Situating middle class identities: American college women of South Asian descent

This article explores the ways in which American college women of South Asian descent discuss their positioning as middle class. The article analyses participants' talk around class as evidence of embeddedness in American class discourses and a complex and contradictory scheme of identification that implicates other identities like gender, race and culture. Respondents often articulated class using the American Dream, where the social capital their parents immigrated with is left unexamined in favour of a narrative of ‘rags to riches’. Young women also used other constructs like ‘stability’, ‘race’ and ‘resources’ to make reference to class, but also to participate in an American discursive silence around it. Finally, the notion of a drive towards professionalism as an immigrant goal is examined, and it is suggested that this serves to further deflect discussions of class. This article synthesises theories of diaspora, ‘translocational positioning’ and habitus, and examines the production of American class discourse as a performance of an American middle class habitus.     

Reproductive cancer: female autonomy and border crossing in medical discourse and fiction

Using three contemporary Irish novels: Down By the River and The Light of Evening by Edna O'Brien and My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain as well as Irish Medical Journal, I suggest that representations of female cancers are images of female pathology that reify and question disease as limitation of autonomy. Tracing the image of reproductive cancers through parts of the Irish cultural artifacts displays how both the fiction and Irish medical discourse attend disproportionately to female reproductive cancers. The texts construct female bodies as sites of pathology through textual representations of reproductive cancer and build upon Irish metaphors of landscape as female, which conceptualize women's (immobile, permeable) bodies as the site of invasion. Thus, fiction and health genres construct (and restrict) gender autonomy through two versions of border control: movement across body borders and movement across spatial, especially geopolitical, borders.     

城乡一体化进程中的社会认同问题研究

我国已经进入统筹城乡一体化发展的重要时期。要实现城乡全面协调可持续发展的胃标,仅仅建立城乡统一的社会制度体系还远远不够,必须在此基础上促进城市和乡村真正深层次的融合,重塑城乡之间积极的社会认同,包括身份认同、制度认同和文化认同,建立城市居民和外来群体在身份、制度和文化层面上的相互认可、融合和整合,保障城乡居民获得平等的生存和发展权利,实现真正意义上的城乡一体化发展。     

Picturing inclusive places in segregated spaces: a participatory photo project conducted by migrant women in Sweden

This article uses participatory photography to explore contradictory processes of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary Sweden. Our aim is to analyse the social relations that shape the kinds of places recently arrived migrant women experience as ‘safe’, as well as their everyday experiences of inclusion and exclusion. The use of photography – wherein the women choose how, when and where to shoot photos – helps us highlight what otherwise would not be immediately evident with regard to the experience of such places. We argue that there are inclusive places in segregated spaces, and that issues of ethnic inclusion and exclusion are linked to ethnic hegemony and other relationships of power. Drawing on theories of relational space in general, and transgressive space in particular, we demonstrate that our informants' daily existence is simultaneously integrated and segregated, included and excluded, and that emancipatory processes that are already under way must be allowed to proceed if the social landscape of integration is to be an open and equal one.     

The Interview Hurdle to Postgraduate Studies and the Job Market

Abstract

This paper explores the educational value of a rural trail—a field visit on foot—using as an example a trail in a small area of countryside near Lancaster in northern England. This trail provides those teaching rural geography in higher education with a means of developing their students’ skills of informed observation and interpretation of field evidence based on study and discussion on‐site. A trail can enhance the appreciation and teaching of conceptual matters such as cultural approaches to rural geography. It also encourages the integration of diverse theoretical approaches to rural studies (based on culture, planning and management) and the simultaneous consideration by students of both local (often personal) details and national (or even global) pressures for change. The paper concludes that the rural trail has considerable pedagogical and academic merit for rural geographers.     

Evolutionary Perspectives on Rural Australia

An enduring concern within Australian rural geography has been to understand the nature and implications of change. Much of the intellectual effort has been focused on interpreting how rural economies, populations, social institutions, cultures, and land uses have been transformed through processes operating across a range of spatial and temporal scales. This paper offers a critical appraisal of recent rural research in Australia and how this body of work has attempted to make sense of change. It argues that despite an ongoing focus on the nature of change, it is often reduced to a relatively simple historical narrative. We suggest that some of the emerging ideas in ‘evolutionary economic geography’ might offer an alternative means of conceptualising the trajectories of rural economies, institutions, and communities. The paper outlines the contours of evolutionary economic geography and the ways in which some of its key conceptual foundations might offer a means of understanding not only rural change, but also continuity.     

20世纪安徽两次农村改革不同命运解析

在当代中国农村改革的历史进程中,安徽具有特殊的地位和影响,先后于20世纪60年代初和70年代末推行了"责任田"和"大包干"的改革。但是,由于政治背景、群众基础、两代领导人态度的不同,两次改革出现了完全不同的命运,"责任田"试行失败,"大包干"推广成功。     

Development for Whom? Rural to Urban Resettlement at the Three Gorges Dam,China

When farmers are dispossessed of their lands to make way for a development project it is often inevitable that there will not be enough land to go around. It is unlikely that parcels of fertile land are lying vacant in the surrounding areas awaiting distribution. It therefore becomes necessary for people who previously derived their livelihoods from the land to move into cities. This research explores what happens to a sample of such people and whether they are able to restore their livelihoods. It examines the Three Gorges Dam resettlement in China's Hubei province and discovers that while the Chinese government has devised an inspired toolbox of benefit-sharing initiatives, the gains accrue to a minority who live in the most amenable location of the Three Gorges area. It concludes that the availability of capital through benefit-sharing initiatives does not guarantee its productive use.     

指引小农经济通向现代化的灯塔——中国共产党农民合作经济的四大理论成果

中国共产党成立90年来,在农民合作经济方面形成了四大理论成果。毛泽东关于组织起来是必由之路的论断,指明了方向,解决了如何根据汪洋大海的小农经济的状况选择什么样的路径引导农民通向现代化的问题;邓小平关于农业两个飞跃的论断,明确了阶段,解决了如何适应生产力发展要求选择什么样的战略阶段推进组织化的问题;多种类型农民合作经济组织共同发展及规模经营形式多样化认识的形成,明晰了形式,解决了如何适应国情及农情选择什么样的模式推进组织化的问题;以民办、民有、民管、民受益为内核的原则及其相应制度的形成,探明了制度,解决了如何尊重农民意愿选择什么样的制度推进组织化的问题。