Race and feminist care ethics: intersectionality as method

Gender has been the privileged optic through which care ethics has been theorised. However, a long line of theorists has argued that gender intersects with other vectors such as race, class and disability in the social world, including in caring practices. This paper contributes to the emergent literature on intersectionality and care ethics by focusing on how racialised difference affects care practices and therefore care ethics. It focuses on competence and alterity, and recognition and communication, as two elements that point to how racialised care is risky. It argues that slavery and colonialism have underpinned racial hierarchies marking contemporary racialised care encounters. As a result, racially marked people’s skills are often undervalued and their competency questioned even as race becomes an increasingly important difference between who cares and who receives care. Secondly, racial hierarchies in who gets care and what that care looks like can make care so distinctive as to be unrecognisable both to the care giver and those who need care. Lack of care is as productive of subjectivities as care so that care needs simply may not be articulated. Finally, given these differences in what care means, caring can become risky. The paper concludes by suggesting that thinking through intersectionality as method allows us to focus on moments and events where care can become unsettled. Care ethics should learn not only from its successes but also from instances when care has failed. We need a feminist care ethics that responds to the distance and difference that race brings to care. That is the promise of good care.     

When transport becomes a destination: deaf spaces and networks on the Mumbai suburban trains

ABSTRACT

This article considers dense social interactions in commuter trains and their crucial role within city-wide networks. Literature on social interactions in public transport has focused on how commuters have short interactions with each other, or constitute groups of train friends, but without situating them in wider geographies. The article focuses on deaf people in the Mumbai metropolis who travel in compartments reserved for disabled people, chatting and exchanging news and information. These spatial practices are facilitated by the peninsular geography and train infrastructure of Mumbai. In order to produce deaf spaces, where deaf sociality and sign language use are the organizing principles, deaf people strategically board particular trains and particular compartments, and sometimes remain in the train beyond their original destination. Mobile phones are used to coordinate these meetings. The diversity of people meeting in the train is high, such as with regard to gender, age, religion, caste, class and divisions are either perpetuated or abated. Because these compartments provide a diverse range of deaf people a space for daily meetings on the way to and from their (mostly hearing) work places and families; they are very important spaces to maintain and expand networks in the wider Mumbai deaf community.     

Engaging in the disablement process over space and time: narratives of persons with multiple sclerosis in Ottawa, Canada

This article presents an interpretive analysis of the narratives of 15 men and women who have been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) living in the city of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Relatively little is known about how people who are affected by MS cope with the challenges posed by social and physical barriers in their environment. Our research investigates two objectives: (1) to explore how those who have developed MS cope with their disease and resulting impairments, both in terms of the bodily experiences of becoming a chronically ill person and in terms of how they cope with changing relationships, changing identities and challenges in their physical environment; and (2) how they engage in the process of disablement over time and space as a result of these changing social and spatial relationships. We argue that the physical body and its social placings in public and private spaces are intertwined and both affect experiences of health, ability, impairment, disability and chronic illness. We further argue that these relationships are experienced across time and space, and in place, as people who have developed a chronic illness, such as MS, engage in, with and through the process of disablement. This article demonstrates the need for researchers to pay more attention to the role and significance of the simultaneity of space, place and time in shaping the experiences of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, as it has been shown that these variables played a significant role in regulating the everyday experiences of this study's respondents.     

Drifting Along or Dropping into Homelessness: A Class Analysis of Responses to Homelessness

Abstract: Prominent assumptions about street homelessness and how it should be addressed originate primarily from middle class domiciled worldviews. This article draws on interviews with 58 street homeless people to develop a typology for explaining different forms of homelessness resulting from differences in class of origin. The concepts of social distance and abjection are used to illustrate how class politics manifests in street homelessness and in responses to this issue. Many of our homeless participants referred to two broad groupings of homeless people who display distinct experiences and cultures in their daily lives on the streets. Drifters are people who do not experience homelessness as a sharp disjuncture from their previously housed life. Street homelessness is a continuation of the hardships of their lower class backgrounds. Droppers are people who have “fallen” on hard times and aspire to return to mainstream middle class lifeworlds. Differentiating between these two groups provides a space for defamiliarizing dominant understandings of, and current generic responses to, homelessness and foregrounds the need for reorienting services to better meet the needs of drifters.     

