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The author’s story of a familial connection on the move was part of the research process of an ethnographic project about a demolished ex-industrial village. Growing up in the 1970s, the author’s fatherless childhood was silently lived out in its spatial geography. The author’s proximate, unknown father was a potent figure that the author would glimpse in the street spaces but was never allowed to acknowledge. Twentieth century accounts of working-class life have little to say on the personal stories of families where ‘father’ was rarely present (Steedman, 1986). Here the author offers a daughter’s emotional geography of fatherlessness. To sketch a socio-cultural backcloth to the personal subplot, the author draws on scholarship about fatherhood, fatherlessness and lone motherhood as a way to discuss men’s involvement in fathering in relation to the author’s own experience of living without a father in a paternalistic company village. Turning to the author’s return in 2015 as a researcher, the author uses autoethnography to explore the personal familial subplot bubbling underneath the main project. The author charts how the methodologies used held affordances which offered a process of coming to terms with the inter-connections of spatial and familial absence and loss: the loss of author’s home-village where memories of an absent father were played out and the revelation of the loss of an already absent father through a DNA test. In this way, it traces the shifting movements of a familial (dis)-connection through memories, photographs and mobile research encounters against the backcloth of the absent spaces of an ex-industrial community.

This chapter introduces the argument that pervades the collection that families are in motion both conceptually and in practice. It articulates the motion of family and families, which are made through space and time, and explains the ways in which the book develops current thinking on family. It also situates the concept and practices of family within wider debates and contexts. The chapter then details the contribution of each of the chapters to this argument, which are organised around three thematic parts: moving through separation and connection; uneven motion and resistance; and traces and potentialities. The chapter draws out six conclusions from the chapters in the collection.

This chapter discusses how an urban regeneration process, with culture as an economic asset, can contribute to creating a city brand and identity for the city of Mestre, a new habitat, and economic opportunities for the local community, as well as helping neighboring Venice tackle overtourism. This chapter highlights that places suffering from undertourism often are located closely to those suffering from overtourism. Urban regeneration policies driven by culture can be a key solution for both places, by creating a new future, identity, and economic opportunities for one community and for the other, in helping to regulate their touristic flows.

Young people are widely known to have poorer outcomes, social status and political representation than older adults. These disadvantages, which have come to be largely normalized in the contemporary context, can be further compounded by other factors, however, and are particularly amplified by coming from a lower social class background. An additional challenge for young people is associated with place, with youth who live in more remote and less urban areas at a higher risk of being socially excluded (Alston & Kent, 2009; Shucksmith, 2004) and/or to face complex and multiple barriers to employment and education than their urban-dwelling peers (Cartmel & Furlong, 2000). Drawing upon interviews and focus groups in a qualitative project with 16 young people and five practitioners, and using Nancy Fraser’s tripartite theory of social justice, this paper highlights the various and interlocking disadvantages experienced by working-class young people moving into and through adulthood in Clackmannanshire, mainland Scotland’s smallest council area.

Art hotels are increasingly providing an opportunity for creative artists to exhibit their artworks and collections within their premises. This research investigates how some hotels are transforming themselves into important cultural tourism centers. Specifically, its objectives are: (i) to better understand the extent to which travelers are aware about the existence of art hotels and to evaluate their level of interest in art-oriented initiatives; (ii) to determine which attributes and features of art hotels are appreciated by travelers; and (iii) to identify the type of travelers who are willing to stay in art hotels. The findings from a descriptive survey suggest that the incorporation of art into the hospitality industry can attract a diverse customer base and could result in a sustainable competitive advantage for hotels. This study identifies four types of travelers including: Art-Infused Travelers, Art-Seeking Travelers, Art-Indifferent Travelers, and Art-Blind Travelers. These prospective tourists were categorized according to their level of awareness and interest in art hotels and art-related experiences. In conclusion, this contribution implies that artification processes within the hospitality industry can add value to the cultural tourism market. Hence, it also advances future research avenues to academia.

This chapter explores the inter-urban dimensions of contemporary inequality in the United Kingdom. It does so by drawing on quantitative measures of inequality from the British Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Great British Class Survey’ experiment of 2011–2013 and representative economic indicators of productivity. It takes its starting point as an acknowledgement of the deepening inequalities in western, developed economies, a reality reflecting in the burgeoning of literature on macro-economic disparities at the start of the twenty-first century. Whilst invaluable, this literature has tended to focus solely on economic definitions of inequality between countries or regions. The purpose of this chapter is to continue the expansion of our understanding of the manifold dimensions of inequality into the social and cultural domains. The data from the Great British Class Survey are uniquely positioned to do this: approximately 325,000 people participated in the online questionnaire, providing information not just on their stocks of economic capital but also on the size and scope of their social networks and the nature and extent of their cultural activities. The size of the sample thus provides an unparalleled tool for analysing the complex nuances of contemporary inequality in the United Kingdom using a framework informed by the theoretical approach to cultural class analysis pioneered by Pierre Bourdieu. The analysis here focuses solely on inter-urban disparities in the United Kingdom and demonstrates the ways in which economic inequalities are reflected and reinforced in the social and cultural domains.

This chapter is concerned with exploring the lived experience of welfare-to-work policy in rural Wales through the lens of participant observation with young people undertaking the initial course that represents their first encounter with the New Deal for Young People (NDYP).¹ I wish to respond to calls for qualitative explorations into marginalised rural life through discussing policy delivery personnel's² views of unemployed young people, and how some young people respond to the experience of being a rural welfare-to-work participant. The terms with which welfare practitioners speak about their clients and the client experience itself are both useful ways to look closely at the operation of the UK welfare programme, drawing out particular issues arising in the countryside. The chapter begins with a brief outline of the NDYP as an early mandatory welfare-to-work programme in the United Kingdom, before summarising some of the characteristics of youth unemployment. Drawing on empirical research undertaken in central Wales, I then outline some ways in which frontline practitioners characterise the 18–24-year olds with whom they work, before a detailed look at some individual stories from fieldwork with the young people themselves.