This article examines lived experiences of food insecurity in the United Kingdom as a liminal phenomenon. Our research is set within the context of austerity measures, welfare reform and the precarity experienced by increasing numbers of individuals. Drawing on original qualitative data, we highlight diverse food insecurity experiences as transitional, oscillating between phases of everyday food access to requiring supplementary food, which are both empowering and reinforcing of food insecurity. We make three original contributions to existing research on food insecurity. First, we expand the scope of empirical research by conceptualising food insecurity as liminal. Second, we illuminate shared social processes and practices that intersect individual agency and structure, co-constructing people’s experiences of food insecurity. Third, we extend liminality theory by conceptualising paraliminality, a hybrid of liminal and liminoid phenomena that co-generates a persistent liminal state. Finally, we highlight policy implications that go beyond short-term emergency food access measures.

Plasma treatment of polymer surfaces is a well established method for improving surface properties. In this paper, the surface structure and adhesive bonding properties of PTFE treated by three types of plasma are reported. The results indicate that different plasma gases have different effects on the surface structure. Argon plasma treatment produced a highly cross-linked honeycomblike structure, while air and oxygen plasma treatment resulted in a surface displaying high aspect ratio protrusions. All experimental plasma treatments caused a marked improvement in overlap shear strength, with the highest shear strength achieved after oxygen plasma treatment. It was found that the overlap shear strength was also influenced by plasma power and plasma treatment time although excessive plasma treatment caused damage to the surface layer leading to decreased shear strength. The change in surface properties and roughened microstructure together contributed to the improvement in shear strength.

This article works to more fully integrate critical theories of race and privilege with political economy to explore the connections between segregation, property values and violence in U.S. cities. Through the prism of Los Angeles, it exposes the economic mechanisms and history of violent struggle by which whiteness became, and remains, an intrinsic component of high land values. The resulting articulations of racial ideologies and geography, connecting circuits of real estate capital to common sense and racialised constructions of 'community', have helped drive L.A.'s fragmented and unsustainable form and increasing privitisation. They also lie at the root of violence inflicted upon those excluded, both ideologically and physically, from white constructions of community. This dynamic is key for theorising in support of ongoing justice struggles to create safe and sustainable cities for all.

Devolution presented an opportunity for the Welsh Government to introduce changes to housing and homelessness policy, and the subsequent homelessness reforms are seen as one of the best examples to date of the Welsh Government using its powers. However, devolved governments in small countries face a number of challenges in terms of realising their housing policy ambitions. In this article we argue that there is inevitable dissonance between the policy behind the Welsh Government legislation (prevention) and practice (implementation) associated with structural challenges (for example, austerity and budget restrictions, Welfare Reform and the availability of affordable accommodation). In response we propose a number of actions the Welsh Government might undertake to attempt to mitigate such structural challenges which also resonate in the English context where welfare retrenchment and homelessness prevention policies operate simultaneously.

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