Sticking to the Stand of Chinese Culture and Promoting Cultural Self-Confidence and SelfImprovement

Sticking to the stand of Chinese culture is the basic premise of promoting cultural self-confidence and self-improvement. Only by thinking rationally about the inheritance, borrow-in, development, and promotion of culture can we grasp the essence of sticking to the stand of Chinese culture. To inherit the traditional culture, we should combine the new practice with the requirements of the times and take its essence while discarding its dross. The key to learning from foreign cultures is to give priority to ourselves and use them for our purposes. We can not swallow it all down and blindly use it. To develop socialist culture, we should, on the one hand, respect the national cultural tradition and on the other hand, constantly innovate and create a new culture. To carry forward Chinese culture, we need to meet the people’s growing spiritual and cultural demands internally and strengthen the influence of the spread of Chinese civilization, promoting Chinese culture to the world.     

Socio-cultural proximity,daily life and shopping tourism in the Dutch–German border region

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses feelings of socio-cultural proximity and distance with a specific focus on the tourist experience in cross-border shopping and everyday life practices in border regions. We examined shopping practices of Dutch border crossers who visit the German town Kleve in the Dutch–German border region. This particular border context has allowed us not only to reflect on a multidimensional approach towards socio-cultural proximity and distance, but also to examine how these different dimensions express themselves in the tourist experience when it comes to people and places that are geographically ‘close’ but assumingly socially and culturally ‘distant’ from home. Although some differences prompted feelings of discomfort, in particular, differences in social engagement, feelings of comfort stand out in our analysis of cross-border shopping tourism. Furthermore, our study shows that shopping tourism and exoticism, on the one hand, and everyday routines and the mundane, on the other hand, are closely intertwined in the lives of people living in a border region, resulting in a fluid interpretation of the exotic and the mundane in the cross-border context.     

Infrastructure Financing and Operation in the Contemporary City

The provision of large economic infrastructure in Australian cities is widely seen to be in crisis. This paper examines the reasons why crisis has arisen in the urban infrastructure sector and what might be done to redress this. The analysis and the argument are based on a resuscitation of the ideas and ideals of infrastructure provision and how these have been eroded. The paper shows how these ideas/ideals once underpinned the formulation of state role, governance and regulation systems, financial arrangements, and even community need and expectation. Critical to this was an acceptance of the ideals of universality, access, bundling and free positive externalities, and the belief that these should be assembled necessarily as part of any urban infrastructure roll-out. This package became instinctive in post-war economic and urban management. Yet this instinct has been lost as governments shift from models of infrastructure provision to infrastructure procurement where a major role for the private sector is now common. While such an involvement has its benefits, there are concerns for the urban condition when privatisation of infrastructure construction, delivery and operation becomes dominant. Citing Graham and Marvin (2001 ), the paper argues that, where once infrastructure was the key device for integrating the elements of the city and its people, the way it is now being delivered produces a splintered urbanism. There is an urgent need, then, to re-think what infrastructure means in today's urban context and thereafter to re-assess the criteria for deciding what infrastructure is to be provided, in what form it should be provided, who should provide it, who should pay, and who should operate it.     

Constructing Social Capital: Self‐Help Groups and Rural Women's Development in India

The success of the group approach in rural micro‐finance among women has inspired the tendency to look at all networking as essentially good and desirable in rural community development, without acknowledging the entrenched caste, class, ethnic and religious hierarchies that lead to diversities among women. Government schemes designed for poverty alleviation among rural women tend to be influenced by concepts and models that have been successful elsewhere, but do not take into account the diversities of situations at the local level. Internationally popular catchwords are used indiscriminately without questioning how these concepts can work effectively in the specific local context. This paper examines why some ‘self‐help groups’ fail by using the Development of Women and Children in Rural Areas (DWCRA) experience in India. The empirical survey was done over a period of two years in Burdwan, a relatively rich agricultural tract located in eastern India. We argue that whilst the ‘group’ has inherent benefits, it must never be allowed to become the paradigm in developmental policies for women.     

