Publications

In parliamentary democracies, a key question for citizens and social scientists alike is, “who speaks on behalf of different social groups and on different policy topics?” This informs not only an understanding of how democracy works but also the workings of the formative phase of public policy-making. This allows us to understand a range of…

There are many ways of looking at global sports and the mega-events that they have created. This manual examines global sports mega-events from the point of view of the unions that represent the workers who make them possible – not the athletes and coaches, but primarily the construction workers who build the stadia and textile…

This paper examines the experiences of Chinese settlers in the Cairns district of northern Queensland, Australia, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a potential early expression of a ‘rural cosmopolitanism’ that has more recently been associated in the geographical literature with contemporary international migration. In contrast to other parts of Australia,…

Existing approaches investigating access to primary health care tend to use relatively crude measures that compare supply to demand ratios for administrative units or use GIS to calculate straight-line or network distances to the nearest facility. The latter however largely assume access is via private modes of transport. The aim of this paper is to…

Writing regions, undertaking a regional study, was once a standard form of geographic communication and critique. This was until the quantitative revolution in the middle of the previous century and more definitively the critical turn in human geography towards the end of the twentieth century. From then on writing regions as they were experienced phenomenologically,…

Book chapter in Reanimating Regions, Riding, J. and Jones, M. (eds). This chapter looks at the ‘new new localism’ and suggests the need to now think about the dawn of a ‘new regional geography’. City-region-based agglomerations are currently riding high on the political and policy agenda across the world. Their emergence is not accidental; they are…

Life stories of mobile individuals provide us with unique perspectives on the condition of modern societies. This article aims to establish the link between narrative accounts of mobility and the conceptual framework of migration studies. Drawing on autobiographical narrative interviews with 91 transnational individuals, this article presents three categories of mobility narratives, emphasizing the specific…

There is a growing literature on global Chinese companies, but this tends to be at a very general level. There is little research to date on the effect of Chinese involvement on workers and their unions. Although focussed on one company, SINOHYDRO, this paper addresses questions of importance to construction unions globally: What is the…

Anderson’s notion of imagined communities has helped to focus attention on the complex connection between language and membership of social groupings. This article explores the sense of membership of an imagined transnational community of ‘Europe’ through a selection of autobiographical narrative interviews in a multi-nation study of identity formation. Data drawn from a sample of…

Network distance and travel times are two popular methods of measuring potential geographic accessibility and networks are also used in gravity model-based approaches such as floating catchment area (FCA) techniques. Although some research has been conducted to assess the effectiveness of the representation of demand- (population) or supply- (destinations) side characteristics within such models, there…