‘Because they can do the work’: women farmers in sustainable agriculture in Pennsylvania,USA

Women throughout the West are up to three times more likely to be the operator of a farm in sustainable agricultural models than in productivist models. When women assume the role of farmer they transgress traditional gender identities on farms, which dictate that women are ‘farmwives’ and men are ‘farmers’; these gender identities intersect with spaces in the agricultural community to imply appropriate behavior for women as farmwives. This research demonstrates that the sustainable agriculture community provides spaces that promote and are compatible with women's identities as farmers. Feminist analyses of space and agriculture suggest that productivist agricultural models marginalize women from spaces of knowledge, while sustainable agriculture provides spaces of empowerment for women farmers. The fieldwork for this project involved a purposive survey, in‐depth interviews and participant observation with twenty women farmers over an 18‐month period in the sustainable agriculture community of Central Pennsylvania.     

Watercourses and Discourses: Coalmining in the Upper Hunter Valley,New South Wales

ABSTRACT Water is a resource that both unites and divides people in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where many communities are facing the prospect of large‐scale open‐cut coalmining developments on productive mixed use land, or already live in proximity to mines and power stations. This article analyses conflicts over a proposed coal mine at Bickham in the Upper Hunter Valley, by contrasting the various protagonists' discourses of water scarcity, supply, and connectivity. It examines the ways in which the terms of opposition are narrowed to the arena of state and industry supported science and economic development, marginalising other cultural values and environmental ethics that are integral to opponents' discourses. Opponents have achieved some measure of success through contestation of the uncertain science of hydrological modelling, bolstered by the context of drought and increasing public acceptance of climate change science.     

Sorcery at court and manor: Margery Jourdemayne, the witch of Eye next Westminster

Margery Jourdemayne, the ‘witch of Eye next Westminster’, Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester, and three scholars of the ducal household were foremost amongst those accused of treasonable witchcraft in 1441. The paper explores Margery's part in this episode, and then examines her background: her husband William came from a prosperous Middlesex yeoman family living at Acton, and he himself was a manorial official on Westminster Abbey's Ebury (Eye) estate.     

Risk Management Strategies Among African-American Slaves at Locust Grove Plantation

African Americans faced a variety of risks under the institution of slavery. The theory of risk management is used as a context for understanding the lives of slaves at Locust Grove Plantation in Kentucky and for deconstructing the common myth that slavery was unusually mild there. African Americans used a diversity of means at Locust Grove to cope with risk, including generalized reciprocity, food storage, religion, and strong kinship/community bonds.     

The Rising Agenda of Physician-Assisted Suicide: Explaining the Growth and Content of Morality Policy

Employing theories and methods of agenda-setting analysis, this article explains the rapid rise of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) on the national political agenda based on its status as a morality policy. PAS reached the mass agenda before the professional agenda, probably because PAS is an outgrowth of previous right-to-die policies and Dr. Jack Kevorkian's assisted suicides provided major focusing events. As in other morality policies, competing groups fight for the last word, but PAS has been blocked on most governmental agendas because its image and media tone has been mostly negative and public opinion is divided. Groups in a few generally liberal states have tried to enact policy through referenda when legislators failed to address the issue. We speculate that competing interest groups will become more active and that state courts will become a venue of choice in the future.     

From the Little Tree,Half a Block Toward the Lake: Popular Geography and Symbolic Discontent in Post‐Sandinista Managua

Abstract: The inhabitants of Managua, Nicaragua have a sophisticated, often bitingly ironic, popular geography that they use to navigate the city. The Nicaraguan capital has been destroyed twice by earthquakes, ravaged by war, left to decay for lack of funds, transformed by the creative destruction of speculative capitalism and subjected to a series of ideological impositions. Few people know the official names of streets, and recent governments have not had the ability to put up signs. So a supple system of popular geography dominates, resisting and ridiculing attempts to impose an official order, and adapting to change while preserving a bottom‐up sense of memory, history and place. Drawing on Allan Pred's classic account of popular geography in late nineteenth century Stockholm, I use Managua's language of spatial orientation as a window into peripheral modernity and the politics of everyday life.