A space for feminist mentoring: the role of Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) specialty group in higher education

Abstract

Higher education and organizations within academic disciplines are important spaces for mentoring and other forms of networking. These spaces, however, are often situated in environments that limit equitable and inclusive opportunities for early career and underrepresented scholars to effectively engage in mentoring. This paper contributes to critical feminist scholarship that examines how organizations in higher education can offer supportive mentoring spaces for women, early career faculty, and scholars from diverse backgrounds. The analysis focuses on the Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) as a space for faculty, students and other geographers to enhance their professional and personal success. Our analysis draws from the results of an international survey, a focus group discussion, and reflexive participation of feminist geographers aligned with this specialty group. We examine the ways in which this academic organization, and the informal and formal networks it cultivates, attempts to foster an anti-oppressive mentoring community of feminist geographers. We also analyze how these networks are shaped by and embedded in neoliberal institutions in the discipline of geography and higher education as a whole. This discussion offers important insights to growing research and initiatives that support mentoring for women, feminists, and others concerned with building more inclusive and socially just spaces in academia.     

The production of penicillin in wartime China and Sino-American definitions of “normal” microbiology

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the history of domestic penicillin production in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, focusing on the work of the National Epidemic Prevention Bureau (NEPB) to identify, isolate, cultivate, and extract the drug. This work took place just as the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China discussed plans to establish an American pilot plant for Chinese penicillin manufacture, which would directly transfer technologies and personnel from the US to China. While American advisers saw the basic conditions of wartime China as actively obstructing the highly technical project of penicillin production, researchers at the NEPB relied crucially upon that same local environment to identify useful molds and find substitutions for key materials in successfully manufacturing penicillin in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province in southwest China.     

Prophetic Perfectionism: The Afterlives of Nat Turner and John Brown

ABSTRACT

Recent fiction, film, art, and scholarship on nineteenth-century American abolitionists Nat Turner and John Brown shed light on the politics of their prophetic religion. Both men led violent rebellions against slavery for which they were executed. Prophetic perfectionism drove Turner and Brown but tended to fade in works about them. Exceptions to this pattern of reception include Jacob Lawrence's John Brown series (1941), Nate Parker's film The Birth of a Nation (2016), and Ted Smith's book Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (2014). This essay situates Turner's and Brown's prophetic perfectionism and their reception in the context of contemporary political theologies and aesthetics of religion and race.     

The Southern Conservative Thought of John C. Calhoun and the Cultural Foundations of the Canadian Identity

Besides the largely ignored fact of general Canadian support for the Southern Confederacy during the American Civil War, the consociational dimensions of Canadian Confederation, as something opposed to American unionism in cultural terms, finds its historical roots legitimized in the Southern conservative writings of John C. Calhoun. It is the tension between an institutionally entrenched foundation of consociational pluralism and growing urban cosmopolitanism within Canadian history that has defined the debates and divides over the meaning of the Canadian identity, just as it is. Alternatively it is the tension between enforced constitutionalist unionism and consociational cultural tradition within the American South that has largely defined their historical experience. Both Canada and the American South find the tensions of their cultural identities rooted in the consociational values originally laid out by nineteenth century Southern conservative political thought.     

西方近代边疆理论的初步发展

文章认为，在资本主义的产生、发展时期，民族国家的出现是近代边疆理论形成的重要前提，重商主义与殖民扩张则是近代边疆理论形成的内在动力。这一时期，传统边疆向近代边疆的转变、国际法的初现也对近代边疆理论的发展产生了重要影响。     

In Search of ‘Affectionate Regard’: American Merchant Lobbies and the State during the Atlantic Imperial Crisis*

This article revisits the politics of British merchants trading to North America in the period between 1763 and 1783. Their political success and failure in this critical period have been examined primarily in terms of their impact on the escalation of imperial crisis, with the day‐to‐day operation of merchant politics rarely taken into full account. This article takes an alternative approach of studying the political influence of merchants trading to North America within the context of their interaction with the state. By looking into the organisation, the process of lobbying, and the arguments that the merchants adopted, the article highlights how, in response to many sources of tension and uncertainty inherent within their relationship with the state, they demarcated their own areas of contribution to the shaping of commercial and colonial policy. Through the case study of merchants trading to North America, this article sheds further light on the necessity to understand the evolution of such modern political institutions as commercial lobbies in their specific economic and political contexts.     

