Search results for "Social and Economic Geography"

Bodies Making Spaces: Understanding the Airport as a Site of Dissonance

2019

AbstractTrakilović theorizes the airport as a site where cultural/European notions of belonging are negotiated and controlled. Focusing on Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, the chapter approaches both the airport itself as well as its nearby detention center as one complex cultural phenomenon, from which Schiphol emerges as a site of heritage dissonance. Taking a phenomenological approach, the chapter explores what it means to be an embodied subject at the airport, taking the narrative of a Syrian newcomer who is relocated to the detention center as well as the author’s own experience of the airport as its analytical starting points. The selective processes of in- and exclusion at the airport …

Migrant family visits and the life course: interrelationships between age, capacity and desire

2017

“Minding the gap” in the research on human trafficking for sexual purposes

2017

Since the signature of the United Nations Trafficking Protocol in December 2000 that human trafficking has been labelled as a transnational, complex criminal phenomenon. However, despite the implementation of international soft law instruments to tackle the phenomenon, human trafficking is constantly evolving by the frequent changes of strategies, routes, types of exploitation and methodologies applied by the criminal networks. This flexibility of the phenomenon does not only difficult the implementation of effective tackling measures, but it also demonstrates to be an obstacle to produce accurate information on the subject (Cusick et al, 2009). Furthermore, due to the hidden nature of the …

Cross-border mobility and long-distance communication as modes of care circulation: insights from the Peruvian ‘zero generation’

2016

ABSTRACTThe contribution of older family members in the sending countries to the well-being of transnational families has only recently come more into the focus of research. Cross-border mobility and long-distance communication are two central modes through which the members of this ‘zero generation’ engage in transnational family life. By applying the framework of care circulation, this paper seeks to discuss the influence of cross-border mobility and long-distance communication on older Peruvian non-migrants’ engagement in transnational family care arrangements. The paper shows, first, that political and economic factors, as well as communication infrastructures, shape the patterns of the…

An Easy Game? Experiences of ‘Homecoming’ in the Post-Socialist Context of Croatia and the Czech Republic

2016

The obstacles that often accompany remigration, planned and imagined as a ‘homecoming’, are seldom the topic of investigation in migration studies. Returning is not always an ‘easy game’. To explore this aspect of remigration, this chapter intends to focus on narratives of return produced mainly by so-called co-ethnic migrants who moved back to Croatia and the Czech Republic during the past two decades of post-socialist transformation. The empirical base of the chapter draws on the experiences and struggles accompanying remigration, and of arrival and acceptance in the respective society as described by returnees in biographical interviews. Attention is given to everyday social interaction …

Place and space in home-making processes and the construction of identities in transnational migration

2016

AbstractIn this era of increasing migration and the trend of growing social, political, and cultural integration worldwide, it is questionable whether the concept of home in its traditional meaning still applies or has to be redefined. Many social scientists agree that the mobile individual of the twenty-first century has become uprooted and thus disoriented or that the idea of home has lost its significance. Since home is still closely tied to one’s identity, the current discussions on the construction of identity must also be incorporated in the analytical processes of home-making. The objective is to point out new ways of understanding the idea of home by taking into consideration and an…

Return Migration Process in Policy and Practice

2019

AbstractThis chapter focuses on return migration processes in Latvia, integrating analysis of return migration policy and the experiences of return migrants. The analysis considers the extent to which return policy activities correspond to the needs and expectations of the target group, and addresses the role of this policy in the process of making the decision to return. The data used for the analysis are policy planning documents, The Emigrant Communities of Latvia survey and in-depth interviews. The main empirical evidence of the return experiences of migrants in the chapter comes from 18 in-depth interviews with Latvian returnees from various age and social status groups, who left Latvi…

Becoming more EUropean or European after ERASMUS?

2015

Lijphart was the first to emphasize the necessity to study the impact of student mobility upon European integration, but mobility programmes have only been studied in the last decade. The European Commission points to the ERASMUS programme as a successful example of construction of European identity; however, this assumption hasn’t yet been empirically proved on an European scale. This paper has been devoted to research of the impact of the ERASMUS programme on fostering European identity in Europe. In academic literature at least two different understandings of the European identity can be distinguished: political and cultural European identity. The quantitative survey (in which 12’173 res…

What makes environmental performance differ between firms? Empirical evidence from the Spanish tile industry

2007

Environmental performance is a matter of major concern both for policy makers and for firm managers. In this paper we interpret firms' environmental performance as their ability to reduce polluting wastes while maintaining observed levels of inputs and desirable outputs. Making use of data envelopment analysis techniques, we compute waste-specific environmental efficiency measures for a sample of ceramic-tile producers located in the eastern Spanish region of Valencia. Our results show that there exists substantial room for improving environmental performance, which would have highly beneficial consequences for the local environment. In a second stage of analysis, we find that affiliation …

Una segregazione paradossale e multi-scalare: il caso del quartiere ZEN di Palermo

2016

L’articolo affronta la questione della segregazione nel quartiere ZEN di Palermo (Sicilia). L’impianto teorico dialoga con la letteratura anglosassone, ma ne prende le distanze nel tentativo di individuare alcune specificità locali del caso. L’obiettivo è duplice: intanto indentificare alcuni “movimenti geostorici” che hanno caratterizzato il quartiere, collegando a ciascuno di questi una fase del processo segregativo; inoltre, rappresentare la segregazione del quartiere in forma cartografica, mediante l’uso di alcuni ideogrammi e mappe mentali. This article deals with the issue of segregation in the ZEN district of Palermo, Sicily. The theoretical framework is built around Anglo-Saxon refe…