Ethnographic Understandings of Gender and Economic Transition in Siberia: Implications for Planners and Policy Makers

Economic transition has been defined by neo-liberal restructuring policies and understandings. Using ethnographic data from Omsk, Russia, I examine structural adjustment policy implementation in the context of socially constructed gender norms. These policies have complicated implications for women and men's economic survival. The ethnographic understandings gained from interviews with women provide vital information that would improve planning processes in Omsk. For example, using an economic gardening approach to support women's small business development and workforce development targeting survivors of violence would advance women's economic self-sufficiency. I suggest that if planners use ethnographic understandings they will be able to more effectively respond to planning challenges such as poverty, education and health care issues.     

Harsh choices: Chinese women's paid work and unpaid care responsibilities under economic reform

China's economic reforms over the past three decades have dramatically changed the mechanisms for allocating goods and labour in both market and non-market spheres. This article examines the social and economic trends that intensify the pressure on the care economy, and on women in particular in playing their dual roles as care givers and income earners in post-reform China. The analysis sheds light on three critical but neglected issues. How does the reform process reshape the institutional arrangements of care for children and elders? How does the changing care economy affect women's choices between paid work and unpaid care responsibilities? And what are the implications of women's work–family conflicts for the well-being of women and their families? The authors call for a gendered approach to both social and labour market policies, with investments in support of social reproduction services so as to ease the pressures on women.     

Transnational family networks in the Somali diaspora in Egypt: women's roles and differentiated experiences

Diasporic Somalis are increasingly leading a transnational life in which family members are sustained through networks of relations, obligations and resources that are located in different nation-states. These networks and relations enable diasporic Somalis to seek safety for themselves and their relatives, minimize risks and maximize family resources. In this article, I examine three key dimensions of such a way of life, namely: migration; remittances; and transnational family care. I focus on the roles that women play in this family-based support system. For instance, women move and facilitate the movement of other family members; they remit to family members; and they provide care for children and sick relatives. But these transnational households are not free from tensions. Family members are placed in hierarchical relations shaped by age; parental authority; possession of western citizenship; financial resources; and bonds of familial reciprocity and gratitude. Women gain appreciation from relatives and a sense of self-respect for their new roles. Some of the women also make use of the family network to arrange for the care of their children and sick relatives, while they engage in transnational trading activities. However, young and single female relatives often sacrifice or delay their individual dreams because of their familial obligations. I conclude that transnationalism – as a way of organizing and sustaining livelihood, resources and relations of Somali families – is not always emancipating or marginalizing for Somali women. Rather the benefits and challenges of such a way of life for women are different, mixed and uneven.     

Friendly Relations: Situating Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic, 1780–1830

Men and women who became friends in the early American republic struggled with societal worries about the purity and chastity of their friendships. More so than other pairs of friends, heterosocial friends had to attend to how their friendships appeared to those around them. One of the most important ways of doing so was positioning a friendship in relation to spouses. In an era when marriage was the central structure for relations between men and women and fears of seduction and ruin were rampant, friends of the opposite sex needed to integrate their friendships within their marriages. This paper examines how men and women did so through the lens of their correspondence. Navigating a society without clear boundaries or rules for conducting a friendship between a man and a woman, individual pairs of friends improvised to create safe friendships in person and in letters. The careful intertwining of marriages and friendships they created demonstrates the way intimate social relationships were embedded in the social fabric of the early American republic.     

The contested meanings of home for women caring for children with long-term care needs in Ontario,Canada

Home as a place of caring is theorized using the literature from geography, sociology, housing and feminist studies. To support our theorization, grounded theory is used to capture and interpret the experiences of women caring for children with long-term care needs in the home. Eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with women in Ontario, Canada uncovered differences in the way the women perceived their homes and highlighted their multiple and complex experiences. The findings revealed three key issues. First, women do not want their homes to be completely defined by long-term care activities as many other types of activities are situated in their homes. Second, long-term care activities and schedules are not segregated but become deeply embedded and enmeshed within the spatial and temporal practices and processes of family life. Third, the meanings, characteristics and ideal of ‘home’ portrayed in popular culture and the academic literature often clashed with what the women experienced on a daily basis. Analysis revealed the tensions surrounding ‘reconstructing spaces in the home’ and ‘the home as a private and public place’ which are indicative of the women's struggles with the disjuncture between the ideal and lived home. The women's experiences challenge us to consider new ways of theorizing the home, and the home when it is a place where long-term care is provided.     

