Nick Clarke

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical Consumption presents an innovative reinterpretation of the forces that have shaped the remarkable growth of ethical consumption. Develops a theoretically informed new approach to shape our understanding of the pragmatic nature of ethical action in consumption processes. Provides empirical research on everyday consumers, social networks, and campaigns. Fills a gap in research on the topic with its distinctive focus on fair trade consumption. Locates ethical consumption within a range of social theoretical debates –on neoliberalism, governmentality, and globalisation. Challenges the moralism of much of the analysis of ethical consumption, which sees it as a retreat from proper citizenly politics and an expression of individualised consumerism.

Urban policy mobility, anti-politics, and histories of the transnational municipal movement

This paper brings geographical research on urban policy mobility into conversation with historical research on the transnational municipal movement. It argues that much of conceptual and methodological interest can be found in this second literature, especially in Pierre-Yves Saunier’s research on the ‘Urban International’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It also uses findings from Saunier’s work to identify and highlight salient characteristics and new lines of inquiry regarding contemporary urban policy mobility. These include that urban policy circulation in the 21st century is (dis)organized, geographically extensive, fast, and anti-political.

Detailing transnational lives of the middle: British working holiday makers in Australia

In recent years, writings on transnationalism have commendably repopulated a world stripped by globalisation theorists with institutions and capable individuals. But, in doing so, they have tended to focus on either end of the labour market, neglecting the middle, and to operate at altitude, neglecting the everyday intricacies of travelling and dwelling. Australias working holiday programme enables young citizens of arrangement countries to holiday and work in Australia for up to 12 months. During 2001–02, I spent nine months researching—observing, formally interviewing, participating with—British and other working holiday makers (WHMs) in Sydney and a few secondary sites. I found that detailing transnational lives of the middle provides flesh for the bones thrown by James Clifford when he wrote rather speculatively on practices of travelling-in-dwelling and dwelling-in-travelling. WHMs travel-in-dwelling passively through the Internet, television, radio, and portable objects; and interactively through phone calls, e-mails, gifts and face-to-face conversation with other WHMs. And WHMs dwell-in-travelling through backpacker and local communities, drawing on objects and technologies, sites, and events and rhythms. I also found that detailing transnational lives of the middle gives us some new bones: the metaphor of uneven mobility as a means of differentiating middling transnationalisms. Some WHMs embrace corporeal, virtual and imaginative mobility more than others, as do some more permanent residents of Sydney.

The Political Rationalities of Fair-Trade Consumption in the United Kingdom

This article situates the analysis of fair-trade consumption in the context of debates about civic activism and political participation. It argues that fair-trade consumption should be understood as a political phenomenon, which, through the mediating action of organizations and campaigns, makes claims on states, corporations, and institutions. This argument is made by way of a case study of Traidcraft, a key player in the fair-trade movement in the United Kingdom. The study focuses on how Traidcraft approaches and enrolls its supporters.

Town Twinning in Cold-War Britain: (Dis)continuities in Twentieth-Century Municipal Internationalism

This paper draws on correspondence and other material in the National Archives at Kew, London, to provide an historical narrative of town twinning in Cold-War Britain. In doing so, it supplements a literature on town twinning that has little to say about international municipal partnerships involving British localities. It also supplements a literature on municipal internationalism that tends to focus on either municipal connections around the turn of the twentieth century or the perceived ‘new localism’ of the last few decades. The argument developed is that twentieth-century municipal internationalism was shaped in Britain by continuities of desire and interest at the local level and discontinuities of opportunity at the national and international levels. Various models of town twinning became available to British localities after the Second World War. During the Cold War, the British Government intervened in the availability of some of these models, not least because of fears about Communist penetration through town twinning. By the late 1970s, such intervention had ensured that town twinning in Britain was associated with civic and cultural exchanges within Western Europe.

