Gender and Household Economic Strategies in Rural Appalachia

In recent decades, many Appalachian households have experienced declining incomes due to the loss of traditional male jobs in the mining and manufacturing sectors. One response to this decline has been an increase in female employment in formal sector activities. Another response is homework, or the home-based production of goods and services for sale in the formal and informal sectors. In rural Appalachia, where formal jobs are often unavailable or inadequate to support a household, many women are engaging in homework as an economic strategy. Consequently, economic restructuring cannot be fully understood without analyzing household strategies and gender relations. This paper examines the intersection of gender, households, and economic restructuring as it relates to women's homework and employment shifts in rural Appalachia. Research for this paper entailed qualitative interviews with 50 West Virginia women who are engaged in the home-based production of goods and services. The study analyzes the variety of homework activities done by rural women, their contribution to household incomes, and the effect of these activities on gender relations and divisions of labor in the home. The research forwarded in this study advances a conceptual understanding of household economic strategies and has some practical applications for women and economic development in underdeveloped regions .     

我国乡村地理学研究的回顾与展望

乡村地理学作为研究乡村发展过程中人文经济活动与地理环境相互关系的一门学科,有着悠久的历史。在我国,其深入发展则是在七十年代末,随着以家庭联产承包责任制为主体的经济体制改革的推行,乡村社会经济面貌发生了深刻的变化,同时,也出现了大量问题,迫切需要地理学家去研究解决,这种形势为我国乡村地理学提供了广阔的实践天地,并极大地推动了我国乡村地理学的研究进展。
本文从乡村地理学产生的背景出发,回顾了我国近年来乡村地理学的发展过程,同时对我国乡村地理学的主要研究领域进行了阐述,最后本文指出了我国乡村地理学研究存在的主要问题以及今后的发展方向。     

Modeling the Roles of Craft Production in Ancient Political Economies

Ongoing debates over the significance of specialized production in ancient political economies frequently hinge on questions of whether elites or commoners controlled craft manufactures and whether the material or ideological import of these production processes was more significant in deciding power contests. Though long recognized, such queries were traditionally answered in relatively straightforward economic terms. Recently, these time-honored approaches have been questioned. An ever increasing number of authors are promoting varied takes on the causal linkages between political forms and processes, on the one hand, and patterns of production, distribution, and use of craft goods, on the other. The literature generated by these discussions is extensive, vibrant, and often confusing. Rather than trying to synthesize all reports and essays dealing with specialized manufacture, this paper highlights general interpretive trends that underlie and structure current debates. The concluding section offers suggestions for how studies of relations among crafts, power, and social heterogeneity might be pursued profitably in the future.     

“Why would they care?”: Youth,resource extraction,and climate change in northern British Columbia,Canada

Discussion about local decision making tends to overlook rural and remote youth engagement. Resource extractive industries are, however, fixtures in many rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities in settler colonial British Columbia, Canada. These industries shape youths' perceived options for social and economic ventures when they are looking towards their futures. By engaging literature on climate change, settler colonialism, and critical Indigenous studies, and drawing on empirics from workshops conducted with youth from northern British Columbia, this paper explores how rural and remote northern and Indigenous youth engagement and perspectives can transform discussions on climate change and resource extraction. The paper documents how rural and northern youth have been engaged in environmental decision making, particularly in light of resource extraction. The paper also suggests that environmental decision making has at times been extractive itself. The paper concludes that when engaged meaningfully, youth desire to work collectively against social and environmental injustices.     

