‘Unlike Vancouver … here there’s nothing’: imagined geographies of idealized health care for LGBTQ women

This article explores imagined geographies of health care among Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) women in Halifax and Vancouver. In expressing the possibilities and limitations of accessing care, participants frame their own experiences through spatialized narratives of how LGBTQ people are thought to be treated elsewhere. Participants’ explicit connections and distinctions between Halifax and Vancouver gave insight into how their perceived difficulties in one health care context are sometimes framed by imagining more ease in accessing care in the other. We explore here the implications of these imagined, idealized spaces, which may set up false expectations that things are always better elsewhere. We reveal imagined geographies and senses of place as highly relevant features in LGBTQ women’s accounts of experiences with and access to health care and expand conventional arguments about physical access to care.     

A love story: for ‘Buddy System’ research in the academy

This article makes a case for a ‘buddy system’ approach to research and scholarship, or a kind of ‘caring with’ our colleagues, as feminist praxis and as an intentional, politicized response to the neoliberalization of the academy. Through autoethnographic writing on our travels together into farmed animal auction yards, we explain the buddy system as a mode of caring, solidarity, and love that differs from collaborative research, focused as it is on caring for and about our colleagues and their research even (or especially) when we have no direct stakes in the research being conducted. We contribute to three feminist conversations with this approach: feminist care ethics in geography; emotional geographies; and critical perspectives on the neoliberalization of the academy. We advocate the buddy system as an extension of feminist care ethics, enriching how feminists think about ‘doing’ research. We draw on feminist geographies of emotion and our own emotions (grief especially) experienced while witnessing processes of nonhuman animal commodification to politicize the act of researching and to develop a more caring way of inhabiting the academy. This is particularly important, we argue, in the context of deepening neoliberal logics that turn the academy into a place where care and love become radical acts of resistance and transformation.     

Eyes on the alley: children’s appropriation of alley space in Riverdale,Toronto

ABSTRACT

Recent research suggests that numerous positive physical, cognitive, and social benefits can be derived from independent mobility and play agency amongst children, necessitating an understanding of how physical and social environments facilitate this development. This study involved parents, and children aged 9–13 from twelve households in the neighbourhood of Riverdale in Toronto. Using a mapping exercise to instigate discussion, participants were asked to describe where, how, and with whom play occurs in their neighbourhood. A reoccurring theme emerged amongst households that border a back alley where parents perceived this space as safer allowing them to grant greater independent mobility to their children and use this space as an intermediary tool to prepare their children for greater independence. For children, this space serves as one of creative appropriation, granting them access to more space and friends to play with. Situated within the context of age-friendly cities, this research identifies several socio-spatial qualities found in alleys that have the potential to contribute to the discussion of more inclusive city-building practice.     

Edward Abramowski's concept of stateless socialism and its impact on progressive social movements in Poland in the twentieth century

The author traces the impact of Abramowski's ideas on the recent history of Poland. His concepts were not only popular in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the syndicalist movement in the interwar period (1918–1939), but they also exerted a profound influence on the cooperative movement and democratic left-wing opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. The leaders of the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) were much influenced by Abramowski's ideas and, according to some researchers, the Solidarity movement from 1980 to 1981 in Poland was the culmination of his concepts. Today's anti-systemic movements in Poland (anarchists, syndicalists, alter-globalists) are also inspired by Abramowski. The author also draws attention to certain similarities between Abramowski's ideas, Kropotkin's idea, Gramsci's concept of civil society and the thought of the young Marx. The author also outlines Abramowski's social ideas in the context of ideas promoted by the main theoreticians of the Polish left in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.     

UNION DISCUSSIONS OF GENDER EQUALITY IN THE SWEDISH TRADE UNION NEWSPAPER JOURNALISTEN, 1961–1989

Sweden is arguably one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, and the historical development of that equality has been studied in detail. However, less is known about how the idea of gender equality was adopted in different professional spheres. In this article, I focus on this topic by using one profession, journalism, to analyse how gender equality was placed on the trade union agenda and negotiated in Sweden between 1961 and 1989. Drawing on a framing analysis of the discussion of gender equality in the trade union newspaper Journalisten, I argue that the Swedish Union of Journalists and its members took a somewhat moderate position in the struggle for gender equality, which, during the decades in question, was mostly framed as a women’s question. For the most active advocates of gender equality, it was nevertheless a deeply felt issue, and their work can be defined as trade union feminism.     

