Risky Geographies: Teens,gender, and rural landscape in North America

Young Vermonters living along the Canadian border experience cultural, spatial and material marginalisation, as well as historically high rates of death due to alcohol‐related motor vehicle accidents. This research examines the relationship between teens' place in society, their material geographies in a rural setting, and the strategies they employ to create social opportunities and produce ‘cultural gateways’. As active cultural producers, young people, especially older boys, are successful in building socio‐spatial networks that extend beyond their local area, across the US–Canada border, and into Quebec bars. The research reveals that teens live in a highly gendered social environment, one that encourages risk‐taking for boys and closes down social opportunities for girls. This study opens up new directions for further research into the social and environmental conditions under which North American teens craft their lives in rural places.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews in this Article: Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages,. David Levine, Reproducing Families. The political economy of English population history. Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Callows: Rebel Women in Pre-war Japan. Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism. Brian Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries, Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars. Birgit Sawyer and Anita Goransson (eds), Manliga strukturer och kvinnliga strategier. Susan Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: women's roles in rural development in the Soviet Union. Veronica Strong-Boag, The New Day Recalled: Lives of Girls and Women in English Canada, 1919–1939.     

Social distance in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and the North Caucasus region of Russia: Inter and intra‐ethnic attitudes and identities*

ABSTRACT. This article examines attitudinal differences and similarities among ethnic groups in conflict‐affected societies. Conventional wisdom tells us that societies that have experienced violent struggles in which individuals of different ethnic groups have (been) mobilized against each other are likely to become polarized along ethnic lines. Indeed, both policy‐makers and scholars often assume that such divisions are some of the main challenges that must be overcome to restore peace after war. We comparatively examine this conventional wisdom by mapping dimensions of social distance among 4,000 survey respondents in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and the North Caucasus region of Russia. The surveys were carried out in December 2005. Using multidimensional scaling methods, we do not find patterns of clear attitudinal cleavages among members of different ethnic groups in Bosnia‐Herzegovina. Nor do we find patterns of clear ethnic division in the North Caucasus, although our social distance matrices reveal a difference between Russians and ethnic minority groups.