Capitalizing on Women's Social Capital? Women‐Targeted Microfinance in Bolivia

Both social capital and microfinance are central to mainstream development interventions, and both are predicated on the need to recognize the importance of social factors in development. Microfinance institutions mobilize social capital in the form of a group guarantee, and aim to support the development of sustainable financial institutions and income generation. Women are targeted in part because of the effectiveness of their social capital as collateral. However, although social capital is assumed to support development and income generation, the precise dynamics involved in this are rarely explored. This article examines the construction of social capital and its relationship to income generation, based on a long‐term ethnographic study of village life in rural Bolivia and the microfinance institution operating there. The author examines the complexity and gendered contradictions implied in the way that social capital is generally viewed to support economic development. It is suggested that the way microfinance institutions use social capital to support sustainable financial institutions and income generation does not always reflect the way that women's networks support access to resources and ultimately, economic development.     

Earthworks: The geopolitical visions of climate change cartoons

This paper asks how climate change cartoons work to communicate geopolitical visions of time, space and power. I make the argument that visuality is integral to climate change communication in ways that are frequently paradoxical. Dominant visual forms of evidence and iconic images help to make climate change real while simultaneously impeding full understanding of the debates and issues around climate change. In this context, at a time when visuality and climate change discourse have become co-constitutive, the paper explores the capacity of political cartoons to effectively represent the geopolitics of climate change. The empirical focus is the data set of cartoons submitted in 2008 to an international political cartoon competition called Earthworks. The entries collectively represent different geopolitical visions of climate change. They also suggest a critical role for cartoons in climate change communication – not as purveyors of visual evidence of climate change but as effective forms of visual commentary on the relations of power and knowledge within which climate change communication and debates are located.     

Rewriting the history of Chinese families in nineteenth-century Australia

The nineteenth-century Chinese population in Australia was made up mostly of men, drawing many commentators to the conclusion these men faced an absence of family life, resulting in prostitution, gambling, opium use and other so-called vices. Recent research has, however, expanded and complicated our knowledge of Chinese families in New South Wales and Victoria, particularly concerning the extent to which Chinese men and white Australian women formed intimate relationships. This article traces the origins of the misconceptions about Chinese families in nineteenth-century Australia, and considers how new directions in scholarship over the past decade are providing methods for enlarging our knowledge. It argues that instead of being oddities or exceptions, Chinese-European families were integral to the story of Australia's early Chinese communities.     

Resisting the New South: Commercial crisis and decline in New Orleans, 1865-85

This essay argues that white New Orleanians' obsessions with race, sectional politics, and the 'Lost Cause' mythology played a significant role in retarding the Crescent City's economic growth during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. Because they resisted efforts to recruit northern capital until after their city had fallen irrevocably behind their 'New South' counterparts, New Orleans civil leaders and businessmen exacerbated the severe structural challenges their city faced from the rise of railroads and other market transformations.