‘It’s a very isolating world’: the journey to HIV care for women living with HIV in British Columbia,Canada

HIV health services research conventionally defines place in terms of proximity to care. However, understandings of place must also include the social spaces that women living with HIV (WLWH) occupy which shape their experience of health and access to care. Drawing on focus group data from the Canadian HIV Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Cohort Study, we explored how 28 WLWH navigate geographic place and social space in attempting to access HIV-related healthcare within and across a range of urban to rural localities in British Columbia (BC), Canada. We describe how existing services, even if physically close, can be socially marginalizing as women confront HIV stigma, racism, and classism, which operate to exclude women from the places and spaces they must access for care. We also emphasize how women enact ‘geographies of resistance’ and succeed in carving out their own safe options for care and support. Finally, we share recommendations identified by women themselves towards developing local and community-driven ‘geographies of change’ that support the health and healing of diverse communities of WLWH. Our findings stress the urgent need to acknowledge and redress socio-spatial barriers to care and to work with WLWH to co-create a therapeutic landscape that reflects women’s diverse identities, localities, emotions, and experiences.     

Migration and Death Ceremonies On St. Kitts and Nevis

Since British slave emancipation in 1838, Afro-Caribbean men and women of St. Kitts and Nevis in the Leeward Caribbean have emigrated and returned in order to sustain their local societies. Economic uncertainty and social oppression both at home and abroad have inspired Kittitians and Nevisians to develop mobile livelihood strategies in order to tap ever-changing sources of employment. Labor migrants from the two islands have therefore often resisted permanent commitments in any one direction except for occasionally returning home. These periodic returns are important to the local community because the migrants usually bring back money and gifts to kinsmen and friends. A related obligation, especially in recent years, has been for migrants to return to family funerals. Funeral attendance confers economic advantages on both permanent residents of St. Kitts and Nevis and the migrant workers abroad. The money and gifts brought back by returning migrants help sustain the local community. The returning migrants themselves are also assured a warm welcome in case they are forced to return in the future by changing conditions abroad, a not unlikely possibility. Local mortuary practices on St. Kitts and Nevis are therefore not simply symbolic displays but also important economic events.     

Caring for ethics and the politics of health care reform in the United States

It is increasingly recognized that the work of (unpaid) informal caregivers constitutes an important contribution to care delivery in the United States and in many other societies. Accounting for the range of social, economic and political circumstances in which this care is produced has become the focus of a number of academics and others theorizing the ‘third sector’, or the ‘social economy’. However, some scholars are concerned that the increasing attention paid to the role of informal economic activity will either legitimate neoliberal state withdrawal from social reproduction or facilitate continued invasive commodification of relationships that were formerly part of social life. While these are possible dangers, J.K. Gibson-Graham's diverse economy framework and theory of community economy allow us to understand the social and economic conditions that support, rather than undermine, a caregiver's fidelity to the process of caring. Given the size of the informal caregiving sector, it would remain an important aspect of the care economy even if the United States developed a national health care system. It is important to understand informal caregivers as economic subjects, with their desires, motivations, hopes and anxieties. What emerges from my qualitative research is an understanding of informal caregivers as ethical subjects who operate best in a network of collective recognition and support. Informal caregivers are neither self-interested economic actors nor (necessarily) victims of failed social support. Rather, they are, potentially, agents of change in a new politics of health care reform.     

The Company Owns the Mine but They Don't Own Us: Feminist Critiques of Capitalism in the Coalfields of Kentucky in the 1970s

This article examines women's involvement in the Brookside Mine strike of 1974, which captivated US audiences and provided women with an unprecedented public platform to challenge the class and gender system undergirding coalfield capitalism. During the strike, female kin of miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, started a club to support striking miners and their families and to organise picket lines; they were joined by women from across the region and country. With the strike as their foundation these women generated a women's movement that revealed the specific ways class and gender inequality shaped their lives, defined by the heavy‐duty care work characteristic of the coalfields. This article argues that the Brookside women's support of striking miners was fundamentally about gendered class inequality: the denigration of working‐class, female caregivers alongside the devaluing of men's labour. Using collective memory and individual experience as their interpretive devices, the Brookside women forged a class‐conscious feminism. In it they exposed the traumas of coalfield capitalism, shone a light on women's unpaid care work (one of the foundations of corporate capitalism) and destabilised the gender and class hierarchies that defined coalfield communities.     

Landscapes of impunity and the deaths of Americans LaVena Johnson and Sandra Bland

On July 19th, 2005, American Army Private First Class LaVena Johnson died in Balad, Iraq, just 8?days shy of her 20th birthday. On July 13th, 2015, almost 10?years later, 28-year-old Sandra Bland’s life came to an abrupt end in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas. Both women’s deaths were ruled suicides, and both women’s families and friends reject these judgments. Instead, they insinuate foul play by the state, which directly governed the militarized spaces within which the women both died. At first glance, these women appear to have had very different life trajectories, one a United States soldier and the other a Black Lives Matter activist. However, in both of their cases, the ruling of the suspicious deaths as suicides illustrates the state’s attempt to render their deaths banal, and thereby diminish the state’s own culpability. In understanding the unremitting acts of violence, on women’s bodies, especially women of color, this paper focuses on how a Black feminist praxis extends feminist notions of an ethics of care.     

