The State of Research on Gender and Political Participation

Woodrow Wilson declared the early Gilded Age to be a time of Congressional Government, when the legislature “reigned supreme” and was the federal polity's “motivating force.” Yet that same Congress, and era, have been immortalized pejoratively as bastions of corruption; of politicos, spoils–and, most especially, of omnipotently evil lobbyists. This essay argues that both lobbying and the notoriety it aroused in the Grant years were essentially by-products of systemic change. Corruption did exist, but much of what contemporaries saw as illicit was merely new; neither Washington nor the polity as a whole had yet devised mechanisms, or even language, appropriate to emerging conditions. In fact, lobbying was a necessary and even beneficial force in post-Civil War America, one that actually helped officials and citizens to function as the scope, procedures, and agenda of governance underwent dramatic transformation.     

The municipal elections of March 2001

This article analyses Algeria's ongoing 'civil war' through the lens of contemporary Algerian theatre. Specifically, it examines the relationship between Algeria's unsuccessful transition to democratic, religious pluralism and Alek Baylee Toumi's 1996 play, Madah-Sartre . Among the prominent themes covered are the issues of gender equality as represented in the efforts of Khalida Messaoudi (Toumi's sister) to resist the 1984 Algerian Family Code; the rise of Islamic radicalism; the legacy of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir within contemporary Algerian intellectual and political communities; the problem of Islamic and state-sponsored terrorism; and the effects of the Islamic radicals' policies of assassinating Algerian intellectuals on the Algerian community in the diaspora.     

The Changing Face of Heritage at Canada’s National Historic Sites

In order for all citizens to fully belong to a nation or a community, they must have membership in that society’s institutions, systems and social relations on both the formal and everyday levels. Heritage sites are public institutions of formal cultural presentation and informal social encounters where society demonstrates community membership. But in a country such as Canada where global economics and popular culture combine with an unprecedented influx of immigrants, how a community imagines itself and articulates its heritage is changing radically. Canada’s National Historic Sites (NHS) is among the important public institutions devoted to both the presentation of heritage and demonstration of citizen membership. This paper describes how this institution is adapting to changes in imaginings about citizenship, on both the formal and informal level. It looks at how NHS is expanding the involvement of all citizens in the why, what, how and to whom of heritage presentation, evolving its practices to include ethic minorities in its imaginings of Canadianness. Using as an example a new NHS exhibit and designations related to the Underground Railroad and African‐Canadians, the paper considers how historic sites, as formal instruments of the state, can be re‐tuned as informal sites of discourse and negotiation about identity, citizenship and belonging.     

The Archaeological Survey of India and Communal Violence in Post‐independence India

This article argues that that the discipline of archaeology as practised by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) significantly contributed to communal violence in post‐Independence India. The essay investigates several legacies handed down from the colonial ASI to the post‐Independence ASI, with a goal of explaining the contribution of archaeology to the ongoing disturbances at Ayodhyā in Uttar Pradesh. The colonial ASI was marked by four characteristics: it was a monument‐based archaeology based on geographical surveys, literary traditions and Orientalist scholarship. These four characteristics combined to form a traditionalist, location‐driven excavation agenda that privileged specific holy sites in the post‐Partition era, sustaining the violent disagreements between Hindu and Islamic populations of India and Pakistan.     

Crowds,Fenianism and the Victorian Stage

This article examines two Irish rebellion-themed plays in context of the growth of Fenianism in the months preceding the Clerkenwell explosion in order to reveal the ways that popular theatre participated in a wider public discussion about what was seen as the modern phenomenon of the crowd. The melodramatic dramas Oonagh; or the Lovers of Lisnamona (Her Majesty's, 1866) and Achora Machree; or Gems of Ould Ireland (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1867) were produced on the eve of one of the greatest Irish–English political crises of the nineteenth century when fears of Irish crowds, and the chaos, violence and contagion they were believed to bring, reached their peak. Both plays feature dangerously ambiguous crowds that alternately form portraits of bucolic sentimentality and forcefully express Irish dissent. This powerful ambiguity mirrors conflicting visions of crowds in this period. While dominant Victorian crowd theory characterized the crowd as a source of chaos that needed to be controlled, political movements such as Irish Republicanism used the organizational form of the crowd to create political and social change.     

Gendered Geographies of Environmental Injustice

Abstract:  As environmental justice concerns become more widely embedded in environmental organizations and policymaking, and increasingly the focus of academic study, the gender dimension dissolves into an exclusive focus on race/ethnicity and class/income. While grassroots campaigning activities were often dominated by women, in the more institutionalized activities of organizations dominated by salaried professionals, gender inequality is neglected as a vector of environmental injustice, and addressing this inequality is not considered a strategy for redress. This paper explores some of the reasons why this may be so, which include a lack of visibility of gendered environmental injustice; professional campaigning organizations which are themselves gender blind; institutions at a range of scales which are still structured by gender (as well as class and race) inequalities; and an intellectual academy which continues to marginalize the study of gender—and women's—inequality. The authors draw on experience of environmental activism, participant observation, and other qualitative research into the gendering of environmental activity, to first explore the constructions of scale to see how this might limit a gender-fair approach to environmental justice. Following this, the practice of "gender mainstreaming" in environmental organizations and institutions will be examined, demonstrating how this is limited in scope and fails to impact on the gendering of environmental injustice.     

Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson

While all individuals have a story, not all individuals’stories offer great insights about American history. This accountof Junius Wilson's life (1908–2001) provides a devastatingcritique of North Carolina social norms and policies (especiallyattitudes to the deaf and to African Americans), court operations,state institutionalization and treatment of the insane, andaccess to justice. Mr. Wilson was "incarcerated in an insaneasylum merely because he was deaf, black, and poor, and bureaucraticinertia and staff paternalism helped keep him there for [morethan] sixty-five years" (129). Not only was he imprisoned physicallybut also he was isolated culturally since he was denied access     

Latitudinal variation in a photoperiod response gene in European barley: insight into the dynamics of agricultural spread from ‘historic’ specimens

Between ca. 6000 BC and ca. 500 BC, barley cultivation spread across the continent of Europe from the extreme south to the extreme north. Carbon-dating would suggest that this spread, and indeed the spread of crop cultivation generally, varied in its pace, with ‘delays’ at certain points along its route. Such delays in the spread of agriculture have been explained as resulting from the slow assimilation of agricultural practices by existing indigenous human populations or as the time taken for the crops to adapt to novel climatic conditions, such as altered temperature regimes and day-lengths. A mutant form of the photoperiod response gene, Ppd-H1, causes barley to be non-responsive to long days, while the wild-type responsive form allows plants to flower in response to long days. We sequenced this gene in 65 ‘historic’ barley accessions, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in order to explore the potential role of environmental adaptation in the spread of agriculture. We chose to use ‘historic’ material, to complement the richer patterns in extant genetic lines, by spreading the data range in both time and space. Our ‘historic’ barley data shows a latitudinal divide in the Ppd-H1 gene similar to that found in extant lines, but with clearer geographical resolution, and extending northwards into the Arctic Circle. We discuss the implications of our results in relation to the dynamics of agricultural spread across Europe.