The aim of this paper is to examine the link between a family’s scholarly culture and the educational aspirations of parents for their children. Using data from the first and the second wave of the Czech Household Panel Survey (2015, 2016), the study reveals that the number of books in a household – the core aspect of scholarly culture – is significantly linked to the educational aspirations of parents for their children. However, other indicators of scholarly culture (frequency of reading, general interest in books) are not significantly associated with parents’ university aspirations. These results suggest that, in the Czech Republic, the presence of a large number of books in the home signals higher social status and refers to the economic power of parents rather than to a family’s literacy or reading culture.

The Covid-19 pandemic can be seen as an event that, amongst other things, fundamentally affected the world of work. In particular, the precarity of work has been thematized by researchers. This overview paper builds on contemporary theoretical concepts of precarious work and presents the various manifestations of precarity of work during the pandemic captured in social science research to date. The identified mechanisms of pandemic precarity are liminal phase, the disabling and labour market exclusionary effect of pandemic measures, and various aspects of precarity at work and power in the workplace - the theme being both non-compliance with the safety measures and their enforcement in ways that workers perceive as stressful. Another important theme is the experience of work-life conflict, particularly among the group of parents with pre-school and school-age children. The penultimate topic is pandemics as limitation on the life chances of certain socio-demographic groups, based on life course theory. The last section is devoted to issues of emancipation and agency of workers during the pandemic. The identified forms of precarity are then compared with the aforementioned theories in order to identify which can be considered conceptually new. These are found in particular in the area of precarity at work and include challenges related to safety measures, extreme work and new forms of work-life conflict. The ambiguous nature of these phenomena requires exploration of subjectivity of the actors.

Via Fanfulla da Lodi is a little street located in the neighbourhood of Pigneto (Rome), considered an emblem of roman gentrification. Sometimes “looking at changes of a street […], if in possession of the right glasses, allows you to have a window on the world” (Semi 2015: 47): the analysis of some recent transformations and daily dynamics related precisely to via Fanfulla da Lodi can reveal synecdochally the general mechanisms at play in the changing of the neighbourhood. The paper focuses on the layering of imaginaries related to via Fanfulla da Lodi, linked to a complex ensemble of images and values, and to often-conflictive representations. Starting from this specific case, the contribution brings into light the actors, the processes, and the effects of the resignification of the neighbourhood; on the other hand, it focuses on the counter-imaginaries that question the ordering logics of the dominant normativity.

How to manage the “self” on the streets of suburbia when everybody knows each other? Due to the social and spatial manageability of suburban spaces, contact with more or less (un)known others is to be expected. Through repeated and continuous contact, residents are automatically and reciprocally assigned the role of acquaintances. This situation requires finding the right distance. The positioning of oneself and others, the perception and practice of distance, results in comfort and freedom from conflict. This coping strategy for public (street)spaces reflects a socio-spatial (con)figuration that is enacted as street management. Although street life is dominated by the notion of nothingness, everyone campaigns to stay private in public by setting up a “public self”. The research findings I refer to are based on two case studies in suburban spaces on the outskirts of Hanover (the state capital of Lower Saxony, Germany). In order to understand and explain the life-worlds of suburbanites in general and their manifestation on streets in particular, I conducted exploratory interviews, go-alongs and field observations. To create an atmosphere of comfort, convivial as well as conflictual situations are to be avoided, which is achieved by the residents positioning themselves and others at a distance. Since street life in the suburbs is uneventful and provides a sense of security and familiarity, living together in coexistence is routine. The delegation of responsibility for everything public enables suburbanites to be indifferent to others and the setting. The minimal sympathetic way of interacting with each other is symbolised by greetings, which both facilitates and hinders communication. In the end, the life-world suburbia and its streets are spheres of comfort because they are manageable, expectable and knowable.

This article makes an original contribution to social gerontology and nissology by addressing the knowledge gap on contemporary gendered ageing in remote, rural island places. Drawing on empirical data gathered through in-depth interviews with 12 mid-life (48-69 years old) women living in the Uist islands of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, the relationship between ageing and remote rural island place is examined. Reflecting the participant narratives, this study discusses personal and place identities, while exploring place attachment and its relationship with gendered island ageing. This qualitative work adopts a lifecourse framework in order to acknowledge lived experience and cultural context from childhood to adulthood. Data were gathered and analysed through the prism of constructivist grounded theory, a methodology well placed for exploratory research of topics about which relatively little is known. Rich participant insight and analysis eschew island mono-culturalism, instead extending the discourse around remote rural island ageing as distinct from mainland rural ageing. Empirical data informs substantive theory, and fresh considerations on gendered mid-life ageing and remote island place are offered for academia. Findings from this study indicate diverse relationships between ageing and place amongst mid-life women living in the Outer Hebridean regions of North Uist, South Uist, Benbecula and Berneray. The connection between ageing and island place is experienced through place attachment, and is influenced by a range of socio-economic factors: primarily of relevance to this study is that of the natural environment. Perspectives on ageing reflect lived lifecourse experience and thus vary between those native and non-native to the Outer Hebrides; those who live with a partner or alone; those who have children and those child-free; and between those who enjoy socio-economic stability and those who do not.

