Europe has set out its plans to foster a 'green economy', focused around recycling, by 2020. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of: first, stopping wastes being 'dumped' on poor countries; second, reusing them and thus decoupling economic prosperity from demands on global resources; and third, creating a wave of employment in recycling industries. European resource recovery is represented in academic and practitioner literatures as 'clean and green'. Underpinned by a technical and physical materialism, it highlights the clean-up of Europe's waste management and the high-tech character of resource recovery. Analysis shows this representation to mask the cultural and physical associations between recycling work and waste work, and thus to obscure that resource recovery is mostly 'dirty' work. Through an empirical analysis of three sectors of resource recovery ('dry recyclables', textiles and ships) in Northern member states, we show that resource recovery is a new form of dirty work, located in secondary labour markets and reliant on itinerant and migrant labour, often from accession states. We show therefore that, when wastes stay put within the EU, labour moves to process them. At the micro scale of localities and workplaces, the reluctance of local labour to work in this new sector is shown to connect with embodied knowledge of old manufacturing industries and a sense of spatial injustice. Alongside that, the positioning of migrant workers is shown to rely on stereotypical assumptions that create a hierarchy, connecting reputational qualities of labour with the stigmas of different dirty jobs -a hierarchy upon which those workers at the apex can play.
Setting The LTBI programme offers testing and treatment to new entrant migrants from high incidence countries in England. However, the rates of LTBI testing, treatment acceptance and completion are suboptimal and appropriate access must be improved. Objective: To gain insights from the community, community-based organisations (CBOs), and public sector stakeholders on interventions that facilitate collaboration to improve health care outreach and delivery. Design Three stakeholder meetings and five focus group discussions were held using thematic analysis to identify themes arising from the participants' perspectives. Results Four overarching themes emerged from the discussions. These were capacity, collaboration, culture and trust. These highlighted the complementary skills sets different sectors bring to collaboration, as well as the barriers that need surmounting. Stigma could be reduced by making LTBI testing routine, and community members could act as champions for health promotion raising awareness on LTBI testing, and providing a bridge between communities and primary care services. Conclusion Public service providers, community members and CBOs have a willingness to collaborate to support primary care delivery of testing for LTBI and other communicable and non-communicable diseases. Policy and commissioning support are needed to facilitate such workings.
Julie Botticello is an anthropologist on the Waste of the World program at UCL whose work considers the shifting meanings and uses of secondhand clothing in commercial and personal settings. Her doctoral research with Yoruba-Nigerians in London considered how clothing, food, and money helped materialize local connections and global aspirations in migration.
This article inspects a set of paradoxes that appeared in an investigation of contemporary industrial craft in the last remaining factory making machine lace in the United Kingdom. Its focus on a single site, set against a now global industry, means it can build on work in cultural and economic geography to understand this setting as a heterogeneous space, with links to a range of material and immaterial lineages, practices and networks. Ethnographic fieldwork on the factory floor at Cluny Lace threw up three paradoxes inherent in the firm’s continued survival in a context of industrial decline. The first of these paradoxes is the re-concentration of material and immaterial resources in the factory both despite and as a result of the global restructuring of the textile industry. The second is the embodiment of knowledge, and therefore craft skill, both within persons and distributed through the worker’s material environments. Third, is the recognition that the skilled practice the workers carry is not uniform but is multiple, resulting from an unequal distribution of opportunities within the lace industry and different versions of practice that result from the re-concentration of human capital in the factory. This article demonstrates that skill is not uncontested, but is power-ridden and value-laden, and transcends scale. It shows that knowledge and skill are not bound within an individual but are distributed among social actors, material objects and locales, where an attention to each is necessary for understanding the spaces of skilled practices and the ongoing survival of contemporary industrial craft production.
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