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Drawing upon qualitative interviews with women students, this article explores the meaning of 'class' and 'studenthood' at a 'new' university in a large post-industrial town in the north of England. Classed experiences were evident in the way interviewees interpreted the locale predominantly in terms of its 'working-classness' and the social problems associated with deindustrialisation. Findings support the accepted notion of a distinct student identity and perceived divides between students and local people based on spatiality, locality, class and student habitus, which also intersected with gender to produce 'locally specific' experiences of space and safety within this setting. However, the article confounds the middle-class student and working-class local dichotomy by exploring accounts from a varied sample of women in terms of age, class, ethnicity and domestic background, which reveal alternative university experiences and shifting class relations as a result of deindustrialisation.

Combining work and family life is central to women's participation in the labour market. Work-life balance has been a key objective of UK and Dutch policy since the 1990s but policies created at the national level do not always connect with the day to day experiences of women juggling caring and domestic responsibilities with paid work. Using qualitative data from a European Social Fund Objective 3 project the paper explores women's lived realities of combining work and family life in the UK in comparison to the Netherlands as a possible ‗best practices' model. We argue that women in both countries experience work-life balance as an ongoing process, continually negotiating the boundaries of work and family, and that there needs to be a more sophisticated appreciation of the differing needs of working parents. Whilst policy initiatives can be effective in helping women to reconcile dual roles, many women in both the UK and the Netherlands still resolve these issues at the individual or personal level and feel that policy has not impacted on their lives in any tangible way.

International migration has a consistently high profile within national and international politics with increased focus on measurement and quantification of migrant numbers, impact on services and contribution to local, regional and national economies. However, the absence of consistency within definitions, categorisations and measurement of international migration and migrant populations create challenges and barriers to both understanding the needs of migrant communities but also the provision of adequate services within specific geographical areas. This paper will present findings from a project designed to map the impact of migration on a settled community within a Local Authority (LA) in the North East of England. As the project encountered routine inconsistencies around definitions, categorisations and measurement of migration within the LA area, this paper demonstrates the complexity of trying to 'measure' migration on the ground and while consistency in measurement is key to accurate data, we conclude with an ethical question about the rationale for collecting data on migrant populations.

CitationWattis, L., Green, E. E. and Radford, J. (2011) This paper explores safety concerns and fear of crime amongst women students attending university in a large town in the north-east of England. It acknowledges that gender as a social category is problematic; however, the paper is grounded in recognition of its significance in shaping experiences of fear, safety and space. The main aim is to explore how gender intersects with student identity/ies in a specific local context.The paper draws upon qualitative data from doctoral research which explored the crime and fear experiences of women students studying in a town bearing all of the hallmarks of industrial decline. It evidences powerful representations of place with respondents drawing heavily on the town's working-class culture and deindustrialisation in their reading of the locale. In addition, respondents linked the town unequivocally to crime and disorder, and identified the criminal threat as originating from local people. In this way, fears were frequently locally focused, linking to a fear of place and the risks associated with the student identity. This highlights that women's fears and spatial negotiation cannot be read exclusively in terms of gender -in this context they are frequently shaped by 'studenthood' and the dynamics of class and locality. At the same time however, the paper reveals how the local intersects with gender to shape experiences of space, fear and safety, as well as the transformative effects of ethnicity at its intersection with gender, locality and the student identity.Keywords: Identity; students; safety; fear; local context. IntroductionThis article explores women's fears as students in a post-industrial, urban locality where crime and disorder were highly visible features of the social landscape. It is underpinned by a recognition of the salience of gender 1 in shaping women's experiences of space, fear and safety. These themes have been covered extensively in feminist literature and research which focuses on how gender structures, sexual violence, harassment, ideology and discourses of victimisation perpetuate fears and render public space differential and problematic for women (Gordon et al.