less impact on the environment – and being rational through qinjian jieyue – by reducing both consumption and waste –is regarded as key to sustainability. Such attitudes align with recent government campaigns to create an environmental-friendly and resource-conserving society. However, the analysis demonstrates how this sustainable way of consumption is restricted by Chinese mianzi and guanxi cultures, the anxieties caused by scares related to food safety, a social welfare system that does not promote a sense of security and a widespread distrust of products made in China which has diffused across society. We argue that studies on discourses and practices of sustainable consumption must strive to take more account of diverse local contexts and sociocultural frameworks.

Corporations, Consumerism and Culpability: Sustainability in the British Press

ABSTRACT Sustainability and sustainable development are prominent themes in international policy-making, corporate PR, news-media and academic scholarship. Its definitions are contested, however sustainability is associated with a three-pillar focus on economic development, environmental conservation and social justice, most recently espoused in the adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. In spite of its common usage, there is little research about how sustainability is represented and refracted in public discourse in different national contexts. We examine British national press coverage of sustainability and sustainable development in 2015 in a cross-market sample of national newspapers. Our findings show that key international policy events and environmental and social justice frames are peripheral, while neoliberalism and neoliberal environmentalism vis-à-vis the promotion of technocratic solutions, corporate social responsibility and “sustainable” consumerism are the predominant frames through which the British news-media reports sustainability. This holds regardless of newspaper quality and ideological orientation.

‘There is violence across, in all arenas’: listening to stories of violence amongst sexual minority refugees in Uganda

ABSTRACT This article examines the complex marginalisation and persecution faced by sexual minorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo and forced displacement into Uganda. It demonstrates the need to create space for the voices of sexual minorities within transitional justice, and to attend to the wider systems of violence occurring through conflict and in its aftermath, as they articulate how everyday sexuality-based violence intersects with wider political violence. This article thus calls for a more transformative gendered approach to transitional justice that goes beyond the legal to address deeply ingrained gendered hierarchies of exclusion and stigmatisation of non-heteronormative sexualities.