Migration,age, and education: a cross-sectional analysis of geographic labor mobility in Japan

"This paper presents some new empirical evidence on the determinants of prefecture-to-city migration in Japan, using a model based on the human capital-search theoretic approach." Several hypotheses relating the rate of migration to age, education, distance moved, and earnings are tested, and the applicability of the theoretical framework to the analysis of labor migration in Japan is evaluated. Data are from the 1970 census and the 1968 Employment Status Survey.     

Being NGO girls: gender,subjectivities and everyday life in Kolkata

This article discusses the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a cultural and political force in shaping the gendered and classed subjectivities of young women growing up in ‘red-light areas’ in Kolkata, India. It foregrounds the flexible deployment of NGO gender narratives by ‘subjects’ of NGO development to improve their everyday lives. Drawing on debates of NGOization, post-colonial urban Indian femininities and intersectionality, it demonstrates how several young women who grew up as ‘subjects’ of NGO development mobilize, reject and improvise contested NGO-inspired femininities for their everyday gain. At the same time, it illustrates how NGO gender narratives that are useful to some young women in their renegotiation of gender norms are deemed ineffective, if not obstructive, by other young women, particularly those whose lives remain entangled in multiple marginalities.     

Resisting mothers,making gender: teenage girls in the United States and the articulation of femininity

Much of the feminist literature on teenage girls in the west has tended to polarize around the issues of girls' gendered agency and victimization. In contrast, this article explores the ambiguous relationship between gender resistance and compliance. I argue that while girls clearly articulate their own agency, they do so through a reliance on gendered and heterosexual norms, identities, and categories. The article draws on examples from my research with girls in South Carolina, USA, in particular girls' narratives about their mothers. I suggest that girls situate their gendered practices and evaluate femininity in part via evaluations of their mothers' gender, sexual and nurturing practices. Mothers often stand in as representatives of normative and traditional femininity for the girls; yet girls do not realize that they reproduce, rather than resist, aspects of femininity, even as they criticize generational differences and their mothers' versions of feminine and gendered behaviors.     

Still a long way to go: gender and feminist geographies in France

Abstract

After recalling some specific elements of the French gender debate, such as French feminism, which threatens the war of the sexes and the fear of indifference, this article distinguishes three moments in the geography of gender in France. The first moment forgotten is the emergence of research on women’s work and urban mobility from a Marxist and feminist materialist perspective. The second, at odds with the first, is distinguished by an approach that is more cultural than social, an inspiration that borrows from the linguistic shift and postmodernism, and that may have its references among the English-speaking authors of radical geography and feminist geography. The last is a moment of consolidation and diversification of themes (masculinities, sexualities, the body) and approaches (queer geography, black feminism, intersectionality). The article then highlights two challenges. The first is to sustain gender by consolidating achievements, developing gender education and promoting gender mainstreaming in all aspects of research. The second is to create common ground and develop solidarity in a context of profound transformations in higher education and research.     

The precarious and the transitional: labor casualization and youth in post-bubble Japan

ABSTRACT

In recent decades economic globalization and neoliberal restructuring have constricted longstanding pathways to middle-class citizenship in Japan and other postindustrial economies. Much attention has been given to how the shift from ‘lifetime’ salaried employment to ‘flexible’ labor markets has disenfranchized many young people, leaving them struggling to reconcile dominant middle-class expectations of adulthood with neoliberal economic realities. Taking an anthropological approach, this article reconsiders this prevailing assessment of labor casualization by examining ways in which young casual workers in Tokyo’s retail, service, and creative industries navigate the transforming economy. Their circumstances, choices, and self-representations shed light on the active role they play in the formation of alternative transition regimes that challenge normative transitions to work and adulthood in Japan. These findings have broader implications for the limits of conventional social scientific approaches to the impact of economic crises and neoliberal restructuring on youth in the early twenty-first century.     

Racial identity, spatial mobility, and labor in the non-plantation rural South, 1880–1940

Across much of the rural South in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, crop-lien systems of agriculture devoted to plantation crops restricted the spatial and economic mobility of many black Southerners. Where crop-lien systems were infrequent, however, black Southerners had somewhat greater spatial and economic mobility, particularly in connection with the wage labor of the lumber industries. This article investigates the connections between perceptions of racial identity, spatial mobility, and labor in both the lumber industry and in non-plantation agriculture in St. Tammany Parish in southeastern Louisiana using census records, historical newspapers, and archival sources.     

School holidays: examining childhood,gender norms,and kinship in children's shorter-term residential mobility in urban Zambia

This article discusses a practice of child residential mobility in Zambia that is frequently overlooked in migration studies and difficult to capture through standard survey methods: the practice of ‘going on holiday’ to the homes of relatives during breaks in the school term. Drawing on child-centered and quantitative research, this article examines the multiple dimensions of ‘going on holiday’ for children living in a low-income urban settlement in Lusaka. Findings suggest that the practice was gendered and may map onto changing norms in schooling in Zambia. Within a context where resources are severely constrained, going on holiday may serve as one means for cultivating reciprocity, sharing the burden of care and household labor, and strengthening kin ties. This work further demonstrates the importance of using locally meaningful terms and practices in survey research where general questions about children's mobility may fail to capture the nature and extent of children's movements.     

