The Gender,Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Gentrification,assassination and forgetting in Mexico: a feminist Marxist tale

In this article, I employ feminist and Marxist tools to expose the struggles over the constant plunder and expansion of global capitalism along Mexico's northern border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In particular, I examine how an official politics – promoted by the Mexican and US governments – for forgetting the economic and social devastation of a transcontinental drug war contributes to the mechanisms for further exploiting the working poor. By combining a feminist focus on the daily struggle of social reproduction with a Marxist emphasis on accumulation by dispossession, I show how this official ‘forgetting’ segues with an international gentrification plan in downtown Ciudad Juárez that seeks to expand the rent gap by denying place, legitimacy and legal status to the working women and their families who have made this border city famous as a hub of global manufacturing. As such, I argue that the social struggles against the official forgetting are struggles against a violent political economy that generates value via a devaluation of the spaces of the working poor, even of the spaces of their literal existence.     

‘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.     

‘Pillagers’ and ‘brigands’ in the hundred years war

The sufferings of French non-combatants, particularly peasants, during the Hundred Years War have been described and deplored from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. A concern for the victims has often left little room for a careful study of the aggressors, thepillars andbrigands of the contemporary records. This article seeks to identify these latter, to distinguish them from each other and from the noble warriors, often called ‘men-at-arms’. It will be shown that the first, brutal, contact between armed men and unarmed ‘civilians’ was not, as the contemporary moralists suggested, between noble and non-noble, but between non-noble and non-noble: between common soldiers and bandits, on the one hand, and peasant victims, on the other. The chivalrous and adventurous war of knights and squires was sustained on the day-to-day level, by the activity of foraging pillagers. Brigandage was a consequence of their activity, not another name for it.     

Asteropygine trilobites from the Late Devonian of the Kerman region,Iran

The discovery of two new Frasnian species of the subfamily Asteropyginae, Bradocryphaeus kermanensis and Radiopyge hamedii, in the Haruz section north of Kerman, east-central Iran, demonstrates for the first time the presence of North Gondwanan trilobites in this region. The two new species provide a link between faunas from Afghanistan to the east and the Alborz Mountains in north Iran. The recognition of R. hamedii confirms the validity of Radiopyge Farsan, hitherto known only from Afghanistan, as well as the presence in some Frasnian Asteropyginae of six pairs of lateral pygidial spines.     

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.