Journal Hosting Service | The University of Edinburgh
Not a member yet
5244 research outputs found
Sort by
A Playful Approach to the Five Ways to Wellbeing
No full textIn 2008, the New Economics Foundation (NEF) was commissioned to develop a set of evidence-based actions that would improve personal wellbeing and consequently, demonstrate \u27real economic wellbeing\u27 (Aked et al, 2008). Acknowledging the importance of personal, social, cultural, environmental, and economic determinants of health, the NEF replicated the ideals of the 5-a-Day campaign using advice from the World Health Organization to promote the need to eat at least five portions of a variety of fruit and vegetables every day, due to the significant health benefits this brings (NHS, 2022).Consequently, the NEF developed a new and creative approach to health promotion and developed the Five Ways to Wellbeing (Aked et al, 2008), which encourage us to Connect… Be active… Take notice… Keep learning… Give. These five simple steps can be followed every day to enhance mental health and wellbeing (Mind, 2023). 
‘The Impact of Community Work: How to Gather Evidence’ (2020) by, Sue Briggs, Kirsty Forrester, Ed Garrett, Karen McArdle and Catherine McKay
No full text‘The Impact of Community Work: How to Gather Evidence’ is a book which I would highly recommend to anyone with an interest in community work. In one sense the book does what it says on the tin and successfully makes the case as to why gathering evidence and measuring impact matters in community work. The book also doubles up however, as an introduction to both community work and community based social research. In terms of impact and evidence, Concept readers will be aware that community work is an intensely governed activity in which community work practitioners must justify what they do to different audiences which includes management, government, inspectors, funders and of course communities themselves. “It’s not enough to just do the work” as an inspector from Education Scotland once told me; “we also need evidence that the work makes an impact”. Inspectors often refer to “impact” as the “so-what” question, namely, so what practical and measurable difference is your working making. ‘The Impact of Community Work’ will enable readers to address that “so what” question and is written as a ‘practical’ and ‘how to guide’, which is neatly divided into two parts - ‘Thinking about Impact’ (Part One) and ‘Methods of Gathering Evidence’ (Part Two)
Pluralising Cancer
No full textThis Review essay seeks to interrogate the vast category of ‘cancer’. Taken together, the three books explored here pluralise cancer, locating it not just in organs and bodies but also in time and space—in the social, material, and historical specificities in which people become patients. These ethnographies break apart the notion of ‘the C word’, showing the diverse experiences and illnesses that are gathered under this banner. Cancers emerge as both unavoidably fatal and potentially controllable in different settings. At points, however, these anthropological texts may also reinforce the unity of a singular cancer. This essay suggests that clarity may be gained by more explicitly treating this notion as an object of their ethnography, historicising and theorising it. Wholeheartedly interrogating what is variously meant by the word cancer may have benefits, not only for improving the precision of anthropological work, but also for addressing the widespread fear that the term and its fairly uniform associations with suffering and death inspire. 
Photo-able Urban Green-Blue Spaces: Investigating Social Media Photographs of 186 Cities Worldwide
Get PDFUrban green–blue spaces (UGBSs) are increasingly integrated into the urban fabric transformation, playing a pivotal role in shaping everyday interactions and experiences with nature in the Anthropocene era. Crowdsourcing, facilitated by digital technologies, has emerged as a novel methodological advance for accessing subjective place-based information, allowing the public to produce and share photographs at an unprecedented scale. As people can now readily capture and disseminate images on social media from virtually any location, these photographs contribute to the digital representation of places. Many studies have leveraged social media imagery to explore mental maps of cities, place perceptions, and ecosystem services. This raises fundamental questions: What are the UGBSs that promote photography across cities? What are the similarities and differences among cities’ photogenic UGBSs? And how do cities’ photogenic UGBSs relate to the happiness of their inhabitants? This study investigates these questions through an analysis of 203,020 photographs, taken from social media, of sites across 186 cities over a five-year period (2014 to 2018). Employing Google Cloud Vision and topic modelling with a state-of-the-art neural network model, photographs are clustered and used to identify cross-city features. The correlation between prevalence of photogenic UGBSs and levels of happiness is investigated using linear regression analysis. The results show that UGBSs eliciting photography practice are predominantly characterised by water-related subjects, confirming a widespread aesthetic appreciation for urban blue spaces. Perceptions of UGBSs exhibit significant variability among cities, offering a metric to assess environmental policy efficacy. Lastly, a positive association is found in high-income contexts between number of social media photographs of UGBSs and subjective well-being, while this correlation is not significant in middle- and low-income contexts. This sheds light on human–nature relationships by providing global evidence of how aesthetic appreciation of urban nature influences human well-being
More-than-Human Jerusalem: Rethinking the urban landscape with postanthropocentric imagination
Get PDFAs a city that is at the same time unified, divided, fragmented, contested, mixed, neoliberal, post- and neo-colonial, Jerusalem / Al-Quds presents a unique combination of urban conditions. It is divided between East (part of the occupied West Bank) and West, and between Palestinian, Jewish-orthodox religious, and Jewish secular neighborhoods. It is a religious meta-city, in which past and future fantasies and obsessions are part of quotidian life, but also a fascinating place of everyday practices, unexpected encounters and productive frictions defying top-down categorizations. At the same time, it is a modern neo-liberal city, in which local and global capital play a major role in new urban developments.