From Idealism to Realism: Women,Feminism and Empowerment in Nicaraguan Tailoring Co-operatives

Co-operatives have been widely promoted as the ideal type of project for women. Because of the focus on income earning, they have been seen as less threatening than more explicit attempts to organize feminist consciousness-raising groups. Based on field research conducted in 1988, this article discusses the experience of women in the Nicaraguan tailoring co-operatives. After the 1979 Revolution, these were set up on a large scale as part of a wider economic policy and grassroots political mobilization. After an initial period of expansion in which many women benefited both in improved income and access to training and management experience, the co-operatives found themselves in serious difficulty by 1988. It is argued that even without the wider economic crisis in Nicaragua, they would have faced serious problems without extensive and probably unsustainable state support. Although co-operative employment has considerable potential, the Nicaraguan case highlights the need for new thinking on ways to resolve basic tensions between economic efficiency and worker participation. It also casts doubt on their viability as a development alternative for women, without specific attention to basic gender inequalities.     

International mobility of women in science and technology careers: shaping plans for personal and professional purposes

International mobility has become a key requirement in science and technology (S&T) professional career progression. On the one hand, the increasing mobility of women suggests that this may be a way for them to avoid or get away from women-unfriendly working environments. On the other hand, international mobility can present problems for women as they, particularly, have to plan their lives around their professional goals and personal lives. This article addresses the international mobility strategies of women regarding their personal and professional choices. We analyse their motivations to move, the way they manage their lives abroad and the effects of mobility on their lives. The analysis is based on 24 in-depth interviews of highly skilled women working in Spanish S&T sectors. Our main findings show that mobility is a new challenge which may improve women's family lives and professional careers. However, they have to plan carefully their lives on a long-term as well as a daily basis. In this sense, they need strong personal determination and the ability to balance their professional and personal goals. Moreover, their personal decisions depend not only on them as individuals, but also on their partners and families, on wider social values, on the institutional support they enjoy, and on the general public policies which they are affected by.     

History lessons for gender equality from the Zambian Copperbelt, 1900–1990

This article explores the historical causes and consequences of gender divisions of labour in the Zambian Copperbelt. Male breadwinner and female housewife stereotypes appear to have emerged as a product of imported Christian ideologies, colonial–capitalist concerns and an economic climate that largely enabled men to financially provide for their families. Reliant upon husbands for status and economic support, many urban women had little conjugal bargaining power. Gender divisions of labour also meant that people lacked first-hand evidence of women’s equal competence in employment and politics, who they thus often underrated and overlooked. Such perceptions seem to have perpetuated women’s exclusion from prestigious positions – a pattern sustained by macro-economic circumstances in the early decades of Independence. Compliance with the gender status inequalities promoted in pre-marital traditional initiation thus became necessary to marital and economic security, as well as respectability, which was not previously the case. While there were exceptions to these trends, the historical record illustrates the interplay between patterns of resource access, internalised gender stereotypes and cultural expectations.     

北宋进士的交游圈对其家族通婚地域的影响

北宋士人在进士及第之后,交游圈逐渐扩大,先有进士同年,后又有意气相投的同僚及文化旨趣相近的文友、诗友等,由此形成多个相互关联又彼此不同的交游圈。交游圈的扩大促进了他们人际交往范围的拓展,使他们及其家族成员在通婚对象上可以有更多的选择,其通婚地域自然也就脱离了本乡本土,发展到全国各地。不过,由于各地区之间存在着社会风俗与生活习惯等方面的差异,他们在选择婚姻对象时,仍然注重由近及远的原则。     

Changing intergenerational contracts: gender,cohorts and elder care in central rural China, 2005–2013

In the absence of stable pension systems, elder care arrangements in rural China depend on intergenerational contracts. The existing scholarship on elder care in rural China tends to treat the elderly as a homogeneous group and depict them mainly as ‘care recipients’. Based on a diachronic qualitative study in central rural China between 2005 and 2013, this research examines the changing intergenerational contracts between two cohorts of rural elderly and their adult children. These cohorts hold different positions in terms of family structure, number and sex composition of adult children, living arrangement, physical situation, economic standing and appreciation of intergenerational exchange. These differences further produce different social exchange patterns and disparate elder care modalities between genders and cohorts. Drawing upon insights from gender theory on social gerontology, this research identifies the ‘agency’ of older rural women and explores ageing issues among older rural men. This study also presents policy implications by identifying the most disadvantaged group in terms of elder care support.     

