Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present

Sex, Time and Place extensively widens the scope of what we might mean by 'queer London studies'. Incorporating multidisciplinary perspectives – including social history, cultural geography, visual culture, literary representation, ethnography and social studies – this collection asks new questions, widens debates and opens new subject terrain. Featuring essays from an international range of established scholars and emergent voices, the collection is a timely contribution to this growing field. Its essays cover topics such as activist and radical communities and groups, AIDS and the city, art and literature, digital archives and technology, drag and performativity, lesbian London, notions of bohemianism and deviancy, sex reform and research and queer Black history. Going further than the existing literature on Queer London which focuses principally on the experiences of white gay men in a limited time frame, Sex, Time and Place reflects the current state of this growing and important field of study. It will be of great value to scholars, students and general readers who have an interest in queer history, London studies, cultural geography, visual cultures and literary criticism.

Policy mixes for resource efficiency – conceptual issues, design and assessment challenges

Since the 1950s the global consumption of natural resources has skyrocketed, both in magnitude and in the range of resources used. Closely coupled with emissions of greenhouse gases, land consumption, pollution of environmental media, and degradation of ecosystems, as well as with economic development, increasing resource use is a key issue to be addressed in order to keep the planet Earth in a safe and just operating space. This requires thinking about absolute reductions in resource use and associated environmental impacts, and, when put in the context of current re-focusing on economic growth at the European level, absolute decoupling, i.e., maintaining economic development while absolutely reducing resource use and associated environmental impacts. Changing behavioural, institutional and organisational structures that lock-in unsustainable resource use is, thus, a formidable challenge as existing world views, social practices, infrastructures, as well as power structures, make initiating change difficult. Hence, policy mixes are needed that will target different drivers in a systematic way. When designing policy mixes for decoupling, the effect of individual instruments on other drivers and on other instruments in a mix should be considered and potential negative effects be mitigated. This requires smart and time-dynamic policy packaging. This Special Issue investigates the following research questions: What is decoupling and how does it relate to resource efficiency and environmental policy? How can we develop and realize policy mixes for decoupling economic development from resource use and associated environmental impacts? And how can we do this in a systemic way, so that all relevant dimensions and linkages—including across economic and social issues, such as production, consumption, transport, growth and wellbeing­—are taken into account? In addressing these questions, the overarching goals of this Special Issue are to: address the challenges related to more sustainable resource-use; contribute to the development of successful policy tools and practices for sustainable development and resource efficiency (particularly through the exploration of socio-economic, scientific, and integrated aspects of sustainable development); and inform policy debates and policy-making. The Special Issue draws on findings from the EU and other countries to offer lessons of international relevance for policy mixes for more sustainable resource-use, with findings of interest to policy makers in central and local government and NGOs, decision makers in business, academics, researchers, and scientists.

An ethnographic investigation into gender and language in the Northern Ireland Assembly

This paper investigates the extent to which the negative evaluation of one of the women Ministers in the Northern Ireland Assembly can be attributed to gender. Interviews with politicians as well as the Minister herself illuminate this discussion by identifying the ‘gendered discourses’ that are drawn upon when describing the Minister’s communicative style in debates. Close analyses of transcripts of debates offer a description of some elements of this style, and find that while the Minister is confrontational in debates and ‘stands her ground’, she does not take part in illegal interventions that disrupt the debate floor and are characteristic of the Assembly as a whole. Although the construction of the Minister’s unpopularity can be attributed to a complex interplay of factors, it can be concluded that it is partly the way she draws on gendered linguistic resources that leads her to be negatively judged by her peers.

Gender, language and floor apportionment in political debates

Political debates are speech events which foreground issues of power and the `floor', and allow the opportunity of assessing the ways in which the gender of participants affects their construction as more or less powerful participants in debates. Debates in the British House of Commons are adversarial in style, making it appropriate to view the floor as `the site of a contest where there is a winner and a loser'. Previous research into political debates has found that male participants violate the formal rules in debates more than their female counterparts, in order to gain the floor. Although the canonical form and rules of debates exist to `permit the equalization of turns', rule violations are common, and inequalities between participants exist. In this article legal and illegal interventions are evaluated in five debates in order to establish the extent to which the gender of participants is related to the control that an individual has over the debate floor.

Local strategic partnerships in England: the continuing search for collaborative advantage, leadership and strategy in urban governance

Local Strategic Partnerships are being established in England to provide an inclusive, collaborative and strategic focus to regeneration strategies at the local level. They are also required to rationalise the proliferation of local and micro-partnerships set up by a succession of funding initiatives over the last 25 years. This article explores their remit, resources and membership and discusses how this initiative relates to theoretical work on urban governance, community engagement and leadership. It concludes by debating whether urban policy in England is now entering a new and more advanced phase based on inter-organisational networks with a strategic purpose. But questions remain about whether the institutional capacity is sufficient to deliver strong local leadership, accountability and community engagement.

