Where the heart is: home space transitions for residential college students

Home and the transition to adulthood are related temporal and spatial constructs. Building upon Kenyon’s [1999. “A home from home: Students’ transitional experience of home.” In Ideal homes? Social change and domestic life, edited by T. Chapman, 84–95. New York: Routledge] categorization of physical, social, personal, and temporal elements of home for college students, we analyze survey responses from 256 students at a 4-year U.S. residential college in order to uncover how perceptions of home-like spaces change as students move from pre-college homes, through on- and off-campus home spaces, and toward imagined future homes. Our quantitative findings show that the four home elements matter differently across time and type of home, supported by qualitative findings wherein students articulate how they conceptualize similarities and differences between the different home spaces. This study adds to ongoing conceptualizations of the transition to adulthood as placed (for four-year residential college students especially), and as fluid and multilayered in terms of social actors’ views of their past, present, and imagined future homes and accompanying identity transitions.     

Gender, Development, and Empowerment in Qinghai Province

A report on the initiatives of Shem, a Qinghai-based Tibetan women＇s group dedicated to empowering Tibetan women and their communities through grassroots development.     

‘Playtime in the Borderlands’: Children's Representations of School,Gender and Bullying through Photographs and Interviews

Photography has been commonly used as a research tool in studies of childhood/children. However images of school children in official documentation are rarely taken or chosen by children and may not reflect their real experiences. This research considered the photographs taken by year six primary school children of their school and the images they chose to represent themselves. Subsequent interviews with children revealed attitudes to school, the importance of playground relationships in the construction of gender, leading to the concept of ‘borderlands’ inhabited by some boys who adopt non-hegemonic masculinities.     

Description and Thermoluminescence (Tl) Dating of An Alleged Hopewell Mobiliary Clay Human Figurine from Hopeton Earthworks,Ross County,Ohio

During a reorganization of the collections at Kent State University (KSU), a fired-clay human figurine was discovered. Beyond the fact that KSU obtained the specimen from a collector, and the alleged origin was the Ohio Hopewell site of Hopeton Earthworks, information on the specimen’s provenience and chain of custody was lacking or ambiguous. To determine whether the artifact was consistent in style and age with Hopewell, we conducted a comparative study, as well as a direct chronometric assessment using thermoluminescence (TL) dating. The comparative study was equivocal: The figurine possessed some attributes consistent with Hopewell, but other features were not consistent or missing. TL dating revealed an age of 4590?±?270, exceeding the Hopewell period by over 2,000 years. These results suggest two mutually exclusive hypotheses, neither of which is relevant to Hopewell: Either the figurine is one of the earliest examples of ceramic technology in eastern North America or it is a “fake,” perhaps from the Old World, and the object entered the KSU collections under pretense. More broadly, we suggest that archaeologists take a much more circumspect approach to collector-acquired objects and perform their due diligence in verifying the stories associated with them, even if that means increased use of destructive testing procedures.     

Gender equality and economic empowerment in the Solomon Islands and Fiji: a place-based approach

The economic empowerment of women is emerging as a core focus of both economic development and gender equality programmes internationally. At the same time, there is increasing importance placed on measuring outcomes and quantifying progress towards gender and development goals. These trends raise significant questions around how well gender differences are understood, especially in economies dominated by the informal sector and characterised by a highly gendered division of labour, as is the case in many Pacific countries. How well do existing international and national indicators of gender equality reflect the experiences and aspirations of Pacific women and men? What do concepts such as gender equality and economic empowerment mean in this geographical context? How might local attitudes and practices be identified and measured? In this paper, we draw on Boaventura De Sousa Santos’ call to recognise and value knowledges of the majority world that have been rendered either largely invisible or non-credible by mainstream development and human rights policy agendas. Reflecting on an action research project conducted with partner organisations in Fiji and the Solomon islands, we explore a more nuanced place-based approach to understanding and measuring gender equality and economic empowerment. This approach takes account of diverse economic practices, such as non-market transactions, and forms of non-cash exchange and unpaid labour, and recognises the imbalance in women’s and men’s household and care work.     

Decisive Evidence for Multidirectional Evolution of Sociopolitical Complexity in Southern Africa

While pioneers of archaeology in any given region have established the foundations of the discipline, their views have not remained unchanged in places such as Europe, North America and Australasia. In these regions, successive generations of researchers changed the direction of their work based not just on new observations but also in light of new methods and theories. For example, the idea of a Bronze Age revolution popularised by V. G. Childe in Europe was superseded by multiple alternatives over the years. In southern African Iron Age studies, John Schofield, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Roger Summers, Keith Robinson and Peter Garlake created an impressive platform upon which successors could build. Confronting firm disapproval from more experienced researchers in the early 1980s, Huffman speculated that the evolution of sociopolitical complexity in our region was a linear relay from Mapungubwe to Khami via Great Zimbabwe. This position was sustained as the conventional wisdom largely, we argue, because no new research was being carried out in key areas of the region, and too few students, in particular African ones, were being trained to expand the focus of investigation. Here, we present new data to support our argument, that the pathway to sociopolitical complexity in southern Africa was multilinear. We propose looking forward rather than back, and to continue to seek the exposure of scales of interaction between multiple but chronologically overlapping entities associated with the rise of sociopolitical complexity in southern Africa.