Fertility decline is not merely a demographic phenomenon; it is a barometer of the structural conditions under which women negotiate reproductive decisions. In Türkiye, the total fertility rate (TFR) has fallen below the population replacement threshold of 2.1 since 2018, reaching 1.63 by 2023. This raises a question central to women's studies: does this decline reflect expanding reproductive autonomy, or is it a constrained response to failures in care provision and gender equity? This study examines the nature and sources of this decline between 2000 and 2023 to distinguish between demographic population structures and behavioural fertility components. Using data from the UN World Population Prospects 2024 and the Turkish Statistical Institute, this research employs Kitagawa decomposition analysis and age-specific fertility rate (ASFR) assessments at both national and provincial levels. The results reveal that while the female population of reproductive age grew by 29.7%, annual live births plummeted by 23.5%, and the TFR dropped from 2.49 to 1.63. Kitagawa decomposition indicates that changes in fertility behaviour accounted for 164.6% of the total decline, overwhelming the positive demographic contribution of population growth. Regionally, all 81 provinces experienced declines, with the most significant drops occurring in Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia. These findings suggest that Türkiye's fertility transition is driven by a fundamental shift in reproductive behaviour. Addressing this decline requires a policy shift toward accessible childcare, expanded parental leave, and genuine support for gender equality.
The emergence of social media, supported by digital communication technologies, sparked off the proliferation of virtual diasporic groups and networks that are gaining prominence as the digital diaspora. Drawing on a netnography of Tunisians in London, this article engages with 'languaging', 'foodways' and 'solidarity' as identity markers of Tunisianit & eacute;, and questions the idea of online and offline community networks as divorced. Tunisian Londoners' Facebook practices stand as another form of place-making where they are actively shaping their milieu, crystalizing the borders of their national identity and marking out the community as a cultural entity.
A recent survey (n=986) by this research team as part of a project entitled 'When Music Speaks' found that female, career-oriented musicians in Denmark were an at-risk group for clinically significant anxiety. This article draws on semi-structured interviews with eight female respondents to this survey to explore potential psychosocial causes. We undertake thematic analysis within a theoretical architecture of 'believability', and in doing so acknowledge the need to believe something which, in the economy of believability, may appear unbelievable: high rates of anxiety among female musicians in a country famed for high levels of subjective wellbeing and apparent gender equality. As a possible explanation, we highlight psychic disjunctures experienced by interviewees; disjunctures between an imaginary of Denmark rooted in egalitarian social democracy committed publicly to principles of innovation, gender equality and social cohesion, contrasted with the anxious lived experience of the women we spoke to (which they wanted others to believe), being one of musical conservativism, restrictive cultural norms and loneliness. This article contributes towards sociologically-oriented and theoretically-underpinned literature into musicians' mental health, global scholarship on the occupational psychosocial lives of female musicians, and cultural, political and anthropological work on Danish society.
This article proposes the examination of the climate politics of labour unions, particularly the strategy of just transition, through the prism of environmental labour studies, an ecosocial approach to labour environmentalism. In the first part, it presents a historical overview in order to highlight how the just energy transition became a central element of labour environmentalism. The paper then examines the double impact of climate politics and just transition on labour environmentalism - narrowing its substantive focus while deepening the intersection of nature and labour within and beyond the workplace. The second part draws on the environmental labour studies approach to propose that labour environmentalism should take into account the inseparable relationship between labour and nature, expand the scope of work and workers, and account for global divisions of labour. In our view, such a programmatic shift will ensure that work and workers are placed centrally within ecosocial politics.
This study uses regression with Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) errors method incorporating the COVID-19 lockdown effect to analyse the electricity consumption of a UK college’s facilities. The objective is to accurately predict the electricity consumption of three college campuses (labelled B, C, and T) for use in decision-making activities and planning. As benchmarking methods, Holt-Winters’ multiplicative and additive methods, ARIMA, Neural Network Autoregression (NNAR), and Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) methods are used to predict electricity consumption. The result identified regression with ARIMA errors as the best-performing model, as it considers the effects of the national lockdowns for Coronavirus based on error measures employed. The Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) values for forecast accuracy are 4.85
