Bursting the Bubble: Spatialising Safety for Privileged Migrant Women in Singapore

This paper develops geographical work that is attentive to, and critical of, how safety is lived and narrated. In contrast to previous work on safety that focuses on fear, the paper looks at safety as something more than aspiration for women. To do so, the paper utilises the metaphor of the “expatriate bubble” to explore how safety is constructed and experienced by privileged migrants in Singapore. Utilising research from two projects, we argue that we need to think about how gender and Othering intersect to construct safety. In doing so, we explore how we can use conceptualisations of privileged migrants to research how safety can be understood and therefore practised more widely.     

Locating Neoliberalism in Dubai: Migrant Workers and Class Struggle in the Autocratic City

Abstract: In recent years, portrayals of neoliberalism in Dubai have often hinged on narratives about the hyper‐exploitation of migrant workers in the city. In this paper I interrogate these narratives by exploring the governance of lower‐waged construction migrants and their recent role in market‐led processes of urbanization. Through a focus on the recent growth of private worker welfare initiatives and dozens of illegal labour strikes led by migrant builders, I draw attention to the fraught and contradictory character of autocratic neoliberalism that operates in the governance of these workers, and point to workers’ bodily capital and the construction labour camp as two emergent sites in which these labour politics are unfolding. I argue that these social reproductive realms of the body and the mass‐worker household have offered a temporary spatial fix to the limitations of autocratic rule in a neoliberalizing city, while also conjuring moments of political possibility for construction migrants.     

中韩国际婚姻的跨国家庭纽带研究——以汉族婚姻移民女性为中心

论文以22名嫁韩中国女性为对象,从跨国主义的视角分析她们在韩的婚姻现状、与原生家庭间的跨国联系及这种联系的性质和意义。研究发现,这些女性绝大多数来自中国东北三省和山东沿海地区;中介婚姻占近70%,且与丈夫的年龄差距普遍较大;再婚者占较大比例。其中,60%与韩国丈夫育有子女,已在韩国生活多年,并从事各种非专业化工作。这些女性通过汇款寄物,信息通讯交流,回国探亲,邀请家人来韩等一系列方式维持着跨国家庭纽带。而她们的中国家人也为其提供育儿、家政以及精神抚慰等多方面的支持。通过跨国家庭纽带,汉族女性与原生家庭成员之间实现的是一种灵活变动着的"跨国看护",双方是互惠互利的。     

Life As the River Flows: Women in the Malayan Anti-Colonial Struggle

This refreshingly straightforward book mostly lets the narratorsspeak for themselves, but what sociologist Khoo has to say aboutthe process of oral history is also very interesting. Khoo spentfive years living amongst and interviewing ex-guerilla fightersin southern Thailand, including the sixteen women featured here. The term "Malaya" refers to the Malayan peninsula (now the westernstates of Malaysia) and the island of Singapore. The Britishbegan to colonize Malaya in 1786, staying in control until theJapanese occupied the peninsula during World War II. Malayansresisted their Japanese rulers; the British fled. After theJapanese surrendered in 1945, the Malayan People's Anti-JapaneseArmy briefly governed Malaya. The British returned the followingyear.     

Women In The City: Feminist Analyses of Urban Geography

Four different sites of gendered social practice are identified as major concerns of socialist feminist urban geography: the home or domestic sphere; the paid workplace; the city's built environment; and localities. Literature about each is described and reviewed Theoretical implications of the feminist reading of urban geography are then considered in particular the feminist criticisms of traditional models of urban spatial structure, and challenges to existing forms of feminist geography from debates in social theory.     

The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg

Abstract: By unravelling the adoption and adaptation of the North American Business Improvement District (BID) model in South African cities, this paper considers the way neoliberal principles are making their way in the post‐apartheid context. Drawing on a comparative approach of BIDs in Johannesburg and Cape Town, we analyse the tensions and conflicts surrounding their implementation and unpack the resilience of this model. As unexpected as this resilience might be in such a context, that is, far away from the heartland of neoliberalism, we argue that this resilience is linked to the permeability of the local contexts and to the plasticity of the model itself at the city and neighbourhood levels, reflecting a capacity to adapt to inherited regulatory frameworks, patterns of territorial development and embedded socio‐political alliances of the local terrains, as well as an ability to accommodate post‐apartheid issues through the crafting of what we refer to as “local Third Ways”.     

Enslaved African Women in Nineteenth-Century Iran: The Life of Fezzeh Khanom of Shiraz

Fezzeh Khanom (c. 1835–82), an African woman, was a slave of Sayyed ‘Ali-Mohammad of Shiraz, the Bab. Information about her life can be recovered from various pious Baha'i histories. She was honored, and even venerated by Babis, though she remained subordinate and invisible. The paper makes the encouraging discovery that a history of African slavery in Iran is possible, even at the level of individual biographies. Scholars estimate that between one and two million slaves were exported from Africa to the Indian Ocean trade in the nineteenth century, most to Iranian ports. Some two-thirds of African slaves brought to Iran were women intended as household servants and concubines. An examination of Fezzeh Khanom's life can begin to fill the gaps in our knowledge of enslaved women in Iran. The paper discusses African influences on Iranian culture, especially in wealthy households and in the royal court. The limited value of Western legal distinctions between slavery and freedom when applied to the Muslim world is noted.     

奋斗 让城市生活更美好

2010年5月,万众瞩目的上海世界博览会大幕即将开启。这是世博会诞生百年以来首次来到中国,也是继2008北京奥运会之后,又一个在全球面前展现中国的机会。本届世博会的主题是——城市,让生活更美好,是自1933年美国芝加哥世博会首次设定主题以来,世博会第一次出现"城市"主题。据说其灵感源自于古希腊先哲亚里斯多德的一句话:"人们来到城市是为了生活,人们居住在城市是为了生活得更好。"     

Frontier Life: Late Prehistoric Adaptations of the Kansas City Locality

Abstract

Late Prehistoric (AD 900–1500) adaptations along the lower Missouri River in the Kansas City locality include two distinct contemporaneous archaeological cultures, Steed-Kisker and Pomona. Both are reviewed with emphasis on interaction, change, and continuity. Evidence from other sites in northeastern Kansas, a prairie-woodland ecotone, points to interaction where their culture core areas overlapped, a locality that was a frontier throughout much of prehistory between cultures of the eastern woodlands and the Great Plains. Recent investigation of house remains at the Scott and Caenen sites, representing the Steed-Kisker and Pomona cultures respectively, provides significant insight concerning relations or lack thereof. About 130 years apart in time of occupation, they are only 350 m distant in Stranger Creek valley, the last major tributary of the Kansas River before its confluence with the Missouri River. Both illustrate the contrasting nature of these adaptations, specifically change from a Woodland adaptation represented by Steed-Kisker and continuity with respect to it represented by Pomona, which persisted longer. The possibility of assimilation of both cultures with the Oneota tradition during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is discussed.