Policy change and network termination: The role of farm groups in agricultural policy making in Australia

As the National Farmers' Federation (NFF) celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2004, it is timely to reflect on the role of farm groups in agricultural policy making in Australia and revisit the policy changes of the 1970s which provided a major impetus for the NFF's formation. Agricultural policy is often presented as the classic case of policy developed by tight policy communities characterised by stability, shared ideology and limited membership. There has been much debate in the literature about the value of the concept of policy communities in explaining policy development processes and policy change. This article suggests that the combination of ideological and institutional change, particularly in the presence of looser policy networks, can disrupt policy making and lead to network termination resulting in policy change.     

Gendered mobilities and immobilities: Women’s and men’s capacities for agricultural innovation in Kenya and Nigeria

Abstract

Social norms surrounding women’s and men’s mobility in public spaces often differ. Here we discuss how gendered mobilities and immobilities influence women’s and men’s capacities to innovate in agriculture. We analyze four case studies from Western Kenya and Southwestern Nigeria that draw on 28 focus group discussions and 32 individual interviews with a total of 225 rural and peri-urban women, men and youth. Findings show that women in both sites are less mobile than men due to norms that delimit the spaces where they can go, the purpose, length of time and time of day of their travels. Overall, Kenyan women and Nigerian men have better access to agricultural services and farmer groups than their gendered counterparts. In Southwestern Nigeria this is linked to masculine roles of heading and providing for the household and in Western Kenya to the construction of women as the ‘developers’ of their households. Access and group participation may reflect norms and expectations to fulfill gender roles rather than an individual’s agency. This may (re)produce mobility pressures on time constrained gendered subjects. Frameworks to analyze factors that support women’s and men’s agency should be used to understand how gendered mobilities and immobilities are embedded in community contexts and affect engagement in agricultural innovation. This can inform the design of interventions to consider the ways in which norms and agency intersect and influence women’s and men’s mobilities, hence capacity to innovate in agriculture, thus supporting more gender transformative approaches.     

Gendered spheres: theorizing space in the English printing house

The English printing house was initially conceived, legally, as a printing house, with public work taking place in a private setting. This private space emphasised the traditional hierarchies of political and legal order: Women’s work that took place within the printing house thus fell into the traditional role of household labours. This erasure of labour is one that foregrounds the erasure of women’s writing from history; women who worked in essence as publishers, as printers and booksellers, are very clearly present in the historical records but invisible in our narratives of book history. How did this erasure happen, and why is their presence, and work, overlooked? If we consider the language of space in theory and reread Moxon’s Mechanickal Exercises closely, we see the ways in which the ideas of space itself can be implicitly gendered, and how this might shape our idea of the printing house.     

The Essential Body: Mesopotamian Conceptions of the Gendered Body

Linguistic, art historical, hermeneutic, gender and intercultural analyses clarify body and gender concepts in Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, literature and visual arts. The body was a fundamental point of reference in ancient Mesopotamia, metaphor for the total self, royal ideology, cities, humanity and deities. Humanity was created without gender; sex, gender and social status were subsequently inscribed on the body. Gender taxonomy tolerated ambiguity beyond the ‘normative’ masculine/feminine. Body and mind were an inseparable unity and denoted by the same Sumerian word. Mind/body and male/female dichotomy were unknown.     

The Company of White Paper Makers in Hampshire: An Inventory of Plant

Abstract

This article describes the unusually detailed inventory made in 1696 of the South Stoneham paper mills near Southampton. It sheds light on methods of paper making in late 17th-century England, and gives an idea of the surprising scale of the undertaking.     

Portrayal of lobotomy in the popular press: 1935-1960

This study analyzed the content of popular press articles on lobotomy between the years 1935 and 1960. Both a qualitative and quantitative analysis provided evidence that the press initially used uncritical and sensational reporting styles, with the content of articles on lobotomy becoming increasingly negative through time. The initial positive bias occurred despite opposing views in the medical community, which provided a basis for more balanced coverage. These findings support the theory that biased reporting in popular press articles may have been a factor influencing the quick and widespread adoption of lobotomy as a psychiatric treatment.     