Geographical imaginations,public education and the everyday worlds of Fascist Italy

This article explores the phenomena of geographical imaginations and their seldom-noted promotion within various corners of Fascist Italy. Imagined geographies are socially constructed understandings of other places and regions and, as such, they are malleable, contingent, shifting and unquantifiable. Nevertheless, these imaginaries help us to navigate our imaginative worlds and our relative place in the material world. In 1930s Italy, various interest groups associated with the colonial and expansionist projects of Fascism promoted the development of wider geographical imaginaries among Italians. Academic geographers were often key figures in these initiatives: some prompted these projects, while others did so at the behest of the regime and its desire to expand Italians' coscienza geografica (the geographical imagination) to an ‘imperial level’. This article explores how academic geographers from Trieste sought to contribute to this project and to embed their geographical knowledge into the ordinary, everyday circuits of public life. The article therefore outlines the notion of the geographical imagination and demonstrates via case studies how Triestine geographers tried to nurture these phenomena. Finally, it suggests that, although elusive and amorphous, geographical imaginations were a feature of everyday life in some corners of Fascist Italy and, as such, they deserve academic attention.     

Women's collective economic strategies and political transformation in rural South Africa

This article examines the economic processes and socio‐political institutions that shape women's involvement in community projects. Feminist materialism and postcolonial theory provide the framework to analyze these livelihood strategies as they are grounded in the material conditions of women's lives. The empirical study is based in a rural northern province of South Africa where colonialism and apartheid have contributed to extreme economic and social hardships. Fieldwork was conducted in Limpopo to analyze how community projects contribute to livelihood strategies. In an area where migrant remittances remain one of the main sources of income for rural households, women have increasingly engaged in collective economic strategies such as pottery making, sewing, and agricultural production. These strategies are embedded in a complex set of patriarchal institutions that reinforce unequal access to resources and have historically marginalized rural black women. Despite these barriers, findings from this study demonstrate that community projects provide the potential for economic and social empowerment, especially among rural women.     

Florence and its hinterlands in the late Middle Ages: contrasting fortunes in the Tuscan countryside, 1300–1500

A key strand of research for social and economic historians of the pre-industrial period is the relationship between city and countryside. Sometimes urban and rural environments enjoyed mutually beneficial relationships, though in other cases cities reduced their rural hinterlands to poverty and decay – the question is, why? By focusing on late-medieval Florence and Tuscany, this paper moves away from approaching this question through an ‘urban bias’, and suggests the answers can be found within the structural configuration of rural societies themselves. Essentially, some rural regions were well set up to repel urban predatory tendencies, while other societies were susceptible to exploitation.     

Museums and communities in Africa: facing the new challenges

Abstract

Established during the colonial era, the majority of museums in Africa were modeled on their European counterparts. The period of Africanization that followed the independence of many African nations witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of Africans receiving higher education and specialized training. Institutions such as museums began to come under the leadership of indigenous Africans but, in most cases, the exhibits and their condition(s) remained the same. Today, African museums face new challenges: how can they become more relevant, both to the local communities they serve and to foreign visitors? How can they attract more visitors, especially from local communities? This article discusses the notion of ‘indigenous’ in an African context. It looks at the development of museums in Africa and their current metamorphosis into dynamic cultural centres that address pertinent social, cultural and even economic issues-in the face of dwindling government funding and increased modernization and globalization. It discusses several museums and how they are meeting these challenges, and how organizations such as AFRICOM (International Council of African Museums) and programmes such as SAMP (African–Swedish Museum Network) are contributing to the positive changes currently taking place.     

State Collapse as Business: The Role of Conflict Trade and the Emerging Control Agenda

This article examines the role played by conflict trade in the process of state collapse. Conflict trade is defined here as the trade in non–military goods such as diamonds, timber and drugs that finances war. Such trade includes both the export and import of goods to a war zone as well as extra–territorial trade undertaken by supporters of a warring faction. It is argued that the decline of superpower military aid coupled with the broader effects of centre–periphery exploitation mediated through a neo–liberal and western imposed version of globalization has meant such trade has a particular salience both in contemporary conflict and the process of state collapse. Equally, though, the reliance of warring factions on conflict trade means they are also susceptible to changes in the market for their goods, creating a vulnerability that can (and to some extent has been) exploited to promote peace. The emerging control agenda on conflict trade is currently characterized by a number of problems — most notably, the risk that the control of conflict trade might become a substitute for action on arms exports; that international action has largely been undertaken within an inappropriate statist paradigm; that control has sometimes taken second place to economic or strategic interests and that policy has become hostage to a ‘drugs and thugs’ agenda which risks undermining its effectiveness.     

