Philip Sarre

Choice and constraint in ethnic minority housing: A structurationist view

Abstract The paper argues that the theory of structuration can help to resolve some problems in explaining ethnic housing and segregation. First, it reviews some of the existing literature on ethnic housing, arguing that the polarisation between ‘choice’ and ‘constraint’ interpretations needs to be replaced by a more integrated view. Then it argues that the theory of structuration provides a promising way of pursuing such integration, though it is necessary to develop appropriate methodologies if research is to put structurationist views into practice. These methods will probably draw on realism. Finally, the paper presents a brief sketch of the findings of a research project into ethnic housing in Bedford, arguing that it can be explained only by a wide variety of factors, involving major structures as well as significant agency, and shows that choice and constraint have adjusted together and changed over time.

Course design in geography: The case of the Open university

Abstract The Open Universitys new second level‐course ‘Fundamentals of Human Geography’ is used to illustrate the process of designing and developing an integrated course using a team of academics who clearly define its aims and select the most appropriate of the available teaching media for particular aspects of the content. Readers are invited to consider the relevance of Open University experience to their own institutions.

Book Review: Rethinking green politics: nature, virtue and progress

uneasily with the book’s emphasis on the mutability of meaning and fluid identities. In both chapters this material is then contrasted with more recent poststructuralist work, effectively dismissing all that has gone before. In chapter 3, for example, Barker spends eight pages looking at research on representations of race, and two reminding us that stereotyping cannot be overcome by an appeal to the ‘real’ and that cultural politics is more concerned with the consequences of these representations (pp. 83–4). To be fair, these sudden shifts emerge through a chronological review of the development of cultural studies and reflect the ways in which the ‘crises of representation’ have problematized critical intervention. The chapters on audience work and the cultural politics of television do address these questions of textual representation through more recent and sophisticated scholarship. Yet while Barker’s examples of ‘television talk’ demonstrate that viewers draw upon representations to negotiate questions of identity, there is nothing about these conversations which is specifically limited to the viewing of television. The televisual text has been ‘dissolved’ into the audience readings, appearing only as talk, so that the medium itself seems to disappear before our eyes. In fact, Barker often makes TV stand in for all media – including print, which bound together Anderson’s imagined communities and Habermas’ public sphere – as if they are simply interchangeable. Perhaps what is missing is a sense of the particular place of television, its role as an object in our material culture and its situation in social networks. One of the key insights of more sociologically informed writers, like David Morley, is that television is more than just a resource for discursive identity construction, more than just a mediating object. As a clear introduction to key debates about identity and cultural politics this book is highly successful. It is just a shame that Barker’s conception of television does not allow him to cast his net wider and to consider the ways that it takes its place in particular social spaces and networks; but perhaps that is something geographers should be doing.