Previous research has shown that childhood disability incurs higher costs. Welfare state cash support is crucial to guarantee adequate social participation for families of children with disabilities. To properly assess the adequacy of cash support, the needs-based costs of childhood disability must be accounted for. This article investigates the adequacy of a cash support system that is designed to increase with the severity of the child’s care needs for four hypothetical children with different types of care needs. Therefore, we build on recently developed reference budgets for adequate social participation for families with disabled children in Belgium. The results show that Belgian cash support is generally insufficient to enable equal social participation for these families, particularly for children with less-visible disabilities. This forces families to make choices about which costs are met by the support measures and which costs are borne by themselves.

The Finnish parental leave system has undergone numerous reforms to encourage fathers’ leave uptake, in part to redress unequal divisions of early childcare, yet many fathers have not taken full advantage of it. Leave is usually taken from the workplace, and though workplace factors are often cited as typical barriers to uptake, they remain understudied compared to policy and individual-level motivators. We systematically investigated the association of important workplace structural characteristics and parental leave decisions of private-sector-employed first-time fathers in 2013–2017, using Finnish register data and a multilevel Bayesian approach. While the probability of taking father’s quota varied by workplace gendered structures and competitiveness, these differences were due to the selection of fathers into workplaces on individual-level characteristics, rather than resulting from differing workplace structures. Workplace educational level was important, but only for tertiary-educated fathers: highly-educated fathers in low-educated environments were less likely to take longer leaves, suggesting that replaceability may be the main mechanism behind the differences. These findings suggest that differing workplace contexts have less to do with structural factors than with workplace cultures and fathers’ individual situations, calling for further study on the interplay of individual and contextual factors in usage of paternal leave entitlements.

Housing policy has been a busy area of activity for the Labour government in its first year. In this paper we critically assess the tensions and contradictions within these housing policy changes, examining whether they add up to a coherent, programmatic response to the ‘housing crisis’ which can deliver for individuals and households struggling to access and sustain adequate housing after fourteen years of austerity and neglect. In particular, we question the underlying driver of the housebuilding target and ask whether the Labour government’s apparent desperation for economic growth is subsuming concerns for social justice, despite the increase in support for social housing – a debate with wide international resonance in the current economic context. Finally, we scrutinise whether the rapid start out of the blocks on housing policy can be maintained for the inevitable marathon that is necessary to make significant changes to the UK housing system.

This essay explores the formation of the Syria-Turkey border by examining the mobility of contraband merchants and couriers. Contraband commerce can be viewed as not only a technique of mobility but a technology of sovereignty. I parse out these linkages from within the semantic domain of kaçak (contraband; literally “fugitive”) repurposed in the hands of contraband merchants, investigative journalists, and state officials. At important historical junctures, contraband commerce between modern Turkey and Syria came to link regimes of value and territorialization, border delineation and land dispossession, and economic informality and political treason. Analyzing the paradoxically uneven distribution of physical mobility and transborder transactions among the inhabitants of the border as a central tenet of territorialization, I suggest conceptualizing the border as a palimpsest of sovereignty. This essay contends that such an approach recuperates the historicity and dynamism of arrested mobilities and their role in the spatial production of borders, and of other contingent forms they give to sovereignty over geography and history.

Despite biomedical explanations for diseases being increasingly accepted in sub-Saharan Africa, traditional African explanatory models of illness remain widespread. This study sought to understand local explanatory models for illness and patient experiences with different traditional health practitioners (THPs) among a population of rural women in Limpopo, South Africa. This was a cross-sectional qualitative study in which eighty-two in-depth interviews were conducted, and the data were thematically analysed. Study findings indicate that 68% of participants believed illnesses can be caused by bewitchment, and these diseases were often considered too taboo to even be discussed. High percentages of participants also believe that THPs can cure illnesses that medical doctors cannot treat. Additionally, several illnesses were identified related to traditional practices and cultural beliefs, which can only be cured traditionally, via THPs. While the hospital/clinic is often first approached, its failure to resolve illness can often be seen as a sign of the spiritual origin of the ailment. This study is a pre-context for more research around biomedical/traditional medicine collaborations.