Category: Geography and Sociology

Geography and Sociology / Opinion / Social Movements / Social Change

If You Plant It, They Will Come: Anti-GM Protest in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom

On 13 October 2003 Friends of the Earth led a group of 1000 people on a march through London to Downing Street to present a petition opposing the continued development of genetically modified crops in the UK (Brown, 2003). A week later in Wellington, Greenpeace erected a billboard on the grounds of Parliament asking why the Prime Minister was not listening to the peoples’ concerns over genetic engineering (New Zealand Press Association, 2003). Both these events came in the latter...

Geography and Sociology / Opinion

The fluid nature of rural ethnic identity: encounters between non-Roma and Roma people in a Central-Eastern European context

In the early 2010s, France repatriated a large number of Roma back to Romania, following a series of highly controversial reforms by Nicholas Sarkozy’s government (BBC, 2010). Campaigners for human rights, free movement, and workers’ rights hotly contested those harsh actions of forced repatriation, which were widely discussed in international media. A Romanian article called ‘Back to the life of Gypsy in Romania’ (Micu, 2010) suggested that most of the transnational worker Roma went back to their homelands in the...

Geography and Sociology / Opinion / Sociology of Health & Illness

SARS-CoV-2: out of touch, out of breath

It is difficult to account for how the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is experienced, chiefly because there is no one universal experience to be identified. Exposure to the virus is unequal. The aptly called “White-Collar Quarantine” implies that the ability to shelter-in-place at home is still a relative privilege, from where the pandemic appears to be playing out as “an arm’s-length spectacle, experienced through a numbing drip feed of media updates on our national prognoses.” Amongst those at home, experiences of...