Unconsented Sterilisation,Participatory Story‐Telling,and Digital Counter‐Memory in Peru

This article aims to prompt reflection on the ways in which digital research methods can support or undermine participatory research. Building on our experiences of working on the Quipu Project ( quipu‐project.com ), an interactive, multimedia documentary on unconsented sterilisation in Peru, it explores the ways in which digital technologies can enable participatory knowledge production across geographic, social and linguistic divides. It also considers the new forms of engagement between knowledge‐producers and audiences that digital methods can encourage. Digital technologies can, we contend, help build new spaces for, and modes of engagement with, participatory research, even in contexts such as the Peruvian Andes where digital technologies are not well established or commonly used. Doing so, we argue, entails responding sensitively to the social, linguistic and digital inequalities that shape specific research contexts, and centring the human relationships that are easily sacrificed at the altar of technological innovation.     

Familial Purposes: An Argument Against the Promotion of Family Uniformity

William Galston (1996) and Jean Bethke Elshtain (1991) argue that law and policy should be used to promote the intact two-parent married heterosexual fondly. Galston advocates divorce reform to discourage single-parent families and Elshtain opposes extending the right to marry to same-sex couples. In response, I defend a multipurpose definition of family, oppose making divorce more difficult, and support same-sex marriage.     

Deconstructing Discourses of Drought

A debate on Haughton G 1998 Private profits - public drought: the creation of a crisis in water management for West Yorkshire Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23 4 419–33     

Gender, nature, empire: women naturalists in nineteenth century British travel literature

Among the many British women abroad in the late nineteenth century were a number of travellers who toured the American West with a naturalist's pen and sketchbook. California, with its giant sequoias and redwoods, scenic Yosemite Valley and Sierra Nevada, and the Mediterranean flora of the southern coasts, especially attracted travellers with a naturalist orientation. We examine the botanical and naturalist writings and art of two well-known (and well-heeled) world travellers – Constance Gordon Cumming and Marianne North – and another more obscure British aristocrat, Theodora Guest, sister of the Duke of Westminster, who travelled in California in the late nineteenth century. We examine relationships among these elite women's association with the Romantic aesthetic and naturalist traditions, natural sciences, class-based associations between women and flowers, and emergent environmentalism. The works of these women indicate the process by which natural history rhetorics and styles became embedded within gender, class, and imperial relations; and how the division of natural history into professional and amateur domains relegated women to discursive margins.     

Advocacy Coalitions Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Globalization and Canadian Climate Change Policy

With its emphasis on shared beliefs and the advocacy use of knowledge within policy subsystems, the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) is ideally suited to the study of environmental policy. Yet the ACF has generally been applied in a domestic context. This article argues that the twin phenomena of economic globalization and the internationalization of environmental affairs are blurring the distinction between some policy subsystems and the international arena. Thus, advocacy coalitions should be understood as operating increasingly along "the domestic-foreign frontier." In the case of Canada's efforts to develop a coherent climate change policy, the boundaries between political levels have been blurred as local and provincial actors come to understand themselves as players in a global game. This dynamic is exacerbated by Canada's unique constitutional division of authority, which delegates significant autonomy to the provinces on natural resource and energy issues.     

From the familiar to the extraordinary: local residents' perceptions of risk when living with nuclear power in the UK

Nearly two decades since the last nuclear power station was built and began operating in the UK, nuclear energy is firmly back on the political agenda domestically and elsewhere in the world. Yet since the 1980s, little research has investigated perceptions of nuclear power in the UK, particularly those of communities living in very close proximity to such facilities. Using biographical narrative interviews (n = 61), we explore how local residents living close to two nuclear power stations in the UK (Bradwell, Essex and Oldbury, South Gloucestershire) have come to view their local facility. We reveal how the power station is constructed through processes of familiarisation and/or the normalisation/normification of risk as part of everyday life; how this ordinariness is juxtaposed with moments of extraordinariness in which, due to direct and mediated events, the power station is reframed as a risk issue; and how risk awareness is associated with moments of anxiety which ebb and flow through our interviewees' lives. We conclude that biographical experiences dynamically unfolding through space and time can be interrupted by risk events (mediated and direct, real and symbolic, nuclear and non-nuclear) to disrupt the usually taken-for-granted ordinariness of a power station's presence in a particular locality. Our findings suggest that those involved in debate about new nuclear build must be sensitive to the heterogeneity of the extraordinary in nuclear affairs and the importance of socio-cultural histories of place.     

Minding the Undertow: Assessing Water "Privatization" in Cuba

Abstract:  The privatization and commercialization of water has proven to be one of the most controversial policy developments of the past 20 years. Largely associated with the neoliberalization of the world economy, it comes as a surprise to many that the socialist government of Cuba signed a 25-year contract with a Spanish multinational in 2000 to manage the supply of water in Havana. This paper provides an historical context for water reforms in the country and the first comprehensive study of this little-known contract. Based on key interviews and primary documentation we argue that there are no easy explanations for why the contract was signed, or whether it has achieved its objectives. There are, however, interesting lessons to be learned for public–private partnerships elsewhere in the world, and insights into the changing fabric of socialism in Cuba.