Drought policy in Australia: gender mainstreaming or gender blindness?

Australia is experiencing a major drought, one that has devastated the landscape and people for up to ten years. This major disaster has accelerated ongoing rural restructuring and created changes in the way farm family members order and live their lives. Yet despite evidence that drought is a gendered experience, that is, that generally women and men experience and respond to drought differently, and despite a rhetorical move to gender mainstreaming in Australian policy circles, drought policy remains significantly gender blind. In this article I use the example of emergency support to poverty stricken farm families to show how agricultural departments that attend to a notional norm of family farming as a unitary male pursuit can actively discriminate against women in their efforts to preserve the farm and support their families. The article exposes gender mainstreaming as an ‘empty signifier’ that is contextually grounded and that its success is highly dependent on making these issues transparent. For gender equity efforts to reach women at local levels, I argue that gender mainstreaming requires international collaboration by gender specialists to facilitate greater attention to gender assessments by national bodies. It also requires national coalitions of gender expert units, women's organisations and academics to work together to expose culturally specific gendered issues and discriminatory outcomes.     

Dwelling at the margins,action at the intersection? Feminist and indigenous archaeologies, 2005

Este artículo aborda los posibles interconexiones entre lo que podría considerarse arqueología feminista y arqueología indigenista. El ensayo pasa de una historia de intersecciones en la Escuela Occidental a una consideración de ambas arqueologías, sus diferencias y sus posibles intereses comunes, y pregunta “jqué puede conseguirse a partir de un enfoque interconectado?” Existen dos dimensiones de la interpretación arqueológica que integran a los eruditos de ambas arqueologías, la feminista y la indigenista: (1) el lugar y el papel de “la experiencia”, y (2) el uso de las narraciones de cuentos y las tradiciones orales. Se sugieren para la arqueología algunas metodologías que descolonizan y alguna contra-investigación. Finalmente, se discuten dos aspectos de la arqueología en los que la interconexión y la colaboración podrían ser especialmente fructíferas: en cómo se sobreentiende el papel del género y en la arqueología espacial. Sugiriendo que ambas arqueologías trabajan hacia la transformación de las prácticas arqueológicas, esta revisión se propone promover el desarrollo adicional de conciencias de coalición transformativas.

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Résumé Cet article se situe à l'intersection de ce qui pourrait être considéré comme les archéologies féministes et autochtones. Cet essai va de l'histoire des intersectionalités” dans la pensée occidentale à une considération de ces deux archéologies, leurs différences et leurs préoccupations communes et pose la question suivante: que pouvons-nous apprendre d'une approche intersectionelle. Deux dimensions de l'interprétation archéologique sont intégrales aux modes de pensée des chercheurs féministes et autochtones (1) la place et le r?le de l'expérience et (2) l'utilisation de la tradition orale et de la petite histoire. Des méthodologies décolonisatrices et une contre-recherche en archéologie est suggérée. Finalement, nous discutons deux aspects de la recherche en archéologie où l'intersectionalité et la collaboration sont particulièrement enrichissantes: celui de la comprèhension des r?les sexuels et celui de l'archéologie de l'espace. En suggérant que ces deux archéologies travaillent à la transformation des pratiques archéologiques, cette révision désire encourager le développement futur d'une conscience coalitionelle transformative.

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“Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks”. —Anzaldúa (1983)     

Mobile Modernities: A South Asian family negotiates immigration,gender and class in Canada

For the modern Indian immigrant family ‘modernity’ is not necessarily found in the west. Using qualitative data drawn from in-depth interviews with one immigrant Sikh family, conducted in both Vancouver and the Punjab, we draw attention to the mobile and contradictory modernities family members have faced in their migration, settlement and subsequent transnational activities. We explore how class, gender and sexuality have framed the experiences of the members of this family in differential, partial and sometimes ironic ways. In so doing we construct a theoretical argument about the nature and geography of modernity, and how it relates to immigrant settlement in Canada.     

Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses of exclusion and inclusion

Disabled students form a significant but under represented minority in higher education in the UK. Participation appears to be particularly low in disciplines that contain a fieldwork component. Fieldwork has been recognized as a barrier to the participation of disabled students. This paper emphasizes a critical perspective on fieldwork, highlighting the way in which fieldcourses as currently conceived, enacted and experienced, can exclude disabled students. It discusses a survey of the experiences of providing learning support to disabled students undertaking fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental science departments in the UK. It also considers the various ways in which the images, spaces, practices and cultures of fieldwork may exclude or marginalize disabled students and the different ways in which fieldwork may be made more inclusive.     

The power of national symbols: the credibility of a dragon’s efficacy

It is only when symbols gain meaning as effective triggers of associated sentiments in many linked contexts, including that of daily life, that they become powerful. It is what is perceived as the proved ability of the state to correct disobedience to its rule and violation to its sovereignty that commands commitment and loyalty, necessary for state symbols to become effective. As long as the link between symbol and effect can be made credible as a natural connection of cause and effect, by rational or irrational means, by folk narrative or academic theory, triggering the national symbol works in the mind of its believers. In this article I discuss the role of academics in the creation of national symbolism. Using some examples of historical and anthropological interpretations of the notion of the dragon, I argue that the cognitive aspect of nationalism is of crucial importance to the efficacy of national symbols. Thus arguments on the dragon’ various shapes, origins and merits as totem, embryo and sea snake attach and support different symbolic and political meanings of the Chinese nation.     

The fire stones carry: Ethnographic records and archaeological expectations for hot-rock cookery in western North America

Ethnographic data from Kalispel elders in the 1930s attest to use of wild root foods, rock-filled earth ovens, steaming and boiling pits, and hot-rock griddles during the 1800s in forested montane regions of the interior Northwest. Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative of his 1528–1536 travels across the Gulf Coastal Plain of Texas and deserts of northern Mexico illustrates the importance of root foods, earth ovens, and stone boiling in aboriginal Southwest North America. These and other accounts, results of actualistic experiments, and knowledge of cooking requirements afford reliable bases for generating archaeological expectations about fire-cracked-rock assemblages representative of diverse cook-stone facilities.     

Epilogue

This epilogue reflects on five questions raised by the papers in this collection. First, I ask ‘what are women's groups’. Second, I consider the centrality of Christianity in women's groups in colonial and contemporary epochs and review debates about how women's agency has been seen in becoming a Christian and in the perduring reality of Christian commitment. Third, I ponder the expansion of agendas from ‘welfare to empowerment’ and the proposition that even groups with conservative agendas can empower women. Fourth, I review the relation between self‐help and help from others and the associated issue of divergent local and global agendas. Fifth, I consider the differences between women grounded in age, rank, and class, highlighted by several authors. I caution against seeing such differences as irredeemable, irrevocable divisions. In conclusion, I pose the sensitive question of the relation between Western feminist scholars and the diversity of Melanesian women and espouse Teresia Teaiwa's value of Oceanic fluidarity rather than solidarity in coalitions of women.