Earth Mother Myths and Other Ecofeminist Fables: How a Strategic Notion Rose and Fell

The notion that women are ‘closer to nature’, naturally caring for land, water, forests and other aspects of the environment, has held powerful sway in certain development circles since the 1980s. Along with the rise in global environmental concern, ‘women, environment and development’ (WED) perspectives gained ground among many donor agencies and NGOs, complementing and sharing core assumptions with earlier‐established ‘women in development’ (WID) discourses. The materialist dimensions of WED were bolstered by fables about women's natural, cultural or ideological closeness to nature grounded in varieties of ecofeminist analysis. This proved a seductive mix for agencies wishing simultaneously to promote environmental protection and WID, as well as for certain forms of feminist activism and sisterhood‐construction, such as those around the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. This contribution revisits these narratives and the politics of this strategic fix in the development of international environmentalism and explores the sustained critiques of these ecofeminist fables by feminist scholars and activists from the early 1990s onwards. It provides a critical review of the approach to gender and the environment in some current donor, NGO and other policy documents, which draw little from the feminist critiques of the 1990s. The author reflects on how, and for whom, women–nature links might have practical or strategic value today.     

Folktales,Reality, and Childhood in Ethiopia: How Children Construct Social Values through Performance of Folktales

This article examines how Oromo-speaking children in Ethiopia construct social values in multiple ways through their participation in storytelling and the subsequent meaning-making discussions. By presenting children as actors in the re-contextualization of folktales, the article argues that participation in a folkloric performance is not a mere play practice for children, but is a social and artistic forum through which they acquire survival skills and grow connected to values of their society. This indicates that in the processes of storytelling and meaning-making, children draw an analogical relationship between imagined situations in folklore and living realities in their local environment. The article is based on data generated through ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with children among an Oromo-speaking society in Ethiopia.     

Spatial Proximity and Intercompany Communication: Myths and Realities

Abstract

Spatial proximity is credited with numerous virtues in the economic literature. In particular, for a company to be located near other companies is seen as conducive to the development of business relations. Spatial proximity is also considered to contribute to the quality and efficiency of these relations by facilitating face-to-face meetings that foster the exchange of complex knowledge and, in particular, the emergence of innovation. This article explores the notion of spatial proximity in intercompany relations, its capacity to facilitate exchange, as well as the link with the methods of communication employed (information and communication technologies and face-to-face). It is based on a distinction between real proximity (the spatial distance between firms), perceived proximity (the spatial distance as evaluated by the firm itself) and active proximity (spatial proximity that facilitates the exchanges). The data come from a survey conducted in 2008 with more than 2000 firms located in the Brittany region (France). The findings emphasize the relative nature of the notion of spatial proximity and the distinction in some cases between real and active proximities, and show that the positive perception of the role of spatial proximity is sustained by the increased face-to-face contact it entails.     

Attenuated Governance: How Policymakers Insulate Private School Choice from Legal Challenge

Indirect or delegated governance engages private organizations, tax expenditures, or service users to deliver programs that would otherwise be provided by the government directly. This paper explains the rise of indirect governance in terms of policymakers’ strategic use of “attenuation” to avoid political and legal challenge. Attenuation is the process by which a government obscures its role in promoting a particular policy goal, through communication strategies (attenuating rhetoric), or by utilizing private third parties and the tax system to deliver a benefit (attenuated design). Deploying policy‐maker interviews and an original historical database of private school choice programs and their legal and political defense, 1953–2017, I argue that pursuing both attenuated design and attenuating rhetoric at once helps policies pass and spread by publicly dissociating the government from legally contentious policy outputs.     

Spatial Autocorrelation in Ecological Studies: A Legacy of Solutions and Myths

A major aim of including the spatial component in ecological studies is to characterize the nature and intensity of spatial relationships between organisms and their environment. The growing awareness by ecologists of the importance of including spatial structure in ecological studies (for hypothesis development, experimental design, statistical analyses, and spatial modeling) is beneficial because it promotes more effective research. Unfortunately, as more researchers perform spatial analysis, some misconceptions about the virtues of spatial statistics have been carried through the process and years. Some of these statistical concepts and challenges were already presented by Cliff and Ord in 1969. Here, we classify the most common misconceptions about spatial autocorrelation into three categories of challenges: (1) those that have no solutions, (2) those where solutions exist but are not well known, and (3) those where solutions have been proposed but are incorrect. We conclude in stressing where new research is needed to address these challenges.     

Myths, Motivations and 'Misunderestimations': the Bush Administration and Iraq

This article explores the myths and motivations behind US foreign policy towards Iraq in America's 'war on terrorism'. It argues that the foreign policy of the Bush administration is widely misunderstood and that much of the debate about Iraq policy that has taken place has been conducted at an unhelpful level of analysis. It addresses arguments that the Bush administration is motivated by oil, revenge or hubris as well as the more mainstream arguments that an attack on Iraq would provoke instability through the entire Middle East, as well as encouraging further acts of and support for murderous terrorism; that there is no urgency to act against Iraq as containment and deterrence remain adequate means to manage this threat; and that Iraq should be a lower priority than dealing with North Korea. It does this by analysing the development of American foreign policy thinking on the war on terrorism, what motivates it, and why it rejects the arguments of its critics. The article explains the intellectual process by which the US decided upon this course of action and how Europe's failure to understand this process added to its incomprehension of American policy. It does not argue that European's opposition would have been swept aside had they better understood the Bush administration, the central disagreement about the necessity and prudence of military action versus containment remains, but that such an understanding would have allowed for a better and more focused level of debate than the one which has got us to this point. Nor does it argue that the Bush administration approach is necessarily persuasive or justified, merely that its case is reasoned and explicable in terms of America's foreign policy traditions.     

Creative Thinking and Emotion in Human Social Life: The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms

Abstract

There is debate whether The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play. However, in this debate there has been insufficient attention paid to Shylock's relationship with Tubal. In his criticisms of Shylock, Tubal represents the larger Jewish community. This criticism shows that, in Shakespeare's view, Jewish self-understanding of what it means to be a good Jew is incompatible with the character of Shylock.