Economic models and having children: some evidence from Kwahu,Ghana

This discussion outlines briefly some of the main features of economic models of rational decision making with regard to fertility which focus on the perceived costs and benefits of parenthood, noting the findings of several Ghanaian studies which have tried to link changing patterns of costs and benefits involved in kin and conjugal family ties with changes in fertility and parental role expectations. Procreation and its context in a rural Kwahu town of southern Ghana in the early 1970s is then described and illustration is included of how a "cost benefit" analysis of pregnancy termination and child bearing in this society illuminates why, although induced abortion rates appeared high, there was little noticeable shift to much lower fertility values or achievements than those traditionally admired. The data on the families of Ghanaian salary earners indicated the usefulness of an economic approach, with attention given to the allocation of scarce resources through the essentially rational choices of individual parents, continually trying to avoid or alleviate the effects of role strain and conflict. They also illustrate the need for household economists' models to take more sophisticated account of variables such as the openness or closure of the conjugal family in various areas of its operation and the need to treat the degrees of jointness of the conjugal role relationship in different areas as crucial variables. The town of the research is a typical "home town," which means that it constitutes the base from which people depart, either to an urban center where they take up trading or look for other employment, or to a farming settlement where they may spend from a few months to several years clearing new land or harvesting crops. The data from Kwahu reveal that the people are struggling to improve their lot in an uncertain and changing context in which lineage support is not guaranteed, marriage is unstable and children often leave their parents at an early age, and in which educational qualifications and the ability to be mobile are critical in the search for incomes and better jobs. Early childbearing is a hindrance and is avoided where possible though it is not an impassable barrier to townward migration and upward mobility. The costs of later childbearing are frequently shelved and passed on to others, especially the child's mothers. Consequently, considerable inertia associated with poverty and insecurity remains with regard to decisions to regulate fertility. Knowledge and availability of contraceptives are restricted.     

The exploitation and control of woodland and scrubland in the Byzantine world

Abstract

A welcome and necessary aspect of the renewal of studies of the Byzantine economy has been the analysis, sometimes in both the technical and the broader organisational aspects, of the production and redistribution of particular goods. One only has to think of some recent work concerning mining and metallurgy, minting, silk-production, glass-making, potteries, shipping, and salsamenta, to realise the potential significance of such studies, the need for the historical study of all types of economic activity, and how unilluminating has become the incantation of such statements as that the Byzantine economy was ‘overwhelmingly' rural (almost invariably made with reference to the primary products of a narrowly defined agriculture), or that centres of population were ‘characterised by consumption', or even that commercialised redistribution was ‘feeble’ and stagnant in the Early Byzantine period.     

Globalization,trade, and material culture: Portugal’s role in the making of a multicultural Europe (1415–1806)

SUMMARY: In the Early Modern age, Portugal was among the first European countries to engage in overseas trade and colonial ventures. The influx of new people and things rapidly transformed it into a multicultural country in permanent contact with the rest of Europe and the wider world. While we possess a vast amount of knowledge describing the overseas contacts and acquisition of goods from historical documents, in recent years archaeological excavations have begun to reveal direct evidence of these interactions. This includes thousands of people and objects such as ceramics, ivory and stone artefacts produced in overseas territories in Africa, South America and Asia. They were exported in vast amounts to several European countries, and are frequently found in archaeological excavations. These commodities were in part responsible for changing European perceptions of the world, its dimensions and cultural plurality. They also rapidly left their mark on European goods production, leading to changes in aesthetics and the introduction of new forms. This paper will discuss some of these objects in terms of how they reflect an Early Modern globalized world, and their influence on European daily life.     

Manufacturing in the 18th Century

The putting-out spinning of flax for merchants and weaving of kersey in house-manufactories for export are examples of new elements in wool production and manufacturing in late 18th-century Iceland. The import of luxuries also increased, and a broader group of inhabitants acquired these items from the monopoly-trade merchants. The article analyses how these elements can be understood in light of Iceland’s pre-industrial society. How did these changes become visible and have an impact on the country? Did changes in wool production and consumption signify new trends in 18th-century society, or should one interpret them as extensions of structures that already existed within what can be called the ‘Old Society’?     