Personal Assistance Services: The Hub of the Policy Wheel for Community Integration of People with Severe Physical Disabilities

The success of persons with severe physical disabilities in living independently in the community, engaging in self-directed productive activities, and staying healthy depends, in part, on getting and maintaining adequate personal assistance with basic tasks such as getting out of bed and tending to personal hygiene. Although few policymakers would disagree with the contention that many people with disabilities need assistance with daily tasks, there is considerable debate about who should provide assistance, what services should be included, who should pay, who should be entitled to publicly provided and paid services, how much assistance should be provided, and who should control its administration. The prevailing model for delivery of personal assistance services has been primarily medical, with control of services by health care professionals, rather than independent living, with control by consumers receiving services. Traditionally there has been an institutional bias of funding for disability-related service, despite its much higher expense than community-based personal assistance services and its violation of basic human rights. Proponents of various solutions to health care reform have given little consideration to the provision of support services for people with disabilities. The advantages of implementing a uniform national system for the delivery of personal assistance services based on consumer control are discussed.     

Across the narrow sea: A Transnational Approach to Anglo-Dutch Travelogues

ABSTRACT

The busy traffic between England and the United Provinces in the seventeenth century produced travel literature by merchants, scholars, soldiers, and diplomats. What can these sources tell us about commonalities and differences among these travellers and between the nations?

This article provides a case study of a transnational approach, setting Dutch and English accounts side by side to enrich our understanding of how travellers sought out specific sites and institutions.

Strikingly, travellers reported on similar themes, such as royalty, universities and war, yet were also keen to draw contrasts with the visited country.

We show how these patterns of travel and imagery can throw light on Anglo-Dutch relations, providing us with the personal nuance often absent from official texts. Simultaneously, Anglo-Dutch relations affected the destinations and outlooks of travellers. The contribution of this article is its presentation of new material in an Anglo-Dutch framework.     

Telling More: Lies,Secrets, and History

This essay argues that secrets and lies are not forms of withholding information but forms by which information is valorized. Lies are constructed: what is to be lied about, what a lie is to consist of, how it is to be told, and whom it is to be told to, all reveal a social imaginary about who thinks what and what constitutes credibility. Secrets are negotiated: continual decisions about whom to tell, how much to tell, and whom not to tell describe social worlds, and the shape and weight of interactions therein. All of this makes lies and secrets extraordinarily rich historical sources. We might not see the truth distorted by a lie or the truth hidden by a secret, but we see the ideas andimaginings by which people disclose what should not be made public, and how they should carry out concealing one narrative with another. Such insights involve a step back from the project of social history, in which an inclusive social narrative is based on experience and individuals' ability to report it with some reliability, and suggests that historians need to look at social imaginings as ways to understand the ideas and concerns about which people lie and with which people construct new narratives that are not true. The study of secrets, however, links the study of social imaginings with the project of social history, as the valorization of information that results in the continual negotiation and renegotiation of secrets shows individuals and publics imagining the experiences labeled as secret because of the imagined power of a specific version of events.     

Dead Hookers and Las Vegas: A Response to the Critics of my Article and the War in Iraq

Abstract

America and its allies took a bold step in launching a pre-emptive strike hoping to create a safer and better world. They did not possess a complete knowledge of the facts. They did not present a simple calculus to justify the action. They decided it was better to act than twiddle their thumbs wondering when and how a menacing regime would fulfill its threats. Their critics might prove them wrong. The pretext for going to war was questionable. The attempt to change the political landscape seems doomed to failure. But foolish people are the ones who dare to dream and act. Their activity is less than perfect and their success never guaranteed, but sometimes the God of all mercy uses what cannot stand on its own merit and effort and blesses it through the omnipotence of his will.     