It would be a mistake, however, to describe Jerusalem solely from an anthropocentric point of view, while neglecting its more-than-human components. The article will present the fruits of a three-year study, conducted as part of the More-than-Human Jerusalem Lab in Bezalel\u27s Master\u27s in Urban Design: Liquid Jerusalem (2021), Growing Jerusalem (2022) and Terra Jerusalem (2023). Together with the students, we explored possibilities for a renewed interaction between artificial and planned elements and between living organisms in the urban space, focusing on water, vegetation and soil in the city and their interweaving in urban culture and everyday experience.
The lab sought to challenge the separations between "nature" and "culture", and to develop nature-based solutions to offer a new perspective on the city, one that can open different futures of inclusion, care and cooperation between the human populations—but also between them and the more-than-human inhabitants of the city. Through a series of projects, the article will describe the research and methodological process of thinking about Jerusalem as a laboratory of the more-than-human suggesting planning tools designed to enhance urban resilience, justice and inclusion
Mapping procurement areas of lithic resources and mobility patterns: A GIS-based approach to the early colonization of Western Mediterranean islands
Get PDFIs it possible to define based on the circulation of chert and obsidian the patterns of mobility and the procurement strategies of lithic resources among the first inhabitants of the Western Mediterranean islands of Corsica and Sardinia?
This paper tackles this question through the following research objectives: 1) To build, through bibliographic research, a systematic database including all published data concerning the presence of chert and obsidian artefacts in Sardinian-Corsican sites dated to the Pre-Neolithic and the Early Neolithic; 2) To create a specific cartography on the geographical distribution of these lithotypes across the two studied islands. Data have been geo-referenced with the QGIS 3.20 open-source software, both to make them visible on the map and to introduce the fundamental variables of space-territory into the research; and 3) To define mobility patterns for the supply of chert and obsidian based on the available results of provenance analyses, using QGIS to draw the movement lines from the findspot to the source with the principle of the minimum effort: that is, through the development of a Least Cost Path Analysis (LCPA). This is to say that the tracing of the probable routes followed by humans will be based on the calculation of the shortest distances from the raw material sources to their findspots based on orography and topographic variables.
The results on the procurement areas and mobility patterns to perform specific tasks, as lithic procurement, will contribute to the debate on resource management and landscape knowledge of early human groups colonizing insular environments
Be Weary: Resistance and Refusal in Black American Music
Get PDFWeary bodies are frequently seen as hopeless, withdrawn, or useless. The common understanding is that weariness is uncritical, limited by fatigue, and always politically inactive. In the realm of Black expression, however, the recurring affect of weariness (and its recognition) is one that elucidates an impasse of endurance and resistance. The seemingly diametric theses of Max Roach’s ‘Members Don’t Git Weary’ and Solange Knowles’ ‘Weary’ evoke this paradox of survival, bringing necessary complexity to discussions of subjugation, agency, and refusal in the Black American context
Uniting Threads: The dual dimension of Mutual Aid: Perspectives from Greece
No full textThis article draws inspiration from the ongoing debate on mutual aid, particularly its emergence as a community-based and led response during the Covid-19 pandemic. One perspective views mutual aid as a positive collective practice, effective for immediate, small-scale needs but inadequate for addressing large-scale systemic inequalities. Advocates of this view propose that mutual aid should operate under state guidance to complement centrally orchestrated responses to systemic issues. In contrast, the opposing side challenges this view, asserting that mutual aid is inherently an emancipatory practice. It aligns with the core principles of anarchism, including anti-capitalism, anti-statism, and anti-authoritarianism. Owing to this ideological alignment, these proponents argue that mutual aid should not be supplementary to the state; doing so would risk transforming it into a form of charity.
This article aims to enrich the broader dialogue on mutual aid by introducing a dichotomous framework for its understanding. This framework categorises mutual aid into two distinct types:
Organic mutual aid, which arises \u27naturally\u27 from immediate communal needs but lacks the political impetus to confront hierarchical power structures.
Political mutual aid, born out of political motivation with the objective of challenging both official and unofficial hierarchical power structures.
To elucidate the necessity of this dichotomous framework in grasping mutual aid\u27s dual dimension, I will delve into both recent and past experiences of mutual aid in Greece. However, before advancing this proposal, it is essential to examine the underlying reasoning behind the two perspectives in this debate
Examining the ‘feminization of agriculture’ in a mixed-farming system in Sindhuli District, Nepal
Get PDFThis paper aims to explore the feminization of agriculture amidst the agrarian transition from cereal to citrus crops in Sindhuli district. Multiple ethnographic field studies in citrus-producing areas have been used to present the conceptual debate and empirical findings on the feminization of agriculture in a mixed-farming system. The paper highlights changing labor arrangements for household labor, exchange labor, and wage labor in agriculture and presents the nature of the agricultural work conducted by men and women. The paper argues that cash crop farming has resulted in a gendered hierarchy in agriculture, with men primarily occupied with skill-based work in high-value citrus crops, while women’s engagement is mainly limited to subsistence farming and menial agricultural tasks. However, some women directly benefit at the household level because of their involvement in citrus production. The study shows that gender-based inequalities in labor use have the power to reinforce and intensify the existing gender roles that render women subordinate. However, women choose their work based on its importance for household food security. The paper portrays four categories of feminization, namely feminization of labor vis-à-vis managerial feminization, feminization of labor categories such as household, exchange, and wage labor, and feminization of particular crop/livestock and subsistence/commercial farming. The study concludes that feminization varies based on the degree of crop marketability