Transmobilities: mobility,harassment, and violence experienced by transgender and gender nonconforming public transit riders in Portland,Oregon

This research endeavours to fill a conceptual gap in the social science literature on gender, public space, and urban mobilities by exploring how transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience public transit. Although previous research has surveyed gender minorities about harassment and discrimination in a range of environments, little is known about the quality or content of these experiences. Drawing from 25 interviews with transgender and gender nonconforming individuals in Portland, Oregon, this article finds that gender minorities experience frequent harassment while engaging with the public transit system. We articulate the concept of transmobilites to describe the ways that transgender and gender nonconforming individuals experience a form of mobility that is altered, shaped, and informed by a broader cultural system that normalizes violence and harassment towards gender minorities. We conclude that gender minorities have unequal access to safe and accessible public transportation when harassment is widespread, normalized, and when policies prohibiting discrimination remain unenforced on urban public transit.     

日本现代的“访妻式“婚礼习俗

世界上,居住在任何地域的民族都有属于自己的独特的人生礼俗。作为一种民族文化现象,人生礼俗反映了一个民族的心态。法国著名民俗学家阿诺德·凡·热纳在《通过礼仪》一书中概括了人生礼俗的概念,并确定了它的性质,阐述了它存在的价值。书中写道:“人生礼俗多见于诞生、成年、结婚、死亡等人生主要转折点。这些礼俗用以保证个人能够顺利通过这些关口,从而昭示当事人身份的变化并在所属集团内获得新的权利。”     

Hospitality workers and the relational spaces of labor (im)mobility

ABSTRACT

Building on the recent interest among labor geographers for workers’ ability to strategize around their mobility, and tourism researchers’ longstanding examination of mobile tourism workers, this paper explores the mobility agency of differently positioned hospitality workers. The findings suggest that workers are not always ‘strategic’ in relation to labor mobility, and that labor mobility and career paths must be recognized as fragmented, happenstance and erratic. Furthermore, this article argues for an approach to the study of mobile tourism workers that takes the relational as well as temporal aspects into account. This endeavor is in particular guided by the notion of stories-so-far and the understanding of people as both being and becoming. The empirical basis of this paper consists of 22 interviews with hospitality workers in four hotel workplaces in Sweden; the luxury city hotel, the suburban chain hotel, the city chain hotel and the seasonal hotel. Ultimately, I suggest that the multifaceted complex of considerations which workers negotiate, could be conceptualized as the relational spaces of labor (im)mobility.     

From rural life to transnational wife: agrarian transition,gender mobility,and intimate globalization in transnational marriages in northeast Thailand

Popular and academic discourses of globalization are often gender biased, focusing on formal and impersonal realms of the market, politics, and technologies. This article explores an intimate dimension of globalization by analyzing the transnational marriage trend among women in northeast Thailand (Isan's) villages. The phua farang (foreign husband) phenomenon in Isan epitomizes the intimate link between the global political economy and individuals' desires, aspirations, and imagination in the private realm of personal and marital relationships. The phua farang phenomenon is embedded in a context of spatial and economic inequalities at the local, national, and global levels, and manifests classed and gendered strategies by which marginalized subjects attempt to transcend the limited opportunities for upward social mobility available to these women.     

当代日本新保守主义思潮研究

当代日本新保守主义,可以视为日本政治思想史上冷战终结前后,保守主义发展过程中的一个新思潮。它的出现同日本近代历史的保守主义和战后传统保守主义的发展历史极为相似。从纯粹意义的政治思想史角度,无法确定其标志性的思想起源。相反,却可以从其政治人物的政论和政治行动中,清晰地反映出它产生、发展的轨迹。     

'They Never Trusted Me to Drive': Farm girls and the gender relations of agricultural information transfer

This research explores the ways in which the gender relations of family farming influence the transfer of agricultural information and knowledge resources to farm girls, a rarely studied population. The study is based on a sample of 32 female farmers from southern Ontario, who were interviewed extensively about their experiences growing up on family farms, and about their lives as adult farmers. Their accounts underscore the fact that the gendered division of labour evident on North American farms constrains the information passed on to farm girls (and women) in particular ways. Farm girls do not share fully in the occupational inheritance of agriculture - they are frequently excluded or marginalised from important agricultural resources, including information. This exclusion comes about through the ongoing social processes of agrarian patriarchal culture, operating both inside and outside of the agri-family unit. In particular, the study illustrates how the social construction of agriculture is heavily reinforced by certain types of myth-making, which work to disadvantage farm girls and women.