Pilgrim routes as contested spaces in Norway

Abstract

Many of today’s pilgrim routes are not only conceived of as religious thoroughfares. They are also seen as historical and cultural routes and are embraced by heritage polices and the tourism industry. It follows from this that contemporary pilgrim routes are endowed with many meanings and expectations, both in the public and private spheres. While much research has focused its attention on the diversity of motives, experiences and symbolic meaning processes among those who embark on journeys along pilgrim routes, less attention has been paid to the varieties of stakeholders involved. By exploring how different types of stakeholders engage with a recently reinvented pilgrim route in Norway, it is shown how this route represents a contested space. Among various stakeholders involved in the development and the management of the pilgrimage, as well as stakeholders who take an interest in the material and symbolic benefits one could possibly draw from it, there are disagreements on what kind of heritage pilgrimage should represent. The differing approaches are basically represented by those who want to promote religious motivations, traditionalist outdoor recreation interests and stakeholders who primarily want to develop and market the pilgrim route in a touristic context. While distinctions between categories such as pilgrims and tourists, or vacationers and religious travellers, are becoming more and more blurred, opposing and partly intersecting discourses among stakeholders tend in this case to result in the upholding of these kinds of distinctions. This implies that travellers along pilgrim route are not left to themselves with their experiences and practices. While some stakeholders take an interest in what pilgrims are doing, in the sense that they want to profit from it, others are concerned about questions of whom a pilgrim is and for whom a pilgrim route is for.     

Structural boundaries that effect the representation of gender and disability in works of fiction from the United States and United Kingdom

Abstract

Discussions of intellectual disability are found in medical journals, published biographies, and disability research. However, outside the realm of medicine or personal reminiscence intellectual disability struggles for spaces of social, historical, cultural and imaginative representation. This article addresses these struggles for space and specifically focuses on the imagined space of narrative fiction. Being imagined spaces they should easily be able to accommodate people with disability, and yet, very few characters with intellectual disability are represented or more importantly have agency in narrative fiction. Drawing on work from feminist geographies and literary geographies this article addresses the limiting narrative structures that have been used against fictional characters who have a disability and ways authors may move beyond these limitations. Reconciling feminist geographies and literary geographies allows new critical spatial knowledge around disability to emerge. It is not enough to write characters with disabilities into narrative fiction if the structures surrounding them remain limiting and prejudiced. This article discusses the three main limiting structures in narrative fiction: character representation, narrative voice and genre. Looking at narrative fiction through feminist and literary geographies reveals how these limiting structures function as power hierarchies, and importantly, shows how these imposed structures can be subverted and changed.     

Sports, ‘race’ and the Finnish national identity in Helsingin Sanomat in the early twentieth century

The main goals of this article are first to examine through Olympic sports journalism what hierarchies and categorisations of the global space and the people populating it were considered important to the national imagery in Finland at the beginning of the twentieth century and, secondly, to assess how the notion of race was intertwined with these categorisations. Sports journalism played an important role in Finland by constructing and legitimising a national imagery and by providing accounts of other races, cultures and nationalities that were considered ‘different’ from ‘us’. The article concludes that sports journalism at that time employed three major discursive practices that were aimed at constructing an image of a white, Western and Finnish nation living in the north. The ‘others’ were placed in a hierarchy, in which their position was determined by their racial background and assumed similarities/differences in appearance and behaviour as compared with Finnish males.     

Diffusion in the Studies of the African Past: Reflections From New Archaeological Findings

Diffusionist theories have often been invoked to explain how ancient African cultures were formed and developed. Explanations were either in terms of waves of migrations or by infiltration by people of less African origin or people alleged to have had a high culture. This article provides new evidence for a Neolithic cultural sequence on the islands and coast of East Africa. It proposes that archaeological cultural horizons such as these should be re-examined using a revised diffusionist theory. On this basis, it can be shown that the people who were smelting iron in Sub-Saharan Africa around the first century a.d. were not marauding communities of Bantu peoples with no inclination to settle and build up empires, but of people who were well settled, and had a long history of building stable settlements and trading from Neolithic times.     

