The Social Role of Technology in Coastal Alaska

Novel technologies linked to women and men through identity-demarcated tasks and knowledge sets can potentially have differential and even long-term effects on each group. This study follows the trajectory of two significant imports into the coastal western Alaskan system, the firearm and the metal cook pot. These imports had different implications for coastal Yup’ik women and men, young and old. Over time the gun became an integral piece of a man’s tool kit and one that had the potential to boost production and thus a man’s access to status-building. However, these same tools had the potential to undermine the apprenticeship system of male authority. Likewise, the metal cook pot replaced the productive oversight and skill set of elder women’s ceramic production but created paths of independence for younger Yup’ik women. These changes in technology destabilized relative balances of gender and age based status, security, and authority and fashioned new gender and age based social and economic opportunities and limitations.     

Offa’s Dyke: a historiographical appraisal

Offa’s Dyke is one of the largest and best known, if rather less well understood, field monuments in Britain. Despite this, there have been very few primary studies of it. This article makes a critical examination of the principal bodies of work dealing with the dyke. It argues that in many respects our knowledge is less certain than is usually believed. In particular it discusses the time and labour necessary for the construction of the earthwork and it is suggested that it could have been constructed much more quickly, and with a much smaller workforce, than is generally supposed. More fundamentally, the purpose and function of Offa’s Dyke are considered, and it is argued that, in addition to any practical utility it may have had, the earthwork had important ideological significances that until recently have been largely neglected. Specifically, it is argued that the dyke was a manifestation of eighth-century Mercian royal ideology, intended to consolidate the power of the Mercian kingship, in the west midlands in particular and southern England more generally.     

‘Lived bodies’ and the neoliberal city – a case study of vulnerability in London

This article explores the ‘more-than-work’ aspects of the lives of vulnerable women who street-sex work. Particularly, we are interested in the differences between the women’s experiences, within the broader context of power structures as manifested in neoliberal cities. Few studies have explored this aspect of street-sex workers’ lives and theorisations of the co-creation of environments tend to elide the experiences of the most vulnerable people. Specifically, we explore the relationships that these women have with two environments: the quotidian (where they undertake routine everyday activities), and the gentrified (relating to changes in the spaces in which they live and work). We find that their experiences are extremely local, and heavily contingent on the services made available to them (or not) by the statutory and third sectors, and the emotional contacts they make, particularly in third sector support services. This challenges some of the literature which suggests a separation of ‘home’ and ‘work’, and which finds close associations between women who street-sex work. While places designed by the third sector are more responsive to these women, they are also more vulnerable to closure through lack of funding. This contributes to a significant degree of ontological non-linearity and ontological insecurity in these women’s lives.