Examining Gender and Community Through Critical Pedagogy

A growing body of literature in critical geography challenges authoritative approaches to the production (and consumption) of knowledge in higher education. Feminist perspectives have contributed to this literature by emphasising the multiple and often conflicting voices of subjects, including those within the classroom. This paper draws from critical and feminist pedagogy in geography to examine student engagement with gender issues in the community. The case study for this analysis is a project in which students volunteer at community organisations and construct their own knowledges of social and political issues.     

“The Pull of Love”: Mutual Love as Democratic Virtue in Niebuhrian Political Theology

Although Reinhold Niebuhr's account of democracy aims to protect marginalized communities by restraining sin through the diffusion of power, the conceptions of sin and love that inform his political theology have anti-democratic consequences for members of these communities. I address this inconsistency by revisiting his under-developed idea of mutual love and clarifying his account of sin. Mutual love occupies crucial terrain between agape and justice for Niebuhr, and therefore enables moral agents to achieve democratic goals. Given the nature and importance of mutual love, I clarify Niebuhr's account of sin by making his position on “self-love” more moderate than it often appears.     

Mapping a Future: Archaeology,Feminism, and Scientific Practice

Drawing on work in science studies, I argue for the importance of fieldwork and research practices when considering the relative significance of feminism within archaeology. Fieldwork, often presented as the unifying hallmark of all of anthropology, has a different resonance in archaeology at the level of material practice and specific techniques. In order to understand the relationship between archaeology and feminism we need to investigate methods, methodology, and interpretations of the material record simultaneously. Examining one practice, that of map making, I suggest venues amenable to feminist insights.     

Reinforcing Diversity: From the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’

This paper focuses on Jan Monk's contribution to reinforcing diversity and collaboration in the field of human geography. It illustrates how gendered diversity and feminism is promoted in her academic work both inside the Anglo-American academic world and outside, by exposing the feminist voices from around the world and mainstreaming them in her collaborative work. Fostering and reinforcing diversity has become a body of knowledge in her extensive publications in which she assesses the varying extent and nature of feminist geography in the Anglophone world and across countries, attempting to interpret differences in terms of geographical and cultural contexts and disciplinary trends. The paper emphasizes how fostering diversity and collaboration in Jan's academic work is not only about writing articles, editing books and producing a film, but also engages the formulation of organizational structures such as the Routledge book series and the initiation and establishment of the Commission of Gender and Geography of the International Geographical Union which have contributed to the production of collaborative feminist geographical knowledge across spaces and places.     

Connolly's Mysterious Trinity Machine: A Panentheistic Reading

Abstract

Drawing Connolly's work into a conversation with Christian theology of a feminist and process persuasion, this article explores and builds upon the way in which Connolly offers a third way between the theistic certainties of George Bush's "Christian America" and the crass secularism of those who are and were appalled by the latter's religious fundamentalism. Discerning a secret Trinitarian structure in Connolly's immanent naturalism, though not the Father, Son and Ghost, the article explores the potentials for developing a counter-apocalyptic strategy for political theology that can counter fundamentalist drives and lay the basis for releasing new energies of earthly becoming.     

'Joking apart…': A 'processual' approach to researching self-help groups

It is well known that 'feminist research methodologies' reject the traditional and positivistic insistence on detached objectivity, favouring instead a situated and empathic responsiveness to particular research contexts. In practice, however, interviewees often have a justifiable interest in maintaining a communicative distance between researcher and researched, thereby retaining a degree of control over the research process. Although the nature and function of this communicative distancing change over time it may (initially at least) emphasize the boundaries between the respondents' 'insider' and the researcher's 'outsider' status. This phenomenon seems especially pertinent where those researched comprise a tightly knit group with shared interests and experiences such as self-help groups for those suffering from specific disabilities. This paper reflects on my own experiences interviewing agoraphobic women members of two such groups in Central Scotland and discusses the manner in which humour acted as an indicator and facilitator of these changing communicative distances. It concludes that a processual methodology is required in circumstances where managing the research process is often as much a matter of coping with as directing change.     

Water,skin and touch: migrant bathing assemblages

This paper offers a contribution to cultures of urban water research through household ethnographies conducted with 16 participants who migrated from Burma to Sydney, Australia. We draw on a strand of corppreal feminism and offer the concept of bathing assemlbages to interpet how watery skin encounters provide clues to how participants washed themselves in their ‘home’ country may presist, transform or stop. Our analysis maps how dimensions of the self (ethical, gender, class, ethnic, national faith and others) are constituted by, and generative of, the felt intensities of watery encounters through different bathing assemblages. This paper illustrates how bathing practices are shaped as much by emotional and affective intensities as by reasoned activity. We show the utility of corporeal feminism not only for theorising subjectivity, but also for household sustainability politics.     

从破碎到完整——探析《金色笔记》中的“新女性主义”

《金色笔记》作为2007年度诺贝尔文学奖得主多丽丝·莱辛的主代表作,以它独特的形式记录了那个时代,表现了那个时代的女性是如何为了追求理想的生活而进行斗争和自我斗争的。本文旨在通过分析《金色笔记》中的女人们从破碎到完整,从束缚到自由的人生经历,探求"新女性主义"的特点及其对那个时代女性的影响。