REVIEW

Voices of the Rainforest Recorded by Steven Feld Produced by Mickey Hart Rykodisc – RACS 0173 Salem, MA: 360° Productions 1991     

Marginalized Potters and Ceramic Compositional Groups: Neutron Activation Analysis of Contemporary Pottery from Tigray,Northern Highland Ethiopia

The study presents the results of neutron activation analysis (NAA) of contemporary pottery from Tigray Regional State, northern highland Ethiopia. This is the first regional-scale study of ceramic composition of Tigray’s pottery and is part of an ethnoarchaeological study of the material and social contexts of pottery production and consumption in Tigray’s Eastern (Misraqawi), Central (Mehakelegnaw), and North-western (Semien Mi’irabawi) zones. The analysis identifies clear compositional groups with strong regional patterns, an encouraging result for the use of NAA to study Tigray’s ancient pottery trade. Significantly, the study further contributes to discussions of how mutually constituted social identities of potters and consumers affect compositional patterning in the distribution of pottery in market networks.     

International Solidarity in reproductive justice: surrogacy and gender-inclusive polymaternalism

Reproductive justice and gestational surrogacy are often implicitly treated as antonyms. Yet the former represents a theoretic approach that enables the long and racialised history of surrogacy (far from a new or ‘exceptional’ practice) to be appreciated as part of a struggle for ‘radical kinship’ and gender-inclusive polymaternalism. Recasting surrogacy as a dynamic contradiction in itself, full of latent possibilities relevant to early Reproductive Justice militants’ family-abolitionist aims, this article invites scholars in human geography and cognate disciplines to re-think the boundaries of surrogacy politics. As ethnographies of formal gestational workplaces, accounts of gestational workers’ self-organised resistance, and readings of the attendant public media scandals show (taking examples from India, Thailand, and New Jersey), there is no good reason to place these new economies of ‘third-party reproductive assistance’ in a ‘realm apart’ from conversations about social reproduction more generally. Surrogacy, I argue, potentially names a practice of commoning at the same time as it names a new wave of accumulation in which clinicians are capitalising on the contemporary – biogenetic-propertarian, white-supremacist – logic of kinmaking in the Global North. Ongoing experiments in the redistribution of mothering labour (‘othermothering’ in the Black feminist tradition) suggest that ‘another surrogacy is possible’, animated by what Kathi Weeks and the 1970s intervention ‘Wages Against Housework’ conceive as anti-work politics. In making this argument, the article revives the concept ‘gestational labour’ as a means of keeping the process of ‘literal’ reproduction open to transformation.     

The bodies of others in Swedish feminism

Abstract

The body – or, more specifically, women’s bodies – has long been one of feminism’s central topics. This discussion has ranged from explorations of the cultural meaning of biology to the challenging of classification systems regulating bodies not only culturally coded as female or male but also understood through race regimes. This article seeks to explore the location of bodies within Swedish feminism, examining how women’s bodies are understood, designated and acted upon in feminist agendas. Our focus is on the location that bodies take in political conflicts among and between feminists. In particular, we explore the impact of the presence of black bodies within the field of Swedish feminism. On a theoretical level, this article bridges decolonial feminist contributions of Black, Chicano and Latin American feminist thought on the body. The research methodology combined autoethnography with feminist ethnography, including an analysis of 25 narratives of young feminist activists engaged in public resistance against, and confrontation with, the growing presence of right-wing xenophobic social movements and political parties in the public sphere.     

Governance,public policy and boundary-making

This symposium draws attention to innovative and emerging research in Australian public policy exploring the interplay of governance, public policy and boundary-making. Conceptually and substantively, boundaries are fundamental to understanding policy outcomes, yet remain overlooked and undertheorised. We aim to contribute to public policy debates, in Australia and beyond, by provoking further reflection on this theme, in particular, the distributive effects of boundaries in policy-making; the blurring of boundaries implicit to governance frameworks; the crossing of boundaries, especially by policy-officials within and between institutions; the construction of boundaries to separate and marginalise; and the existence of temporal–spatial boundaries that demarcate jurisdiction and authority. In short, the study of governance and public policy-making is marked by multiple different types of boundaries but the way in which boundaries get drawn and redrawn is also suffuse with political contestation meaning they raise crucial questions about the exercise of power.