Young caregiving and HIV in the UK: caring relationships and mobilities in African migrant families

Recent research in Sub-Saharan Africa has revealed the importance of children’s caring roles in families affected by HIV and AIDS. However, few studies have explored young caregiving in the context of HIV in the UK, where recently arrived African migrant and refugee families are adversely affected by the global epidemic. This paper explores young people’s socio-spatial experiences of caring for a parent with HIV, based on qualitative research with 37 respondents in London and other urban areas in England. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with young people with caring responsibilities and mothers with HIV, who were predominantly African migrants, as well as with service providers. Drawing on their perspectives, the paper discusses the ways that young people and mothers negotiate the boundaries of young people’s care work within and beyond homespace, according to norms of age, gender, generational relations and cultural constructions of childhood. Despite close attachments within the family, the emotional effects of living with a highly stigmatised life-limiting illness, pressures associated with insecure immigration status, transnational migration and low income undermined African mothers’ and young people’s sense of security and belonging to homespace. These factors also restricted their mobility and social participation in school/college and neighbourhood spaces. While young people and mothers valued supportive safe spaces within the community, the stigma surrounding HIV significantly affected their ability to seek support. The article identifies security, privacy, independence and social mobility as key dimensions of African young people’s and mothers’ imagined futures of ‘home’ and ‘family’.

Shaping children’s mobilities: expectations of gendered parenting in the English rural idyll

This paper explores the impact of local parenting practices and children's everyday use of public space within two villages in the rural South West of England, an issue that has been underexplored in recent research. Drawing upon the concept of hybridity, it explores the interplay between the social, natural and material in shaping local cultures of rural parenting. The paper begins by drawing upon recent research on parenting in the global North, the gendering of rural space and hybridity to show how these bodies of work can be interlinked to better understand rural parenting practices and norms. Through empirical research that focused on the relationships between gendered parenting strategies, idealised notions of rural motherhood and materiality, the paper explores the diverse ways in which a group of working and middle-class mothers construct and define ideas about their children's lives and mobilities. Whilst dominant discourses of rurality focus upon the idyll, and gendered identities of rural women still remain within the domestic sphere, so we examine how these deeply embedded notions of ‘normality’ can be powerful social tools in rural villages, mobilised through discourses of materiality and anxiety. In our conclusions, we argue that the hybrid integration of the material and social provides a useful framework for understanding the everyday geographies of rural parenting.

Past mobilities: archaeological approaches to movement and mobility

The new mobilities paradigm has yet to have the same impact on archaeology as it has in other disciplines in the social sciences – on geography, sociology and anthropology in particular – yet mobility is fundamental to archaeology: all people move. Moving away from archaeology’s traditional focus upon place or location, this volume treats mobility as a central theme in archaeology. The chapters are wide-ranging and methodological as well as theoretical, focusing on the flows of people, ideas, objects and information in the past; it also focuses on archaeology’s distinctiveness. Drawing on a wealth of archaeological evidence for movement, from paths, monuments, rock art and boats, to skeletal and DNA evidence, Past Mobilities presents research from a range of examples from around the world to explore the relationship between archaeology and movement, thus adding an archaeological voice to the broader mobilities discussion. As such, they will be of interest not only to archaeologists and historians, but also to sociologists, geographers and anthropologists.

Determination of sorbate and benzoate in beverage samples by capillary electrophoresis - Optimization of the method with inspection of ionic mobilities

The aim of this study was to develop a fast capillary electrophoresis method for the determination of benzoate and sorbate ions in commercial beverages. In the method development the pH and constituents of the background electrolyte were selected using the effective mobility versus pH curves. As the high resolution obtained experimentally for sorbate and benzoate in the studies presented in the literature is not in agreement with that expected from the ionic mobility values published, a procedure to determine these values was carried out. The salicylate ion was used as the internal standard. The background electrolyte was composed of 25 mmol L(-1) tris(hydroxymethyl)aminomethane and 12.5 mmol L(-1) 2-hydroxyisobutyric acid, atpH 8.1.Separation was conducted in a fused-silica capillary(32 cm total length and 8.5 cm effective length, 50 mu m I.D.), with short-end injection configuration and direct UV detection at 200 nm for benzoate and salicylate and 254 nm for sorbate ions. The run time was only 28 s. A few figures of merit of the proposed method include: good linearity (R(2) > 0.999), limit of detection of 0.9 and 0.3 mg L(-1) for benzoate and sorbate, respectively, inter-day precision better than 2.7% (n =9) and recovery in the range 97.9-105%. Beverage samples were prepared by simple dilution with deionized water (1:11, v/v). Concentrations in the range of 197-401 mg L(-1) for benzoate and 28-144 mg L(-1) for sorbate were found in soft drinks and tea. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Mobilidades Urbanas - The Mobilities Turn in the Social Sciences

Em uma conjuntura de expansão urbana, intensificação do consumo, mudança climática e escassez de petróleo, o tema das mobilidades assume inquestionável importância econômica, social e ambiental. O seminário internacional "Mobilidades Urbanas: Alicerces para Pesquisas Transnacionais" volta-se, por um lado, para a fomentação do debate em torno do paradigma das novas mobilidades - envolvendo mobilidade espacial e socioeconômica, entre outras - e de sua aplicabilidade no contexto brasileiro; por outro, para a capacitação de pesquisadores cujas investigações tematizam os processos de mobilidade social e espacial a partir de perspectivas comparativas e transnacionais.

