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.     

Bordering through care and control: Policing and sheltering Central American migrant youth in Mexico

Despite rising numbers of unaccompanied child migrants in the Americas, very limited research directly engages with youth as they journey north to seek protection in the United States. In this article, we examine young Central American migrant experiences of bordering, focusing on policing and shelter management. Part of a wider binational, interdisciplinary, and multi-scalar research project along the Mexico-U.S. border, which began on the heels of Programa Frontera Sur, we draw on interviews and a participatory workshop with migrant youth, and complementary interviews with migration officials and shelter workers. Through the uniquely insightful accounts of children themselves, we show how care work in shelters and direct control via policing emerge as powerful and connected techniques of bordering. In these spaces of connected securitization and humanitarian management, children negotiate highly violent, emotional, and extra-legal interactions with officials. These include extortion, apprehension, aggression, confinement and deception, but also disciplinary forms of care and protection. Our findings deepen and complicate extant work on the humanitarian care/control nexus via our focus on, and direct research with, youth from Central America in Mexico. Their narratives make clear that state policies such as Programa Frontera Sur expand the geographies of bordering and bring practices of migrant care and control into deeper relation. This bordering blocks children's access to legal protections like asylum; leaves them more exposed to exploitation and rights abuses; and encourages greater risk-taking in migration journeys.     

An overview of women's health in the U.S. since the mid-1960 s

Women's health became intertwined with the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. The process and history of the interactions among physicians, feminists, health care consumers, activists, and politicians have brought women's health into the foreground of health research and curricular agendas in several ways. It identified major gaps in research and practice and initiated a critique of the current health care system at all levels; it originated from, and remains connected with, the non-medical community; it is interdisciplinary and requires interdisciplinary teams for research and clinical practice, as well as collaboration with colleagues in non-medical academic fields; it developed new curriculum focused on women's health; it emphasizes race, class, sexual orientation, and other diversities among women. The continuing presence of activists and feminist scholars will insure that health and science include women's needs to provide better health for all.     

‘My Dog is My Home’: multispecies care and poverty politics in Los Angeles,California and Austin,Texas

My Dog is My Home is an art activist project in Los Angeles dedicated to sharing testimonies about the redemptive bonds of care and love between homeless persons and their canine companions. These testimonies politicize the structural violence and oppressive norms about propertied citizenship and notions of home that operate to render homeless human and animal lives disposable and ungrievable. Informed by the experts’ testimonies on multispecies homelessness and an engagement with feminist care theory, we bring relational poverty studies into conversation with critical animal studies to reject this framing of homeless lives as disposable and to trouble the idea of property as the fundamental basis for value. We problematize these notions by highlighting the insights gained from witnessing the entangled empathetic relationships forged between homeless humans and dogs. These relationships are not only a window into the political economic material conditions and discourses that reproduce homelessness and the animal-as-property. We conclude that studying these bonds offers a collective politics of multispecies mutuality, care, and love.     

The Janice Monk Lecture in Feminist Geography: the first 10 years

The year 2016 marked the 10th anniversary of the publication of the Janice Monk Lecture in Feminist Geography in Gender, Place and Culture. Here we celebrate that milestone by reflecting upon the 10 lectures that have been delivered in the series. Our aim is to situate these lectures within the context of the wider intellectual changes that have occurred during that period so as to appreciate the lectures, taken as a whole, as a window on contemporary feminist geography. This contextualization also allows us to recognize the continuing development as well as speculate about feminist geography and the Jan Monk Lecture’s role in contributing to and shaping them.     

Using Discrete Event Simulation Models to Evaluate Resilience of an Emergency Department

Hospitals are critical infrastructures which are vulnerable to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, man-made disasters and mass causalities events. During the emergency, the hospital might also incur in structural and non-structural damage, have limited communication and resources, so they might not be able to treat the large number of incoming patients. For this reason, the majority of medium- and large-size hospitals have an emergency plan that expands their services quickly beyond normal operating conditions to meet an increased demand for medical care, but it is impossible for them to test it before an emergency occurs. The objective of this article is to develop a simplified model that could describe the ability of the Hospital Emergency Department to provide service to all patients after a natural disaster or any other emergency. The waiting time is the main response parameter used to measure hospital resilience to disasters. The analytical model has been built using the following steps. First, a discrete event simulation model of the Emergency Department in a hospital located in Italy is developed taking into account the hospital resources, the emergency rooms, the circulation patterns and the patient codes. The results of the Monte Carlo simulations show that the waiting time for yellow codes, when the emergency plan is applied, are reduced by 96%, while for green codes by 75%. Then, using the results obtained from the simulations, a general metamodel has been developed, which provides the waiting times of patients as function of the seismic input and the number of the available emergency rooms. The proposed metamodel is general and it can be applied to any type of hospital.     

¿Hacia una literatura de compromiso? Cohesión social desde el individuo en La muerte de Kurt Cobain de Care Santos

Socially committed writing in contemporary Spanish narrative scene sometimes eliminates the possibilities of depicting individual realities. Care Santos's novel La muerte de Kurt Cobain (1997) develops the case of a unique young girl who goes through a life-changing experience during a summer when she has to overcome personal issues in order to form her persona. The novel is half crime-fiction since there is a mystery to solve and half bildungsroman due to the formation of the personality of the female lead character. Coming of age by becoming a human being, a friend, a sister, and a woman is the main focus of this text, which rejects generalizations regarding youth as a reckless period of life and embraces adulthood as a natural process of growth. Young Spanish girls represented in Santos's work are portrayed through the protagonist who contributes to build a human and cohesive society that stems from the level of commitment of the individual.     

春秋战国时期优抚思想管见

优抚思想在春秋战国时期的发展．与长期的战争环境有直接关系,是时代的产物。战争要求军事家和政治家们调动一切手段来激励将士奋勇杀敌,这是优抚思想产生和发展的最重要动因。春秋战国时期的优抚范围涉及所有将士,优抚对象有烈士家属、现役军人家属、残疾军人和没有后代的阵亡将士等;优抚内容既有物质奖赏．也有精神鼓励;优抚费用来自国家税收和“以战养战”。