This paper examines how intercultural relations are continuously developed, destroyed, and remade in the practice of everyday bus travel. Through an ethnographic study of one bus route across Birmingham, UK, the paper explores the formation of relational practices on the move and the bodily orientations, public codes of conduct, material cultures, habits and affects through which they are formed. In particular, this paper gives specific attention to the tacit obligations of public travel and how such obligations both produce and sustain tolerance of others across a journey, to further reveal the multifaceted nature and workings of multicultural intimacies on the ground. In so doing, the paper responds to recent calls to politically revalorise public mobility spaces as key sites of encounter and identity formation, to position the bus as a crucial site of everyday multiculture through which wider processes of differentiation and exclusion are experienced and further understood.
Paradoxically, the focus on teen motherhood as an object of concern in the West has coincided with declining rates of teen birth. This suggests that the view of teenage motherhood as problematic is underpinned by changing social and political imperatives regarding the role of women in these countries. This article examines the literature surrounding teenage motherhood from the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand, and explores the way in which normative perceptions of motherhood have shifted over the past few decades to position teenage mothers as stigmatised and marginalised. Two specific discourses -those of welfare dependency and social exclusion -are highlighted, and their mediation through scientific discourses examined. The increasing trend to evidence-based policy development has masked the ideological basis of much policy in this area and highlights the importance of critical evaluation of the discourses surrounding teenage motherhood. A critical examination of the literature suggests that teenage mothers are vilified, not because the evidence of poor outcomes for teen mothers and their children is particularly compelling, but because these young women resist the typical life trajectory of their middle-class peers which conforms to the current governmental objectives of economic growth through higher education and increased female workforce participation.
The notion of encounter has been used widely within work on urban diversity and socio-cultural difference, yet it remains under-theorized. This paper argues that ‘encounter’ is a conceptually charged construct that is worthy of sustained and critical attention. Drawing on a wide range of geographical interests, including animal geographies, urban diversity, postcolonialism, mobile geographies, and the more-than-human, it offers the first examination of how ‘encounter’ has been deployed across the discipline. By further tracing the historical links between geography and encounter, the paper contends that encounters are distinct genres of contact, and demonstrates why this matters for geographical thought, and how we think about bodies, borders, and difference.
In this commentary we explore how geographers might respond to the event of "Brexit"the decision and process of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union after the referendum of 23 June 2016. Although it is necessary to understand the ways in which Brexit is an effect of a range of named causes and conditions, we argue that geographers should also stay with the event of "Brexit" by following how Brexit surfaces across a variety of everyday scenes and situations.Such geographies of everyday Brexit would begin from the different ways in which people, groups and organisations relate to Brexit through the making present of diverse futures. As futures are anticipated, hoped for, suspended or otherwise related to, Brexit (re)animates relations of power, and gives rise to new forms of collective and bodily life. K E Y W O R D S affect, Brexit, everyday, futures 1 | WHAT KIND OF THING IS BREXIT?In the days that followed the UK referendum of 23 June 2016 the verdict by a margin of 52% to 48% to leave the European Union had what Derrida, talking of 9/11, called the "impression of a major event" (Derrida & Borradori, 2003, p. 88) it appeared to both disrupt and open up possibilities. Immediately narrated as a decision to break with a long accepted, but for many only ambivalently attached to, status quo, the "impression" of a major event was created through a turbulent mix of dramatic scenes of jubilation and devastation, joys and despairs, which punctuated more familiar moods of resignation, apathy, or indifference (on which see Fisher, 2009;Gilbert, 2015). What very quickly became named and known as "Brexit" saturated everyday life in multiple, disjunctive ways; becoming as the exhilaration and joy of the return of something lost and the possibility of unspecified, better futures to come ("sovereignty", "control", "Britishness"), and the despair and worry of an unsettled present foreshadowed by future losses (of "influence" or "economic well-being", or a "tolerant Britishness"; see Wilson, 2016). As an act of voting quickly morphed into more or less intensely attached-to political identificationsremainers and leavers -Brexit became an occasion of dissensus and the complex enactment and reproduction of existing power relations and inequalities; intensifying, revealing and foregrounding existing divides of class, age, ethnicity, race, and locality, while also cutting across other commonalities (for example, on the whiteness of Brexit, see Emejulu, 2016). Perhaps it was felt as a "major event" not only because something settled was overturned, not only because of the surprise of a changeeven if exiting the EU had been successfully framed in the leave campaign as a simple solution to a range of contemporary illsbut because there was and is no consensus about the UK's (post)Brexit futures. Brexit was and is encountered as promise and threat, salvation and disaster, opportunity and mischance, or simply more of the same. And perhaps it has retained the "impression of a major event" because, despite efforts, it has not yet ...
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