Mobilidades Urbanas - Brevíssimas notas sobre o projeto 'Emerging Middle Classes and Low Carbon Mobilities: Setting long term foundations for transnational research'

Em uma conjuntura de expansão urbana, intensificação do consumo, mudança climática e escassez de petróleo, o tema das mobilidades assume inquestionável importância econômica, social e ambiental. O seminário internacional "Mobilidades Urbanas: Alicerces para Pesquisas Transnacionais" volta-se, por um lado, para a fomentação do debate em torno do paradigma das novas mobilidades - envolvendo mobilidade espacial e socioeconômica, entre outras - e de sua aplicabilidade no contexto brasileiro; por outro, para a capacitação de pesquisadores cujas investigações tematizam os processos de mobilidade social e espacial a partir de perspectivas comparativas e transnacionais.

Complex tracer mobilities in polymer networks revealed by fluorescence correlation spectroscopy

Gels are elastic porous polymer networks that are accompanied by pronounced mechanical properties. Due to their biocompatibility, ‘responsive hydrogels’ (HG) have many biomedical applications ranging from biosensors and drug delivery to tissue engineering. They respond to external stimuli such as temperature and salt by changing their dimensions. Of paramount importance is the ability to engineer penetrability and diffusion of interacting molecules in the crowded HG environment, as this would enable one to optimize a specific functionality. Even though the conditions under which biomedical devices operate are rather complex, a bottom-up approach could reduce the complexity of mutually coupled parameters influencing tracer mobility. The present thesis focuses on the interaction-induced tracer diffusion in polymer solutions and their homologous gels, probed by means of Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS). This is a single-molecule-sensitive technique having the advantage of optimal performance under ultralow tracer concentrations, typically employed in biosensors. Two different types of hydrogels have been investigated, a conventional one with broad polydispersity in the distance between crosslink points and a so-called ‘ideal’, with uniform mesh size distribution. The former is based on a thermoresponsive polymer, exhibiting phase separation in water at temperatures close to the human body temperature. The latter represents an optimal platform to study tracer diffusion. Mobilities of different tracers have been investigated in each network, varying in size, geometry and in terms of tracer-polymer attractive strength, as perturbed by different stimuli. The thesis constitutes a systematic effort towards elucidating the role of the strength and nature of different tracer-polymer interactions, on tracer mobilities; it outlines that interactions can still be very important even in the simplified case of dilute polymer solutions; it also demonstrates that the presence of permanent crosslinks exerts distinct tracer slowdown, depending on the tracer type and the nature of the tracer-polymer interactions, expressed differently by each tracer with regard to the selected stimulus. In aqueous polymer solutions, the tracer slowdown is found to be system-dependent and no universal trend seems to hold, in contrast to predictions from scaling theory for non-interacting nanoparticle mobility and empirical relations concerning the mesh size in polymer solutions. Complex tracer dynamics in polymer networks may be distinctly expressed by FCS, depending on the specific synergy among-at least some of - the following parameters: nature of interactions, external stimuli employed, tracer size and type, crosslink density and swelling ratio.

Introduction: Sociolinguistics and tourism - mobilities, markets, multilingualism

In the introduction to this special issue on Sociolinguistics and Tourism, we focus on language in tourism as an important window into contemporary forms of economic, political, and social change. Our aim is twofold: (1) to establish and extend ‘sociolinguistics and tourism’ as another social and applied domain of sociolinguistic research; and (2) to use tourism as a lens for a broader discussion of the sociolinguistics of late modernity. To this end, we outline the contours of language and tourism research to date; we consider the (re)conceptualization of key thematics or notions in sociolinguistic research – such as ‘community’, ‘identity’, and ‘language’ itself – as particularly germane to the study of tourism's fleeting encounters; we examine the inevitable tensions between commodification and authenticity; and we explore the links between performances of ‘self’ and ‘other’, and the contestation of different identity positions with regard to social actors’ multilingual repertoires. We illustrate these issues with data examples from several tourist sites, where multilingual resources are deployed for identification, authentication and commodification. Finally, we briefly introduce the papers in this special issue and conclude by commenting on some sociolinguistic consequences of the study of language/s in tourism.

Mobilities, Entanglements and Transformations in Neolithic societies on the Swiss Plateau (3900-3500 BC)

The material culture of Neolithic settlements – especially pottery – was often taken as key argument to distinguish „Neolithic cultures“ like Cortaillod, Pfyn, Michelsberg, Munzingen, NMB, Altheim. „Foreign influences“ in these pottery styles point to complex entanglements between social groups and highly mobile people, bluring the supposed cultural boundaries. The two PhD-projects aim at a critical revision of former notions of „culture“ by focussion on similarities and differences in pottery practecies of dedrodated key sites on the Swiss Plateau (3900 -3500 BC).