Educational Policy Analyses: Three Recent Works

Books reviewed in this articles:
Derrick Ben, ed., Shades of Brown; New Perspectives on School Desegregation
Michael E. Manley-Casimir, ed., Family Choice in Schooling
Michael A. Rebell and Arthur R. Block, Educational Policy Making and the Courts: An Empirical Study of Judicial Activism     

Neural integration at the mesoscopic level: the advent of some ideas in the last half century

History seen by a professional historian, based only on the documented record, always incomplete and liable to bias, can be unreliable. Modern history seen by a protagonist must surely be among the most unreliable. Yet, I must try, in a limited scope, to show the human drama as well as the flood on which we are floating, unable to dump the baggage of past biases. Our points of view, priorities, and positions on all the controversial issues and even the well established, noncontroversial ones, are not as rational as we would like to think but are strongly conditioned by where we came from. I wil depend on selected vignettes of the way things looked when I was a student, a young postdoctoral fellow and an Assistant Professor, to compare with the way they look now, in each of half a dozen mesoscopic domains--those in between the most basic subcellular or molecular and the higher levels of learning and cognition. The half dozen constitute, of course, anything but a representative fraction of neuroscience. But they add up to a nontrivial segment of the big picture with respect to the integrative aspects of our science. Most of the fronts that grew into today's popular branches are not represented, but a small set of particular interest and probability of further surprises.     

Gendered mobilities and immobilities: Women’s and men’s capacities for agricultural innovation in Kenya and Nigeria

Abstract

Social norms surrounding women’s and men’s mobility in public spaces often differ. Here we discuss how gendered mobilities and immobilities influence women’s and men’s capacities to innovate in agriculture. We analyze four case studies from Western Kenya and Southwestern Nigeria that draw on 28 focus group discussions and 32 individual interviews with a total of 225 rural and peri-urban women, men and youth. Findings show that women in both sites are less mobile than men due to norms that delimit the spaces where they can go, the purpose, length of time and time of day of their travels. Overall, Kenyan women and Nigerian men have better access to agricultural services and farmer groups than their gendered counterparts. In Southwestern Nigeria this is linked to masculine roles of heading and providing for the household and in Western Kenya to the construction of women as the ‘developers’ of their households. Access and group participation may reflect norms and expectations to fulfill gender roles rather than an individual’s agency. This may (re)produce mobility pressures on time constrained gendered subjects. Frameworks to analyze factors that support women’s and men’s agency should be used to understand how gendered mobilities and immobilities are embedded in community contexts and affect engagement in agricultural innovation. This can inform the design of interventions to consider the ways in which norms and agency intersect and influence women’s and men’s mobilities, hence capacity to innovate in agriculture, thus supporting more gender transformative approaches.