Inside and outside the school lunchbox: themes and reflections

We examine here the discourses surrounding the lunchbox taken to school by children: aspects both of the contents and of how children consume and understand these.1 The observations presented here form part of the preliminary stages of a broader project examining ‘Men, Children and Food’. The project itself is part of a large research programme – ‘Changing Families, Changing Food’ – funded by the Leverhulme Trust (award number F/00118/AQ) from 2006 to 2008, and situated at the University of Sheffield, working in collaboration with colleagues at Royal Holloway University of London. Our aims, in ‘Men, Children and Food’, are to explore the experiences of fathers (and other male figures in the household) and of children, in relation to food practices, including ways in which the two interconnect. View all notes Examples within and beyond the UK suggest that the lunchbox is a container for various aspects of the private and public. What traces can be found inside of wider social relations, including processes of care and surveillance? We argue that the lunchbox consists of intersecting spatialities, within which children constitute a public face, and create identities, relationships and subjectivities; this perspective frames opportunities for priorities in future empirical research with children.     

Foremothers: Neera Desai (b. 1925)

Neera Desai (b. 1925), best known as the founder of India's first Women's Studies Research Unit, also wrote the first analytical history of Indian women. In Woman in Modern India, published in 1957, the central concern is women's lack of opportunity and progress from the Vedic period to the 1950s. A college student at the time of the Quit India movement in 1942, Neera belongs to a generation of women who entered the professions in newly independent India and continue to ask the hard questions about gender and power.     

Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception

I consider two cases of legal abandonment in Vancouver—of murdered sex workers and live‐in caregivers on temporary work visas—in light of Agamben's claim that the generalized suspension of the law has become a dominant paradigm of government. I bring to Agamben's theory a concern to specify both the gendering and racialisation of these processes, and the many geographies that are integral to legal abandonment and the reduction of categories of people to 'bare life'. The case studies also allow me to explore two limit‐concepts that Agamben offers as a means to re‐envision political community: the refugee who refuses assimilation in the nation‐state, and the human so degraded as to exist beyond conventional humanist ethics of respect, dignity and responsibility.     

Collaboration as feminist strategy

I discuss my collaboration with Susan Hanson, which spanned a decade, culminating in our book, Gender, Work and Space. I focus on the productivity of our research collaboration. It led us to combine quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and economic geography and feminist cultural theory, in ways that allowed us to find an audience amongst, not only feminist geographers but also non-feminist political economists and planners. Our collaboration involved a large number of research assistants as well, and though this kind of collaboration is typically hidden in most research accounts, these research assistants were active producers of survey data. I consider this, as well as how they helped us to localize and situate our knowledge claims. Finally, I highlight the support that comes from a feminist collaboration.     

Mount Shamrock: A Symbiosis of Mine and Settlement

Mount Shamrock township was one of the earliest gold mining towns in the Upper Burnett district of Queensland, Australia. A study of the township and associated industrial area demonstrates the integration of town and mine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper examines the relative permanence of the mining settlement and reveals a multifaceted landscape influenced not only by miners but by the women, children and other non-mining residents operating within distinct social and administrative frameworks.     

The Failure of Citizens’s Initiated Referenda Proposals in Australia: New Directions for Popular Participation?

Australia has been a leading proponent of direct democracy since the turn of the century because of the provision for referenda in the Australian Constitution. However, the experiment has progressed little further. Bills for citizens’s initiated referenda have been introduced across the Australian parliaments. Not one has been passed, despite the concept being supported at different times by all sides of politics. This article examines why these proposals have failed. It also evaluates other means of reinvigorating popular participation. Widespread disillusionment with the political system indicates that there is a genuine need to increase community involvement in the political process.