Youth homelessness in the United States is a serious challenge. Recent national research by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago found concerning rates of homelessness among adolescents and young adults ages 13-25. An estimated one in 30 adolescents (ages 13-17) and nearly one in 10 young adults (ages 18-25) experienced some form of…

Rural children belong to an educationally disadvantaged group whether they migrate or remain in their villages. Using a specially designed questionnaire, this paper surveyed more than 2,500 migrant and left-behind children in the Xixiangtang District of Nanning in Mainland China on issues relating to education and mental state. Through comparisons…

Discussions of forest certification have tended to characterize certification systems as a prime example of the hollowing out of the state and a shift from government to governance. The continued contention that certification is a product of a retreating state has implications for how we understand democratic participation and fails to pay…

Early in 2011, the Government initiated a consultation on the potential sale of the Public Forest Estate in England. This proposal leads to vociferous negative public reaction and the consultation was withdrawn and an Independent Panel established. This paper reviews the arguments as to the options and appropriate institutional arrangements for…

The spectre of a food security crisis has raised important questions about future directions for agriculture and given fresh impetus to a long-standing debate about the potential contribution of agricultural biotechnology to food security. This paper considers the discursive foundations for promotion of agricultural biotechnology, arguing that…

This article examines how the history of land-grant universities in America shaped the views of higher educators, public officials, and foundations on the role of urban universities in addressing the problems of American cities. Higher education leaders urged the federal government to provide funds that would enable urban universities to do for…

This paper explores the challenges that neoliberalism and the globalized new economy present to the politics of linguistic minority movements by ethnographically examining language policy as a discursive process, rooted in political economy. Following the post-WWII period, as most Western States restructured from welfarism to neoliberalism, there…

In this article, the authors set the scene for this research volume. They sought to emphasize and broaden their interest and concern about their "Learning to be drier" theme in this edition to the 77 per cent of Australians who live within 50 km of the Australian coast, the majority of whom also live in major cities and urban complexes.…

This paper investigates learning related to the phenomena of drying over the past decade in the southern Murray-Darling Basin in Australia, as perceived in a mid-river site within the western Riverina of New South Wales, Australia. The insights from audio-recorded interviews, with a wide range of adults across the water-dependent community, mostly…

Our paper explores how and what adults living and working in the Alpine region of Victoria understand and are learning about the changes to water availability, in a time when the response to water availability is subject to extensive debate and policy attention. Interviews for this study were conducted in the towns of Bright and Mount Beauty, with…

This research project, part of a much larger study, considered how people in regional communities learnt to deal with the impact of reduced water availability as a result of drought or climate change. The communities in the Mallee-Wimmera region of Victoria, Australia, were the focus of this study and a range of local people from different sectors…

In Britain, and Wales particularly, inclusion and equal opportunities for all became key principles guiding the work of the many partnerships that were established at the beginning of this century. A primary objective of this paper is to develop a greater understanding of the politics and processes within "partnership" as a widely used…

In this final, collaborative paper in the "Learning to be drier" edition, we reflect on and draw together some of the key threads from the diverse narratives in our four site papers from across the southern Murray-Darling Basin. Our paper title, "Wicked learning", draws on a recent body literature (Rittel & Webber 1973)…

Discusses the history and philosophy of the premise of rural localism from Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty to its present relationship to the New Federalism of the Reagan administration. Concludes that the concept and its consequences should be reexamined by those in the rural social work profession. (Author/BRR)

This paper isolates critical rural economic development issues and identifies needed federal policy interventions. Despite a long history of federal efforts to improve rural economic conditions, recent policies and programs aimed at stimulating rural development have had little impact. Reasons include: (1) narrowly focused economic development…