The aim in this paper is to present a discussion of the participatory research methods employed to explore intersectionality between sexuality, rurality and age through consideration of a research project investigating how older lesbian and gay citizens in rural southwest England and Wales interact with their local community. The aim of the project is to explore how older lesbian and gay citizens adjust to and connect with their rural environment, exploring the notion of a "rural idyll" for groups who may be seen as different. Discussion of the different methods used to explore themes surrounding connectivity, place, space and identity will be offered. These include a core biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM), a visual ethnographic method, and an overarching participatory methodology. This methodological approach is reviewed using the six principles for working with disempowered groups identified by Whitmore and McGee (2001).
The UK's departure from the European Union (Brexit) is likely to result in greater immigration and employment restrictions on European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) nationals within the United Kingdom. EU/EEA citizens constitute a significant proportion of the current social care workforce. Research evaluating the impact of Brexit on social care has highlighted potentially severe future workforce shortfalls, but has not engaged in detail with the experiences of social care personnel involved in day‐to‐day recruitment and retention activities. This article explores how social care managers evaluate Brexit's prospects for future workforce sustainability, through the prism of their organisation's workforce requirements. This qualitative study incorporated in‐depth semi‐structured interviews and questionnaire surveys with domiciliary and residential care managers. Data collection focused on an urban conurbation in south‐west England, with demographic characteristics likely to make post‐Brexit recruitment and retention in social care particularly challenging. A key finding is that, irrespective of whether they employ EU/EEA workers or not, research participants have deep concerns about Brexit's potential impact on the social care labour market. These include apprehensions about future restrictions on hiring EU/EEA nurses, as well as fears about increased competition for care staff and their organisation's future financial viability. This article amplifies the voices of managers as an under‐researched group, bringing their perspectives on Brexit to bear on wider debates on social care workforce sustainability.
Drawing on a recent ethnographic study of contemporary hospital volunteering in the Czech Republic, this paper explores the changing ideologies underpinning youth volunteering in the Czech context and shows how they may be linked to broader socio-economic and political transformations that have taken place in Czech society following the collapse of state socialism in 1989. Volunteering discourses in the contemporary period promote processes of individualisation, and the experiences of young volunteers highlight volunteering as an activity enabling the construction of distinctive personal identities and biographies. The article examines the extent to which these developments can be illuminated by the theory of reflexive modernisation. It is argued that this thesis can conceptually elucidate the emphasis on reflexivity in the creation of young people's contemporary volunteer identities. At the same time, however, young volunteers' reflexive practices also create the ground for the reformulation of certain wellestablished health hierarchies and gender inequalities linked to the socialist era.
State frameworks for welfare and social security have been subject to processes of privatization, decentralization, and neoliberal reform in many parts of the world. This article explores how these developments might be theorized using anthropological understandings of social security in combination with feminist perspectives on care. In its application to post-1989 socioeconomic transformation in the former socialist region, this perspective overcomes the conceptual inadequacies of the "state withdrawal" model. It also illuminates the nuanced ways in which public and private (as spaces, subjectivities, institutions, moralities, and practices) re-emerge and change in the socialist era as well as today, continually shaping the trajectories and outcomes of reforms to care and social security.
Rosie Read is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at Bournemouth University, UK. She has conducted a number of ethnographic research projects in the Czech Republic and the UK. Her publications explore issues of gender and care work, volunteering, welfare transformation and the state. AcknowledgmentsI am grateful to the editors of this special issue for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments.
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