Cultural icons and urban development in Asia: Economic imperative,national identity,and global city status

Global cities are characterized by the multiplicity of flows that they are implicated in – flows of people, goods, services, ideas, and images. Yet, global cities do not derive their status only on the basis that they are networked nodes. They also require particular forms of cultural capital. Cities with global aspirations have thus increasingly recognized the need to accumulate cultural capital, for which one means is to create new urban spaces, in particular, new cultural urban spaces (e.g. grand theatres, museums, libraries). These often monumental structures are intended to support a vibrant cultural life, in order to attract and sustain global human and economic flows. In this paper, I examine the efforts by Shanghai's, Singapore's and Hong Kong's governments to develop cultural icons as part of the strategy to help their cities gain global city status, and in the process, constructing shared national and city identities. I illustrate how such efforts are not universally interpreted in the manner intended, with city populations sometimes protesting, sometimes simply oblivious. At the same time, I argue that such strategies to achieve global city status are sometimes at odds with projects of nationhood.     

Growing up in a tourist destination: negotiating space,identity and belonging

There is little research on children’s experiences of growing up in a popular tourist destination, where place and space are contested with visitors, migrants and temporary residents. Existing literature on young people’s experiences of their socio-spatial surroundings has focused predominantly on the rural/urban dichotomy, often neglecting to explore how identity and belonging are negotiated in complex community contexts such as tourist destinations. This paper reports on recent research that suggests that young people’s experiences of growing up in such an environment are nuanced and diverse, with their rich narratives disrupting socially constructed distinctions between the rural and the urban, merging experiences from both worlds.     

Discipline and Devolution: Constructions of Poverty, Race, and Criminality in the Politics of Rural Prison Development

Abstract:  The soaring expansion of the US prison population is transforming the geographies of both urban and rural landscapes. As the trend in mass incarceration persists, depressed rural spaces are increasingly associated with rising prison development and the increasing criminalization of rural communities of disadvantage. Drawing on in-depth archival and interview research in rural communities in the Northwestern states of Idaho and Montana, this paper explores how cultural productions of poverty and exclusion intersect with rural prison development. I examine how representations of poverty and criminality are entangled with processes of economic restructuring and the localization of economic development and social welfare. I explore the ways in which the rural prison geography of the Northwest is linked to the material and discursive construction of those in poverty and how these narratives are produced through local relations of race, ethnicity, and class. I suggest that the mobilization of these constructions legitimates rural prison expansion, increasingly punitive social and criminal justice policies, and the retrenchment of racialized and classed inequality. Further, I argue that these discursive imaginations of the poor work to obscure the central dynamics producing poverty under the neoliberal restructuring of rural economies and governance.     

Feminising the Economy: Metaphors,strategies, politics

Within contemporary feminism, common approaches to feminising the economy involve adding a sphere or sector or attributing a monetary value to women's unpaid labour. Each of these approaches is interested in creating an accurate representation of the real or 'whole' economy. But these representations are in the same lineage as mainstream economic conceptions; the economy remains a bounded entity that can be known by enumerating its parts. The 'adding on' and 'counting in' strategies employed by feminists complete the picture of what is needed to produce social well-being but do not necessarily help us think differently about how goods and services are or might be produced. In this article, the authors ask how feminist economic theory might contribute to envisioning or enacting alternative economies. They find answers to this question through reading feminist interventions for glimmers of a deconstructive project that opens 'the economy' to difference. Pursuing these glimmers, they attempt to insert the possibility of non-capitalist forms of economy, including economies of generosity, non-profit businesses, worker collectives and alternative capitalist enterprises impelled by a social or environmental ethic. In place of the view of the economy as a whole comprised of a pre-established number of parts or sectors, it can begin to be seen as a discursive construct that can be reconstructed to contribute to social transformation.