The Jacob Story: Between Oral and Written Modes

In this article I examine the relations between Jacob’s putative oral story and the pre-Priestly narrative. I argue that Hosea’s prophecy presents the version of Jacob's oral story related in his time and antedated by many years the composition of the story-cycle in its written form. Comparison of Hosea’s prophecy and Jacob’s narrative indicates the thorough way in which the exilic author worked the oral story he received in order to fit it to his ideological messages and religious concepts. To further examine the relations between the oral and written modes, I discuss the episode of the treaty between Laban and Jacob (Gen 31,45–54) in light of a Mari letter (A.3592). Comparison of the two episodes indicates that part of the biblical narrative rests on the oral story and other part was written by the late author. Evidently, the long process of oral transmission, the growth of the narratives in its course, and the creative reworking of the author make it impossible to either isolate the early oral layer within the present story-cycle or to date the stages of its growth in the oral process of transmission.     

How to deal with migrants and the State’s backlash – Polish cities’ experience

Over the last decades, Poland has witnessed a relatively dynamic increase in the number of immigrants. At the same time, current Polish central authorities, politicians of the ruling party and the majority of the population perceive migrants mostly as a threat and a challenge. Municipal authorities lack complex support from central authorities. However, the situation is slowly changing. Some Polish cities are adopting migration policies or including migration issues in the local development strategies. Considering this, the article aims to examine migrants’ integration policies in selected Polish cites considered leaders in this field: Lublin, Gdańsk, Kraków and Wroc?aw. The main research question is: how do Polish cities deal with the backlash from the national government and absence of clear legal regulations on their role and competences in the area of migrant integration? The research method is that of a legal-institutional analysis and case study. The former is used to interpret the legal acts and other documents. Its application is justified by the fact that this paper examines strategic documents adopted at the level of urban governments regarding the integration of migrants. Case study methods made it possible to examine the migrants’ integration policy in four Polish cities.     

民国时期甘肃改土归流后土司辖地的归属纠纷

民国时期改土归流政策的推行,使土司辖地被纳入与内地一致的省县体系当中.这一过程在解决历史遗留问题的同时,也激化了新的土司辖地的归属纠纷,促使甘肃省政府展开界务调整,但实际勘划并不完全与相关勘界法规相符.狄道赵土司辖地乔家沟以耕种土地租户的籍贯为标准而划归渭源;河州何土司辖地何家堡则在甘青省界调整的过程中被划归永靖;卓尼...     

宋代官员墓葬相关问题刍议

从现有考古材料来看,与前代相比,宋代墓葬体现的等级制度并不明显,而官员墓葬似恰是造成这一状况的原因.原本应当尊奉制度、为民表率的官员群体中,有很大一部分官员并未向下传递上层的丧葬文化,反而被出身之地或归葬之所的富裕平民阶层同化.由此使其地下墓葬部分呈现出“地方化”的特征.而这一情形,所反映的可能是两宋时期,民间经济力量...     

Creating New Schools for Bradford’s ‘Factory Children’: Obstacles and Outcomes, 1836–1850

Industrialization brought extensive factory development to northern English counties during the early nineteenth century, with new cotton, wool and worsted mills that employed many child workers. By 1840, some 1800 children, aged less than thirteen, worked in mills across the widespread Bradford parish – mostly in the central townships and predominantly in the worsted trade. Under the 1833 Factory Act, these factory children were restricted to forty-eight hours work per week and were required to attend school two hours each day. Available school provision was often poor and ill-adapted to mill-working hours. After delays, diversions and sustained lobbying, new Bradford schools – under the auspices of the ‘National Schools Society’ but specially targeted on factory children – started to come into being, soon reaching an attendance of some 1000 children. One of these schools – in a new, hastily constructed, building – gained recognition as a ‘model factory school’. Despite the perceived deficiencies of the 1833 Act, despite opposition and despite recurrent difficulties over finance, the 1833 legislation gave ‘leverage’ that, in Bradford, generated a new pattern of schooling.