The `Inventing Adulthoods' study seeks to document transitions to adulthood reported by over 100 young people living in five contrasting communities in the UK over a five-year period. A principal aim of the study is to identify `critical moments' in young people's biographies and to explore how these moments are implicated in processes of social inclusion and exclusion. This article reports on an analysis of the first of three rounds of one-to-one interviews. We begin by mapping young people's critical moments, exploring the relationship between the social and geographical location in which they live and the kinds of events that they report as having particular biographical significance. We suggest that the character of these `critical moments' is socially structured, as are young people's responses to them. The argument is illustrated by case studies that show the interaction of choice, chance and opportunity in three young people's lives.
Traditionally adulthood and citizenship have been synonymous. Yet adulthood is changing. In this paper we explore how young people's evolving understandings of adulthood may contribute towards an understanding of citizenship within the broader context of increasingly extended and fragmented transitions. The paper draws on a unique qualitative longitudinal data set in which 100 young people, from contrasting social backgrounds in the United Kingdom, have been followed over a five-year period using repeat biographical interviews. We present first the themes that emerged from a cross-cut analysis of the first of three rounds of interviews distinguishing between relational and individualised understandings of adulthood. We then present a model we developed to capture the ways that young people sought out opportunities for competence and recognition in different fields of their lives. Finally a case study that follows a young woman through her three interviews illustrates how these themes can appear in an individual trajectory. We offer the model and case study as a way of exploring a more subjective approach to citizenship in which participation is not deferred to some distant future in which economic independence is achieved, but is understood as constantly constructed in the present.
Food aid is no longer the only, or even the dominant, response to widespread food insecurity. Donors, governments, NGOs and recipient communities exhibit rapidly growing interest in and experimentation with cash-based alternatives, both in the form of direct cash distribution to food insecure persons, and of local or regional purchase of food using cash provided to operational agencies by donors. But the humanitarian action and social protection communities lack a systematic, field-tested framework for choosing between food-and cash-based responses to food insecurity. This paper outlines the rationale for "response analysis" and introduces a new, fieldtested, systematic approach to this emergent activity. The Market Information and Food Insecurity Response Analysis (MIFIRA) framework provides a logically sequenced set of questions, and corresponding analytical tools to help operational agencies anticipate the likely impact of alternative (food-or cash-based) responses and thereby identify the response that best fits a given food insecurity context.
A total of 383 obsidian hydration measurements are reported for highland Ecuador. Specifically, hydration rim measurements have been used to test the reliability of five radiocarbon dates from the site of El Inga, and three of them are shown to be too young.
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