SITING A WOMEN'S HEALTH FACILITY: A LOCATION-ALLOCATION STUDY OF BREAST CANCER SCREENING SERVICES IN EASTERN ONTARIO

Women's health care has been a neglected area of study in geography. Access to health care has generally been treated as gender-neutral in the medical geography literature. In this paper, access to a women's health care service is examined using a location-allocation approach. We argue for the utility of a location-allocation approach to the informed siting of breast-screening facilities for two reasons. First, the readily available sex- and age-specific data are truly representative of need for breast-screening services. Second, there is a need to ensure geographic accessibility to women's health care services where the outcomes such as decreased mortality and improved quality of life have been demonstrated. A commonly used location-allocation approach with distance constraints is employed to evaluate the service provided by mammography facilities in the Ontario Breast Screening Program Kingston Centre's catchment area. The existing catchment area is found to leave many women with impossibly long travel distances. The results demonstrate the importance of taking a gender-informed geographic approach to the siting of women's health care services. Le bien-être des femmes a été négligé dans le domaine de la géographie. L'accès á l'aide médicale a été, généralement, traité sans tenir compte du problème ‘sexe’ dans la littérature médico-géographique. Dans cet écrit, l'accès des femmes á un service médical est analysé au moyen d'une approche qui tient compte de la disponibilité du corps médical sur l'ensemble de la région désservie. ll y a deux raisons pour lesquelles nous argumentons l'utilité des ‘médecins désignés’ concernant l'information distribuée sur les cliniques offrant, aux patientes, des examens amenant au dépistage du cancer du sein. Premièrement, les dernières statistiques disponibles sur le sexe et les âges spécifiques, montrent clairement la nécessité de services pour les examens mammaires. Deuxièmement, il est important de dèmontrer qu'il y a un besoin de réassurer l'accessibilité géographique au centre médical pour les femmes dans les cas où le taux de mortalité décroît ce qui amène, comme résultat, á une meilleure qualité de vie. Le service offert concernant la mammographie du ‘Programme Ontarien de Dépistage du Cancer du Sein’ au Centre Médical de Kingston est employé pour évaluer l'efficacité du corps médical malgré les problèmes de distances. Les régions désservies existantes ont malheureusement le désavantage d'être trop loin, ce qui ne favorise pas les patientes qui ne peuvent faire de longs voyages. Pour conclure, les rèsultats démontrent que l'approche géographique par le facteur de sexe dans la location des centres médicaux pour les femmes doit être, de préférence, revue.     

WHAT,AT LONG LAST,IS HISTORICAL THEORY FOR? REFLECTIONS ON HISTORICAL THEORY IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD

The term “post-truth” is a capacious trope that collects threats to the stability of shared knowledge on many fronts—digitally spread disinformation, ignorance and resistance to science, unabashed lies in the public sphere, mythologizing by resurgent nationalist forces, and so on. History is particularly vulnerable to this array. Post-truth threats to serious history produced to professional standards for research and reasoning by historians free of coercion, intimidation, or pressures for co-optation are too blatant to need explanation. Avenues of response to the politicizing of history have been protests by public intellectuals and academics and a growing scholarly literature recording the imposition of memory laws by the police powers of numerous states. Attacks on empirical history, and the academic freedom required to sustain it, provoke clear responses, but the situation of historical theory is more problematic. Historical theory is a superstructure of analysis that presupposes the free production of history that invites and justifies the cultural work of theorizing. Reading Karen S. Feldman's Arts of Connection: Poetry, History, Epochality, an erudite, philosophical contribution to historical theory advancing a severe critique of history's fundamental powers of representation against a widening background of nationalist state-sponsored policing of history, produced an acute cognitive dissonance in this reviewer. In this essay, I frankly acknowledge this dissonant experience and lay out some of the most egregious causes of it in history distorted and undermined to nationalist ends in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and beyond. I pose the question of whether the intellectual work of theorizing history can continue with any confidence when the ground on which theory stands is being eroded and distorted.     

Vital Creativity: Exhibiting Beauty and Heritage in Material Culture

Museum exhibits are an important but often overlooked source of anthropological, folklore and decorative art analyses. Some exhibits are cross-cultural and focus on object types; others deal with the cultures of particular peoples. This review assesses two exhibit catalogues that deal with each of these two types: Gavin, Pierce, and Pleguezuelo's Cerámica y Cultura: The Story of Spanish and Mexican Mayólica deals with one art form and its development, and Griffith's Hecho a Mano: The Traditional Arts of Tucson's Mexican American Community documents the home arts of Mexican Americans in Tucson, Arizona during the 1990s.     

NORTH AND SOUTH AT THE END OF THE MYCENAEAN AGE: ASPECTS OF AN OLD PROBLEM

Summary. The end of the Mycenaean age calls for an explanation outside the immediate Aegean area. The evidence is more likely to come from changes in habit than in the importation of objects of bronze or pottery. In order to understand events it is necessary to look beyond Greek frontiers to the Danube and Balkans. Among important changes are those in fighting tactics with a return to the sword in the Aegean and new workshop practice in Europe with more bronze forging against casting. Evidence for actual arrival of people is never likely to be conclusive; various alternatives are considered.     

Reading the Body: Mystical Theology and Spiritual Actualisation in Early Seventeenth‐Century Lima*

In early seventeenth‐century Lima, Peru, female visionaries composed texts of their bodies, and texts composed their bodies. This fact can be explained, in part, by the belief that an individual could gain access to and appropriate the language of God (His spiritus) in distinct ways. Mystical narratives, stigmata, as well as the spoken words of enraptured visionaries communicating with absent souls were considered readable texts because the object to be read could be a book, a painting, or the body itself. Thus the reading of, and listening to, texts was parallel to Lima's visionaries entering a state of spiritual ecstasy (arrobamiento), and “reading” their bodies as living books, which perforce became a readable space.