INTEGRATING HOME and WAGE WORKPLACE: WOMEN'S DAILY LIVES IN A CANADIAN SUBURB

A continuing growth in women's wage labour participation suggests that taken-for-granted understandings of suburban life need to be re-examined. This paper portrays women's everyday lives as social and economic restructuring reframes the conditions under which mothering work takes place. Although previous literature has emphasized the spatial and social constraints facing women, this paper focuses on women's active construction of their lives within such constraints. The use of ethnographic methods and an interpretative analysis reveal how agency, space, and structure intertwine in the constitution of mothering practices, and reveal the central significance of women's control of the domestic workplace to the integration of home, community, and the wage workplace. La présence sans cesse croissante de la femme sur le marché du travail impose un ré-examen de la perception communément acceptée de la vie suburbaine. Cet article a pour but de décrire la vie quotidienne des femmes à un moment oÙ la société et la situation économique imposent une restructuration des conditions dans lesquelles s'effectuent les tâches maternelles. Alors que, jusqu' à présent, la littérature a surtout mis I'accent sur les contraintes spatiales et sociales auxquelles doivent faire face les femmes, cet article est centré sur la participation active des femmes dans I'organisatin de leur cadre de vie à I'intérieur de ces contraintes. L'emploi de méthodes ethnographiques et d'une analyse interprétative révèlent la manière dont les intermédiaires, I'espace et la structure s'entremêlent dans I'accomplissement des tâhes maternelles et la signification primordiale du contrôle exercé par les femmes sur le lieu de travail domestique dans I'intégration du foyer, de la communauté et du lieu de travail.     

MAN-MADE LANDSCAPES FROM THE THIRD–SECOND MILLENNIA BC: THE EXAMPLE OF CASTELO VELHO (FREIXO DE NUMÃO, NORTH-EAST PORTUGAL)

Summary.   The analysis of charred plant material from Castelo Velho (north-eastern Portugal) yields information about the environmental background of a long-term architectural project. Work focuses on the physical characteristics of this sui generis site and on the interrelationships between human communities and their vegetal environment. Important vegetation changes are recorded despite the fact that site 'occupation' is considered to be sporadic and therefore causing only minor anthropogenic impact. Evergreen oaks (Quercus, evergreen) dominate during the first two stratigraphic layers but are replaced by the tree-strawberry (Arbutus unedo) during a third layer. This change may result from a premeditated woodland management, ensuring that the site remained visible in the distance. Special attention is given to the plant assemblage and broken pottery found in a sealed structure (layer 3) and thought to have served a 'ritual' purpose. Seeds of Triticum aestivum/compactum are largely predominant.     

Telling it Like it is? Constructing accounts of settlement with immigrant and refugee women in Canada

This article reflects on the methodology of a study of immigrant and refugee women's settlement experiences in Vancouver, Canada. It specifically takes up the ways in which the women's accounts were co‐constructed through social and political processes and relations operating at different geographical scales, but were experienced at the local scales of body, home and neighbourhood. The study consisted of in‐depth interviews with 16 immigrant and one refugee woman and their teenaged daughters. Here we focus on the mother's accounts showing how their story‐telling of life since coming to Canada was framed by multiple discourses and local material conditions. We use two case examples from the study to raise substantive issues in the research, focusing particularly on the women's talk of work and health and how these framed their understanding of ‘womanhood’ in Canada, routes to a desired ‘integration’ and their daily practices. Their quotidian life embodied their multiple identities as women, mothers, wives, workers and immigrants and the interviews were used by them to express the frustrations and hardships which were in direct contradiction to their expectations as ‘desirable’ immigrants or refugees under protection. We argue that methodological reflection is not simply an important dimension of rigour in feminist qualitative research, but is also critical to the opening up of taken‐for‐granted categories brought to the politically charged study/construction of ‘the other’. In this research the identities of study participants and researchers, in the specific space of the interview, were intricately involved in ‘telling it like it is’ for these immigrant and refugee women settling in an outer suburb of one of the three major destination cities for immigrants to Canada.     

Feminism and Health Geography: twin tracks or divergent agendas?

Feminist geographies of health and illness have emerged over the last 10 years, marking an increased interest in the highly gendered nature of health, health care and caregiving. Yet work in this area remains relatively sparse. This article examines parallels and divergences between feminist and health geography, which frame the context of feminist geographers doing health work. Interconnections between the two subfields where there is most exchange relate to the admission of experiential knowledge in a ‘reformed’ medical/health geography, and work engaging critical theory—particularly that of the body. The positioning of health geography in the shadow of medicine brings ambiguity to the issue of transformative politics; institutional conservatism vies with an opportunity to bring feminist work to the interstitial space of social science and critical medicine.     

THE USE OF SIMPLE PULSES TO ESTIMATE INELASTIC RESPONSE SPECTRA

Inelastic response spectra are estimated for elasto-plastic SDOF systems subjected to strong earthquake ground motions by applying the strength reduction factors determined for a simple pulse to the elastic response spectrum of the ground motion. This approach relies upon similarities in the strength reduction factors computed for earthquake ground motions and for short duration pulses. The accuracy of the estimated inelastic spectra obtained using 24 simple pulse waveforms is assessed in order to identify subsets of just several pulse waveforms that are suited for this purpose. Based upon the ground motions and pulses investigated, this approach appears to be equally applicable to short and long duration ground motions and those having near-fault forward directivity features.     

EPISCOPAL GROUPS IN HISPANIA

This study considers the most important Christian architectural complex in the Late Antique city, which at the same time came to be seen as a fundamental point of reference for the ecclesiastical structure of the surrounding territory. Taking the current state of research on episcopal groups in Hispania as its starting point, this paper aims to reach a series of conclusions as regards their location, spatial evolution and the total area they occupied, as well as their internal distribution. In addition, the continuing difficulties involved in archaeologically defining the presence of these religious complexes in the majority of episcopal sees created in Hispania during this period are discussed.