A review of Clouds by Glen Snyder

Over on Musings on the Dérive I have published a review of Glen Snyder's photobook 'Clouds'. Check it out here. An quote from the review:

Snyder’s photobook distills 3,000 shots taken over three years while standing at the same spot on the bank of the Tama River that divides Tokyo and Kanagawa prefectures. Pared down to a slim volume, the power of the work is not the beauty of each individual frame but the meditative motif of people passing by under the sky and the small everyday beauty of these moments. In one frame a set of people are approaching and have passed each other in the next. A cyclist gazes up into the clouds. Others look to see where they are going. A schoolboy’s white shirt is caught in the light, a woman holding an umbrella is cast in shadow, a group of runners evenly spaced as they traverse through the frame and in another scene others muddle about. People and clouds drifting along.

Spatial Injustice and the 2022 Victorian floods

A new report by the Victorian Council of Social Services has come out looking at spatial injustice around exposure to the 2022 Victorian floods and its ripple effects on affected communities. Here is the report: Ripple Effects: Spatial injustice and the 2022 Victorian floods. I am happy to have contributed to the quantitative analysis that underpins the report. Here is an article I wrote with Ang Li talking about some of the findings and their implications.

COVID-19 lockdowns and children's access to justice

This is a journal article that I published in 2024 with Ang Li and Natalia Maystorovich Chulio in Child Protection and Practice. Here is the abstract:

Morocco's national lockdown was enforced between March 21st and June 10th 2020 in response to the spread of coronavirus. Restriction of civil space was not fully extended to the judiciary which had to transition to virtual sessions. To prepare for future pandemics and disasters, it is crucial to understand how well court systems across jurisdictions especially in low- and middle-income countries managed to function and protect children's access to justice under the constraints of stay-at-home orders. To investigate the effect of the national lockdown on children's access to justice in Morocco, this study employed interrupted time series analysis of publicly available court filings (N = 77,335) pertaining to child protection from January 1st to December 31st 2020 spanning the pre-lockdown, lockdown, and post-lockdown periods. Results showed that lockdown measures hampered children's access to justice and is associated with statistically significant and substantial decreases in the number of cases heard by the courts across all filing types. The interrupted time series model estimates that average cases per week dropped by 199.5 for penal filings, 1180.3 for civil filings, 942.5 for complaint filings, and 358.1 for report fillings during the lockdown relative to the pre-lockdown period. While the percentage of cases with recorded delays mostly increased, the average case length decreased except for civil filings which saw a significant increase. The substantial susceptibility of civil cases to lockdowns might be precipitated by the need of individuals to petition the court for a hearing. Evidence suggests that the courts adjudicating child protection cases struggled to maintain operations during the national lockdown, and indicates the need for stronger disaster preparedness and an integrated child protection system to increase the judiciaries' resilience and children's access to justice in future emergency and disaster events.

Photography and Narrative

Newpost on my substack blog, What is the narrative potential of a photograph?. A quote from the post:

I am driven to click the shutter not out of some recognition of an idea in objective form, but from a gesture, movement, or a sense of visual rhythm. Photographs have narrative potential but do not offer narrative closure. Just resources that enable possible interpretations. The viewer is not compelled to find anything there.