A Third-Generation Telecare System using Fuzzy Ambient Intelligence

The automated care and monitoring of vulnerable people is becoming a reality with the rapid development and improvement of networked sensor technologies. Many researchers have shown considerable success in determining immediate causes for concern in well-being, such as detecting falls in the home. To date however, little emphasis has been placed on monitoring well-being in a long-term sense, known as third generation telecare. The system described in this paper involves a customised sensor network, able to detect a person’s movements and use of furniture and household items, coupled with a sophisticated fuzzy data analysis process able to infer activities that the monitored client is undertaking and thus answer high level queries such as “is the person eating regularly”. The system also detects abnormal patterns of behaviour and provides tools for long-term trend analysis such that gradual and subtle changes in behaviour can be clearly understood. Soft computing techniques are needed due to the high degree of uncertainty in the inference process. We also describe a trial of the system, which was installed in two homes. Results indicate that fuzzy analysis enables us to summarise the data in a manner which is useful to the care providers without them needing to be experts in data analysis. www.springerlink.com Artificial Intelligence Group, University of Bristol BS8 1TR UK T. Martin et al.: A Third-Generation Telecare System using Fuzzy Ambient Intelligence, Studies in Compu© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007 tational Intelligence (SCI) 72, 155–175 (2007)

Dynamic daily-living patterns and association analyses in tele-care systems

Tele-care systems aim to carry out intelligent analyses of a persons wellbeing using data about their daily activities. This is a very challenging task because the massive dataset is likely to be erroneous, possibly with misleading sections due to noise or missing values. Furthermore, the interpretation of the data is highly sensitive to the lifestyle of the monitored person and the environment in which they interact. In our tele-care project, sensor-network domain knowledge is used to overcome the difficulties of monitoring long-term wellbeing with an imperfect data source. In addition, a fuzzy association analysis is leveraged to implement a dynamic and flexible analysis over individual- and environment-dependent data.

The decline in diffuse support for national politics: the long view on political discontent in Britain

Abstract This research note considers how to track long-term trajectories of political discontent in Britain. Many accounts are confined to using either survey data drawn from recent decades or imperfect behavioral measures such as voting or party membership as indicators of political disengagement. We instead develop an approach that provides the long view on political disaffection. We first consider time-series data available from repeated survey measures. We next replicate historic survey questions to observe change in public opinion relative to earlier points in time. Finally, we use Stimson’s (1991) dyad-ratios algorithm to construct an over-time index of political discontent that combines data from multiple poll series. This reveals rising levels of political discontent for both specific and diffuse measures of mass opinion. Our method and findings offer insights into the rising tide of disillusionment afflicting many contemporary democracies.

Faith in Ethical Consumption

This chapter traces significant interconnections between faith-motivated activists and the widening participation in fair-trade activities in and around the city of Bristol in the UK. Despite the attempts of institutionalised religion to demonstrate the contrary (see, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, 1985) ‘faith and ‘the city’ have often been awkward bedfellows within social science narratives. Disciplines such as human geography, for example, have developed rather uncontroversial geographies of religion, marking out both geographies of difference, in which religion poses as an aspect of ethnicity or political factionalism (Guelke 2006), and geographies of landscape and place involving both formal and informal spaces of the sacred (Kong 2001). Beyond safe havens such as these, however, human geography’s account of the groups and individuals identified with faith and/or religion has often been characterised by embarrassment, suspicion or hostility. ‘Faith’ has become easily essentialised as fundamentalist, proselytising, politically conformist and integrally immersed in the workings of the capitalist state and, as such, it has been framed as an object of critique rather than a legitimate source of explanation and understanding (Cloke 2002).

Golden age, apathy or stealth? Democratic engagement in Britain, 1945–1950

Abstract This article revisits democratic engagement in post-war Britain in a context of debates about political disaffection in the current period. The study systematically reanalysed volunteer writing in the Mass Observation Archive and represents a significant methodological advance on previous studies. Little evidence was found to support common existing interpretations: whether ‘golden age’ narratives of deference to authority, partisan alignment and high voter turnout or revisionist accounts of apathy. Instead, evidence was found of something akin to what Hibbing and Theiss-Morse call ‘stealth democracy’. Citizens thought democracy to be important and felt a duty to vote, but wished for government by experts in the national interest. This ‘stealth’ interpretation builds on existing studies of duty, populism and expertise in twentieth-century Britain. It helps to move discussion of democratic engagement after the Second World War beyond the binaries of self/collective and private/public, and to explain the paradox of high voter turnout in a context of hostility to party politics. It also promises to inform debates about declining political support in the current period.