Gendered struggles over land: shifting inheritance practices among the Serer in rural Senegal

Although women’s land rights are often affirmed unequivocally in constitutions and international human rights conventions in many African countries, customary practices usually prevail on the ground and often deny women’s land inheritance. Yet land inheritance often goes unnoticed in wider policy and development initiatives to promote women’s equal access to land. This article draws on feminist ethnographic research among the Serer ethnic group in two contrasting rural communities in Senegal. Through analysis of land governance, power relations and ‘technologies of the self’, this article shows how land inheritance rights are contingent on the specific effects of intersectionality in particular places. The contradictions of legal pluralism, greater adherence to Islam and decentralisation led to greater application of patrilineal inheritance practices. Gender, religion and ethnicity intersected with individuals’ marital position, status, generation and socio-ecological change to constrain land inheritance rights for women, particularly daughters, and widows who had been in polygamous unions and who remarried. Although some women were aware that they were legally entitled to inherit a share of the land, they tended not to ‘demand their rights’. In participatory workshops, micro-scale shifts in women’s and men’s positionings reveal a recognition of the gender discriminatory nature of customary and Islamic laws and a desire to ‘change with the times’. While the effects of ‘reverse’ discourses are ambiguous and potentially reinforce prevailing patriarchal power regimes, ‘counter’ discourses, which emerged in participatory spaces, may challenge customary practices and move closer to a rights-based approach to gender equality and women’s land inheritance.     

Gendered water spaces: a study of the transition from wells to handpumps in Mozambique

In many parts of rural Africa, women and children spend a lot of time collecting water. In the development literature, the water collection task is portrayed as oppressive, arduous, and disliked by women. Eliminating this activity from women's lives is believed to empower them, yet there has been little research investigating what actually happens at the water source or how women themselves perceive the time spent there. This research is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in five rural communities in the northern province of Nampula, Mozambique. Over this year, handpumps were constructed in communities where people previously collected water from distant shallow wells and rivers. This article compares the social interactions and activities between the customary water sites and the handpump through the lens of gendered space. The customary water sites are controlled by women and highly valued for their social attributes. While clean water is more accessible at the handpumps, men often regulate access to the technology and social activities are limited. This article contributes to feminist geography and political ecology by showing how differences in the materiality of water spaces interact with local norms to shape social interactions and gendered subjectivities, and how, in turn, men and women contribute to the production and meaning of these spaces. I argue that the handpumps open up new spaces for men and women to negotiate gender roles and (re)define their associations with modernity and development.     

Common misperceptions: the press and Victorian views of crime

After a string of successes in the early nineteenth century, the Victorian movement to reform criminal punishment began to falter. Despite evidence to the contrary, the populace grew convinced that violent crime was on the rise. A frequency analysis of The Times and The Manchester Guardian suggests that this misperception was due to a drastic increase in crime coverage by the periodicals of the day.     

Gendered Geographies of Elimination: Decolonial Feminist Geographies in Latin American Settler Contexts

Gendered geographies of elimination further settler colonialism's influence on conceptual discussions in human geography on contemporary forms of the place‐based death of indigenous peoples. Through work stemming from scholarship on the gendering of settler colonialism, this paper adds to narratives on place annihilation and dispossession of indigenous territory tied to the slow death of racialised, gendered and sexualised populations. Building on incipient reflections in geography with settler colonialism, I explore the geographic implications from the perspective of Epera women, indigenous women belonging to a trinational ethnicity experiencing elimination along the Ecuador–Colombia borderland from the perspective of decolonial feminist geography frameworks. I claim that attrition implied in settler colonialism's logic of elimination is a territorial project demonstrated in place‐based elimination and gendered embodied elimination.