Guerrilla urbanism involves citizen-led bottom-up unsanctioned temporary efforts. This kind of temporary urbanism may offer unique opportunities not possible through traditional planning approaches. This paper is a case study of the Swing Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. It began as an effort to temporarily enliven an area at one end of a pedestrian walkway – the Marsupial Bridge – suspended under a viaduct across the Milwaukee River. What started as an illegal temporary installation of swings made of used tires was embraced physically and emotionally as part of the everyday life of the pedestrian bridge by the local community who wanted the swings to stay. The guerrilla urbanism group found itself in conflict with the City’s Department of Public Works over concerns about safety and legal liability, aside from budgetary constraints on permanently upgrading and maintaining the swings. This paper conceptualizes the case study within a three-part framework of public space, community, and urban planning. It examines how the Swing Park has been seen to have both succeeded and failed, while problematizing it within the context of the interdisciplinary literature on temporary urbanism.

The West Bank (occupied Palestinian Territories) is a fragmented network of urban clusters while the rural area is slowly chipped away by Israeli settlers and military apparatus. Palestinians’ bodies are squeezed between checkpoints, razor wire, apartheid walls, military watchtowers, barracks but also between state bureaucracy, incorporation of labourers and cultural dispossession. The occupation through multiple devices produces dispossession and the national struggle explodes with violent and unforeseen forms against Israeli settlers and soldiers. The present paper is a reflection based on one year of fieldwork in Yatta’s urban cluster and its rural area in the southern West Bank. By analysing Israeli’s occupation law, the present work aims at explaining how the Palestinian urbanization process is forced under colonial rule with interlinked consequences on cultural and material dispossession, and youth liminal identities. Within the frame of this set of socio-spatial fragmented relations, the distrust of political parties is growing, and political forms are re-territorialized in local struggle. The research inquires why radical subjectivity is emerging in the Yatta social-spatial context produced by occupation law. How, despite the devices of Israeli occupation, aiming at drawing docile bodies and geography, the bottom-up political phenomenon emerging from Yatta’s urban context explodes in sudden violence.

Abstract: In the social movement literature, the relationship between the political work of collective survival and the politics of the streets remains undertheorized despite robust research on the significance of direct social actions (DSAs). This article revives the work of the Berkeley Free Church during the People’s Park struggles in 1969. Through waves of intense street conflict, the Berkeley Free Church ran grassroots health programs and helped launch a free healthcare clinic. The Free Church’s health programs served both those with daily needs and those needing urgent care in the streets when police responded to demonstrations with violence. This historical case adds complexity to the social movement literature because the Berkeley Free Church’s work reveals a dynamic, interconnected relationship: health mutualism became central to street protest, and street protest in turn made the goals of building projects of health mutualism more feasible.

Abstract: Using a cultural landscape approach, this study examines all National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) sites in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, located in the southern United States. The NRHP recognizes sites representative of “our” national heritage by listing them on this registry. From analysis of these records and related archival materials and observations garnered from field visits to select historic sites in the parish, this study interrogates the officially-designated memorial landscape of the American South. We find that preservation and re-use practices of NRHP-sites have engaged in racialized “purposeful forgetting” (Roberts 2020) and reinforced power relations while enabling the appropriation of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) labor and culture.

Recent research and studies have undermined the idea that borders are not only a demarcation between an inside and an outside, but a performative space around which unexpected interactions, power relations, economic value, conflicts and new spatialities are produced. Inside and around the structures organized for the reception of asylum seekers, we are witnessing a constantly evolving process of production of new social relations and new micro-spatialities that tend to progressively change the territorial features. This paper, based on observations and materials collected during a long ethnographic study carried out between Padua and Venice, investigates the controversial relations between asylum seekers and such urban spaces and suburbs, with attention given to migrants who relate to the territory just as a point of transit. We analyze the widespread phenomena of segregation these individuals, who have often left the reception system, are subjected to in their daily routine of using public space in certain urban areas. Moreover, through a perspective and a positioning that allowed us to live some protests and phenomena of resistance “from within”, we focus on the ways in which the streets and the squares of the provincial towns and urban centers have presented themselves as “borderscapes”.