Exploring the intangible impacts of cultural events on the creative sector: Experiences from the Cultural Olympiad programmes of Torino 2006 and London 2012

This paper engages with the debates around the Olympic legacy by exploring the qualitative, intangible impacts of the Cultural Olympiad programme on local small creative firms in Torino, Italy and London, UK. The research objectives are achieved through a qualitative study of local small creative firms’ perceptions of the impacts of the Olympic Games’ cultural programme on their activities. To achieve this, Torino 2006 and London 2012 are used as case studies. The findings of this exploratory study show that cultural events can impact the creative sector. They do this by providing opportunities for mutual learning and access to initiatives that may generate ideas and new skills, as well as contributing to the development of a creative field. The study also explores the weaknesses and missed opportunities linked to the Cultural Olympiad programme, as perceived by creative practitioners. These include the lack of information and failure to engage smaller businesses. Based on qualitative analysis and discussion, recommendations for future organizers and further research are provided.

Plurality, policy and the local: can hyperlocals fill the gap?

Over the last 15 years, the acceleration in media consolidation has presented a series of policy challenges around diversity of editorial output. While policy debates on national ownership limits and other regulatory interventions are important, developments at the local level are often marginalised. And yet, the direction of travel—towards more consolidation and more deregulation—has arguably been more debilitating for democracy at the local level, where the vast majority of citizens interact with hospitals, schools, transport systems and local councils. The decline of local media—including, in some towns, the wholesale disappearance of local newspapers—leaves citizens starved of information and local institutions less accountable. This article uses an existing conceptual framework for assessing whether and how journalism makes a real-life contribution to democratic life at the local level. Against this normative framework, it then assesses the contribution of hyperlocal media sites to local democracy. We present findings from the most extensive survey of the hyperlocal sector to date, a collaboration with research partners at Cardiff and Birmingham City Universities and Talk About Local, which analysed online questionnaires from over 180 local online media initiatives. Our research offers a unique insight into the funding, operational problems and sustainability of community media sites, and suggests they have the potential to fulfil a vital democratic and civic role. These data inform our conclusions and recommendations for policy initiatives that would invigorate hyperlocal sites and therefore provide a real alternative for otherwise democratically impoverished local communities.

Urban design, central London and the ‘crisis’ 2007-2013: business as usual?

London is changing, to a breath-taking extent. Beneath this fast paced activity, new patterns are forming and divisions that had been relatively unremarked before are now becoming increasingly visible. The ‘square mile’ of the City of London, which is now identified by some dramatically tall buildings, forms a contrast to the traditional urbanism of the City of Westminster, the majority of which is covered by conservation area legislation. This paper will consider this contrast from the perspective of urban design, examining both the wider development context for these changes and the separate design policies of these two historic organisations of local government. One of the key questions to be investigated is how these changes have impacted on the character of central London as a place. Moving on from the well-rehearsed debates about London’s skyline, the paper considers the significance of urban design in the context of a global urban spatial economy. It suggests that central London faces severe dilemmas about its future if the growth scenario continues.

Migration, Space and Transnational Identities: The British in South Africa

This timely text explores the lives, histories and identities of white British-born immigrants in South Africa, twenty years after the post-apartheid Government took office. Drawing on over sixty in depth biographical interviews and ethnographic work in Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg and Cape Town, Daniel Conway and Pauline Leonard analyse how British immigrants' relate to, participate in and embody South Africa's complex racial and political history. Through their everyday lives, political and social attitudes, relationships with the places and spaces of South Africa, as well as their expectations of the future, the complexities of their transnational, raced and classed identities and senses of belonging are revealed. Migration, Space and Transnational Identities makes an important contribution to sociological, geographical, political and anthropological debates on transnational migration, whiteness, Britishness and lifestyle, tourism and labour migration.

'The Rich Harmonics of Past Time': Memory and Montage

This article examines John Sommerfield’s 1936 novel, May Day, a work that experiments with multiple perspectives, voices and modes. The article examines the formal experiments of the novel in order to bring into focus contemporary debates around the aesthetics of socialist realism, the politics of Popular Front anti-fascism and the relationship between writers on the left and the legacies of literary modernism. The article suggests that while leftist writers’ appropriations of modernist techniques have been noted by critics, there has been a tendency to assume that such approaches were in contravention of the aesthetics of socialist realism. Socialist realism is shown to be more a fluid and disputed concept than such readings suppose, and Sommerfield’s adaptations of modernist textual strategies are interpreted as key components of a political aesthetic directed towards the problems of alienation and social fragmentation.

Walter Benjamin and the Inhumanities: Towards a Pedagogical Anti-Nietzscheanism

The following discussion is intended as a critical intervention into recent debates about the “crisis of the humanities,” reading the symptomaticity of crisis in the medical sense of a turning point. It does so from the perspective of the work of Walter Benjamin, whose own transdisciplinary practice of thought has been characterized as a “philosophy directed against philosophy” and a “philosophizing beyond philosophy,” and stands as a model for the kind of intellectual and para-academic activity evoked here. Historically re-situating Benjamin’s famous allegory of the Angel of History from the twentieth-century context of the “crisis of culture” to the contemporary “crisis of education,” it attempts to reconstruct a dialectical understanding of pedagogization within Benjamin’s work, which is used to sketch out the contours of a critically reimagined pedagogy of the Inhumanities.