Women running for neighborhood offices in a Turkish city: Motivations and resources for electoral candidacy

This study is about how gender and local urban scales interact with each other to influence individuals' motivations and resources for political recruitment. The data came from interviews with twenty women who ran for and lost the 2004 local elections for their neighborhood office, muhtarlik, in Eskisehir, Turkey. Considering both individual and institutional factors and the neighborhood scale as important for women's candidacy for local offices, this paper relies on a “relational” view of citizenship while examining the mediating roles of the local scale for citizenship. My findings overall disagreed with the arguments that “women's interests” drive women to enter politics and that the local offices provide more opportunities for women's political recruitment. As women's roles and responsibilities had been changing across multiple spaces, they ran for elections to search for ways to practice their capacities in public arenas. Yet to the electorates, first, even women with high qualities for the office did not appear as the most qualified candidates. Second, most electorates tended to evaluate candidacy qualities in relation to the neighborhood office's weak status in Turkish political system and as an unskilled job. Third, they seemed to associate this “job” positively with men's traditional domestic role as the main breadwinner, consider women's charity and communal works as women's traditional care responsibilities, and to vote mostly for over-middle-aged male incumbents with locally embedded relations. Finally, women missed an opportunity for their candidacy by not transforming their local network-based assets into resources for candidacy.     

Homeless at Home in East Durham

Abstract: This paper contributes to research on homelessness and home, focusing on the experiences of young, working class women living in privately rented or social housing in the former coalfields of East Durham in north east England. Although the women had a place to live, they rarely felt “at home” because they lived in the most deprived areas of East Durham, or too far away from family and friends, or in substandard accommodation. The women were denied the “normative values of home” that should be, as Iris Marion Young (1997) argued, accessible to everyone. While most of the women were on a waiting list for social housing, home was experienced in the emotional space of imagining and hoping to move house while living with the frustration of not moving. They often felt homeless. The paper sets the young women's experiences of home(lessness) against a changing housing policy context.     

Violence against women in Ethiopia

Investigating the experience of violence against women and exploring women's coping strategies is a crucial component of re-tailoring the provision of services for victims/survivors. This article explores violence against women in the context of culture, theory of fear of violence and literature on spaces perceived to be ‘safe’ or ‘dangerous’ by women victims/survivors of violence in Ethiopia. To collect the relevant data, we conducted 14 semi-structured interviews with Ethiopian women who are victims/survivors of violence and three interviews with gender experts in Ethiopia. Our group of women suffer in ‘silence’ and confide only in friends and relatives. They did not resort to institutional support due to lack of awareness and general societal disapproval of such measures. This contrasts with claims by experts that the needs of these women are addressed using an institutional approach. Culture, migration status and lack of negotiating power in places of work are key factors when considering violence. The majority of the respondents in this study occupy both public and private spaces such as bars and homes and have experienced violence in those spaces. The social relations and subsequent offences they endured do not make spaces such as these safe. Education of both sexes, creation of awareness, sustainable resource allocation to support victims/survivors, ratification of the Maputo protocol and effective law enforcement institutions are some of the practical strategies we propose to mitigate the incidence of violence in Ethiopia.     

Community‐based cooperative ventures for adults with intellectual disabilities

When people with intellectual disabilities gain some influence over the running of their own households and the organisation of their workplaces, their lives can improve markedly. But success depends on community support not only from their families and social workers, but also from nonprofit groups and public services such as social housing and public transit. Dominant trends among institutions in the social sector responsible for meeting the needs of people with intellectual disabilities have produced models that focus on deficiencies, individualisation and service. Through cooperative structures and entrepreneurial activity, projects in community economic development have attempted to replace these models with an emphasis on capacities, collectivisation and care. We describe projects engaged in by community‐based cooperatives in Toronto that demonstrate this approach and encourage those with disabilities to live interdependently and to participate as partners in their own businesses.     

Between two cities: Jewish women and exogamous marriage in medieval Catalonia

In the marriage strategies of medieval Catalan Jews, the economic security of women came second to the economic goals of families. Exogamous marriages – marriages between the Jewish communities of two different cities – exacerbated the vulnerability of Jewish wives, widows and divorcées, due in large part to restrictions on women’s travel. Women who moved in order to marry experienced greater difficulty in managing financial resources and lost access to kinship networks. When women married men from other cities, at best they found themselves unable to take advantage of the connections created by their marriages. At worst, they risked financial loss if their husbands absconded to other cities with their dowries. Five case studies drawn from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Catalan notarial registers reveal some of the ways in which exogamous marriages disadvantaged Jewish women. The extreme case of exogamy delineates the boundaries of possibility for Jewish women in the medieval Western Mediterranean.