Convenience Stores As Social Spaces

Liquor, tobacco, processed food, and sugary snacks: this is the range of products that are far from healthy available in convenience stores. Yetthese stores have become people’s resource for meeting daily needs in deprived neighborhoods in the United States. In her book, Convenience Stores as Social Spaces: Trust and Relations in Deprived Neighborhoods in the U.S., Cosima Werner explores the contested meanings of these stores and their function as social hubs in a social fabric where poverty, violence, and social neglect are part of peoples’ daily life. Despite the strict security measures around the stores, language barriers, and cultural differences that make convenience stores appear as the antithesis of social spaces, trustful relationships are crucial for residents to access resources such as loans, food, drinks, or information to make ends meet. The concepts of trust and mistrust shed light on the fragility of trust within these communities. Through ethnographic research conducted in Chicago and Detroit, she reveals the unique ways in which these stores are viewed and utilized by residents.

This book illustrates how social entrepreneurship can be used as a tool for addressing grand challenges. Combining leading theoretical insights with rigorous empirical methodologies, the book is the result of field work with 17 social entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom at various points during the COVID-19 pandemic. Adopting a highly innovative theoretical synthesis to discuss the role of social entrepreneurs as potential agents for positive social change, the book introduces the sociomateriality of space, Luhmann’s systems theory, and the social imaginary as missing building blocks in which disruption is created and navigated for creating positive social change. Concluding with a chapter that focuses on the practicalities of meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, the authors extend scholarship in social entrepreneurship and provide a comprehensive account of insights gained from the pandemic, demonstrating how these insights can enable the navigation of further grand challenges.

A unique comparative study of immigrant and diaspora literatures in America

Integrated exploration of the latest insights and advances on the intersection of technology and assessments around the world.

Charts new directions for interdisciplinary research on refugee writing and representationPlaces refugee imaginaries at the centre of interdisciplinary exchange, demonstrating the vital new perspectives on refugee experience available in humanities researchBrings together leading research in literary, performance, art and film studies, digital and new media, postcolonialism and critical race theory, transnational and comparative cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, human geography and cultural politicsThe refugee has emerged as one of the key figures of the twenty-first-century. This book explores how refugees imagine the world and how the world imagines them. It demonstrates the ways in which refugees have been written into being by international law, governmental and non-governmental bodies and the media, and foregrounds the role of the arts and humanities in imagining, historicising and protesting the experiences of forced migration and statelessness. Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry.

In the past two decades, a discourse of crisis has emerged about the democratic institutions and political culture of the US: many structures of authority which people had more or less taken for granted are facing a massive public loss of trust. This volume takes an interdisciplinary and historical look at the transformations of authority and trust in the United States. The contributors examine government institutions, political parties, urban neighborhoods, scientific experts, international leadership, religious communities, and literary production. Exploring the nexus between authority and trust is crucial to understand the loss of legitimacy experienced by political, social, and cultural institutions not only in the United States but in Western democracies at large.

Geographic space is a fundamental and essential construct of the physical reality within which we live, move, and construct our world. Through space we create ‘others’ (anything that is any distance from ‘us’) and we experience time (by moving from one place point to another). Because it is so fundamental to our experience, we often take geographic space for granted. Tourism Spaces: Environments, Locations, and Movements shows some of the ways that geographers and other social scientists bring spatial considerations to the forefront of our research and understanding of tourism. This is seen through the spatial arrangements and distributions of tourism phenomena, such as attractions, destinations, and in the spatial behaviour of tourists themselves. Today, these spatial arrangements and patterns are increasingly being captured, analysed, and understood through various forms of formal and informal digital data. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Tourism Geographies.