In search of Wales: travel writing and narratives of difference, 1918–50

Travel writers since the eighteenth century have sought to portray Wales as a place of «difference» with its own culture, history and legends woven into the landscape. Their texts were later to inspire twentieth-century travellers. These later travellers also drew on the academic work of geographers, anthropologists and archaeologists such as H.J. Fleure, Cyril Fox and E.G. Bowen who wrote extensively and influentially on their ideas of identity and race grounded in the landscapes of Wales. One recurrent theme throughout these popular travel narratives, like H.V. Morton'sIn Search of Wales , was that of a Celtic history and culture, evident both in landscape and in the people. Travellers» books recorded journeys punctuated by visits to the monuments of this Celtic past with its hill-forts and standing stones, and by encounters with the peoples of Wales. The literature of travellers and academics combined to create a particular form of text for Wales that in turn became the language for the promotion of tourism and for the images and experiences of Wales that could be taken away by those who came to visit.     

Welshness in ‘British Wales’: negotiating national identity at the margins

Popular interpretations of national identity often focus on the unifying qualities of nationhood. However, societies frequently draw hierarchical distinctions between the people and places who are ‘most national’, and those who are ‘least national’. Little attention is paid to these marginal places within the nation and the experiences of their inhabitants. This article helps to address this by analysing the ‘less Welsh’ British Wales region of Wales, a country that has traditionally possessed a hierarchical, regionally constituted nationhood. The article studies the British Wales region both ‘from above’ – considering how some areas develop as ‘less national’ – and ‘from below’, introducing empirical ethnographic work into ‘everyday Welshness’ in this area. Whilst previous work on hierarchical nationhood focuses on how hierarchies are institutionalized by the state, this article demonstrates how people at the margins of the nation actively negotiate their place in the nation. Whilst people in this area expressed a strong Welshness, they also struggled to place themselves in the nation because they had internalized their lowly place within the national hierarchy. The article demonstrates the importance of place and social class for national identity construction and draws attention to the role of power in the discursive construction of hierarchical nationhood.     

Historians and Their Duties

We need to specify what ethical responsibility historians, as historians, owe, and to whom. We should distinguish between natural duties and (non‐natural) obligations, and recognize that historians' ethical responsibility is of the latter kind. We can discover this responsibility by using the concept of “accountability”. Historical knowledge is central. Historians' central ethical responsibility is that they ought to tell the objective truth. This is not a duty shared with everybody, for the right to truth varies with the audience. Being a historian is essentially a matter of searching for historical knowledge as part of an obligation voluntarily undertaken to give truth to those who have a right to it. On a democratic understanding, people need and are entitled to an objective understanding of the historical processes in which they live. Factual knowledge and judgments of value are both required, whatever philosophical view we might have of the possibility of a principled distinction between them. Historians owe historical truth not only to the living but to the dead. Historians should judge when that is called for, but they should not distort historical facts. The rejection of postmodernism's moralism does not free historians from moral duties. Historians and moral philosophers alike are able to make dispassionate moral judgments, but those who feel untrained should be educated in moral understanding. We must ensure the moral and social responsibility of historical knowledge. As philosophers of history, we need a rational reconstruction of moral judgments in history to help with this.     

Apollo and the Virgin: The Changing Meanings of a Sacred Site on Anafi

The ruins of an ancient Greek temple on a Cycladic island form part of an Orthodox Christian shrine. To local people and returning migrants, the site is that of their patron saint; its pre‐Christian past is irrelevant except in so far as it establishes their specific link with the ancient world, and thus with national claims of unbroken continuity between modern and ancient Greece. To early travellers and antiquarians, and to today’s archaeologists, it has been primarily the ancient site which is of interest, while tourists are more concerned in finding “an unspoilt island”. A historical survey of information about the ancient and the Christian site reveals ambiguities and confusions about both. These multiple meanings for locals and scholars are discussed.