GIs and “Jeep girls”: sex and American soldiers in wartime China

ABSTRACT

This article examines how sex affected the larger politics of the Sino–US alliance during World War II. By early 1945, Chinese from across the social spectrum resented the US military presence, but just one issue sparked a violent backlash: sexual relations between American soldiers (GIs) and Chinese women. Two interrelated, patriarchal narratives about sex emerged that spring. Starting in March, government-backed newspapers began criticizing “Jeep girls,” an epithet coined to describe the Chinese women who consorted with American servicemen. Rumors also circulated that GIs were using Jeeps to kidnap “respectable” women and rape them. Each narrative portrayed women’s bodies as territory to be recovered and inextricable from national sovereignty. These narratives resonated widely, turning Jeep girls into the catalyst through which all variables causing resentment against the US military presence intersected and converged. With Japan on the ropes, China’s allied friends now stood in the way of irreversibly consigning foreign imperialism to the past. Sexual relations were not the Sino–US alliance’s seedy underside, but the core site of its tensions.     

Legislating the Melanesian Way: Bernard Narokobi and the Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea

Abstract

A common criticism of Bernard Narokobi is that his vision of the ‘Melanesian Way’ was vague and imprecise. This article argues against this claim by describing the activities Narokobi undertook as the head of the Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea (1975–8). Using the example of his suggested revision of adultery laws, this article shows that Narokobi realized his abstract vision of the Melanesian Way in the most concrete and specific way possible: by attempting to reform the law. Much of Narokobi's legal reform work was unsuccessful, but a full understanding of his philosophy can only be achieved by reading his legal work alongside his published writings like The Melanesian Way.     

Nationalizing international relief: Romanian responses to American aid for children in the Great War era

ABSTRACT

This article examines the interactions between American humanitarian agendas and initiatives and domestic efforts for child relief in Romania in the aftermath of the Great War. While focusing on the presence of the European Children’s Fund (ECF) in post-war Romania, the article traces the domestic organization of relief, the Romanian elites’ turn to American humanitarian assistance, and their active responses to this external aid on behalf of war-suffering children. The article argues that Romanian leadership of child welfare initiatives nationalized American humanitarian aid by integrating ECF’s institutional efforts into domestically established philanthropic associations. This nationalization was sustained in three key ways: (1) American humanitarians’ own engagement of local channels in aid diffusion; (2) the growing network of national associations of child welfare in post-war Romania; (3) the competing political agendas of both donors and recipients. The case of Romanian responses to American aid for children, and its eventual domestic institutionalization, challenges the seemingly unequal relationship between Western donors and East-Central European recipients during a period of post-war reconstruction and sociopolitical transformation. It sheds light on the transnational dimension of the humanitarian process, driven by the dual agency of foreign humanitarians and domestic interlocutors in the country of aid reception.     

Radicals,Tories or Monomaniacs? The Birmingham Currency Reformers in the House of Commons, 1832–67*

Benjamin Disraeli described Thomas Attwood as a ‘provincial banker labouring under a financial monomania’. The leader of the Birmingham Political Union, Attwood's Warwickshire accent and support for a paper currency were widely derided at Westminster. However, the themes of Attwood's brief parliamentary career were shared by the other men who represented Birmingham in the early‐ and mid‐Victorian period. None of these MPs were good party men, and this article illuminates the nature of party labels in the period. Furthermore, it adds a new dimension to the historical understanding of debates on monetary policy and shows how local political identities and traditions interacted with broader party identities. With the exception of Richard Spooner, who was a strong tory on religious and political matters, the currency men are best described as popular radicals, who consistently championed radical political reform and were among the few parliamentary supporters of the ‘People's Charter’. They opposed the new poor law and endorsed factory regulation, a progressive income tax, and religious liberty. Although hostile to the corn laws they believed that free trade without currency reform would depress prices, wages and employment. George Frederick Muntz's death in 1857 and his replacement by John Bright marked a watershed and the end of the influence of the ‘Birmingham school’. Bright appropriated Birmingham's radical tradition as he used the town as a base for his campaign for parliamentary reform. He emphasized Birmingham's contribution to the passing of the 1832 Reform Act but ignored the currency reformers' views on other matters, which had often been at loggerheads with the ‘Manchester school’ and economic liberalism.