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.     

‘Dirty old ladies,’ mothers,and others: Age and gender in cultural and biological perspectives

Brown, Judith K., and Virginia Kerns, eds. In Her Prime: A New View of Middle‐Aged Women. South Hadley, Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1985. xii + 217 pp. including individual chapter bibliographies and combined index. $25.95 cloth; $14.95 paper.

Davis, Dona Lee. Blood and Nerves: An Ethnographic Focus on Menopause. St. Johns, Newfoundland: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1983. x + 234 pp. including maps, appendices, and bibliography. $9.00 paper.

Rossi, Alice S., ed. Gender and the Life Course. New York: Aldine, 1985. xxi + 368 pp. including chapter references and author and subject indices. $34.94 cloth; $15.95 paper.