Is counselling a feminist practice?

Women’s efforts to influence policies have complex effects, which are often difficult to evaluate. This paper identifies four themes in feminist politics through which to analyse whether a particular intervention involving substantial numbers of women – that of counselling in the UK – can be understood as a feminist practice. These themes are concerned with gender equality, women’s autonomy, recognition of diversity among women and the deconstruction of gender norms. In its early post-war origins prior to the emergence of second wave feminism, and in the stories recounted by women practitioners at the turn of millennium, counselling emerges as contradictory and ambivalent in relation to these themes in feminist politics.     

Choreographing a different dance: placing research in the public arena

Geographers increasingly advocate placing research in the public arena and the creation of work that is useful for public policy makers. Existing literature indicates some approaches that have bearing on these goals, such as using participatory action research, clarifying positionality, and attending to the nature of discourse. It does not, however, generally offer empirical cases of addressing the goals being advocated. This article narrates an experience of a collaborative effort among two institutes for research on women and a community funding agency as they created and disseminated research aiming to influence public opinion and foster advocacy in support of policies to improve women’s lives. Among the issues addressed are the importance of networking, of identifying effective partners, of adapting research to incorporate the priorities of stakeholders, and of engaging the support of media professionals. It discusses barriers encountered, strategies adopted to address them, and compromises in the process.     

Imaginative geographies of gender and HIV/AIDS: moving beyond neoliberalism

This paper examines how neoliberal development discourse contributes to the production and maintenance of problematic gendered hierarchies and spaces. By interrogating the basic assumptions undergirding this discourse, this paper explores how neoliberalism produces spaces which normalise certain identities—especially those associated with individualism and economic rationality, and makes errant values such as communalism and altruism. Drawing on perspectives from feminist geographies, we argue that by normalising and privileging certain masculine identities, neoliberalism reinscribes and legitimizes gendered power relations that are counterproductive to addressing HIV/AIDS. The ‘ideal’ person fighting HIV/AIDS in the neoliberal framework is rational, competitive and self-interested, but these characteristics are complicit in worsening HIV prevalence and mobilize problematic gender roles and identities. Given the pervasiveness of this ideology in Malawi, we propose ways in which families, communities and institutions can challenge and reshape gender identities and potential solutions to HIV within this context.     

Placing racism in public health: a perspective from Aotearoa/New Zealand

This commentary reflects on Nancy Krieger’s thinking in light of the links between place, ‘race’ and public health from our vantage points as Maori (indigenous) and Pakeha (settler) researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand. We propose an addition to Krieger’s list of pathways through which racism impacts upon the health of indigenous peoples: the systematic alienation of indigenous lands and subsequent degradation of ecosystems that undermine traditional economies. We believe that this proposal, along with the forging of new community-based research partnerships, will increase the potency of Krieger’s challenge: to name and claim racism as a public health issue.     

Breadth and depth in research on health disparities: commentary on the work of Nancy Krieger

Geocoding and spatial analysis of data describing populations and health events are important methods in health social science now carried out using GIS technology. This commentary considers Nancy Krieger’s work on health disparities in light of the various ways individuals and organizations use geocoded population and health data: analyzing spatial patterns of health and disease including health disparities, aggregating data spatially, assessing health status of individuals based on characteristics of aggregates, modeling neighborhood contextual factors affecting health, designing observation and intervention studies, and delivering health interventions and services. The extent to which her work addresses each of these purposes is considered. The strengths and limitations of the research including choice of spatial analytic units and techniques as reported in the published work are discussed. Krieger’s work, with her colleagues, has used standard methods of spatial analysis to raise the profile of GIS and spatial analysis in the public health community.     

Gender equality and poverty in Ghana: implications for poverty reduction strategies

Poverty trends in Ghana show a decline over the last two decades. However, the period also shows evidence of the intensification of vulnerability and exclusion among some groups, including women. Among several variables accounting for women’s vulnerability to poverty are gender inequalities, which it is argued, undermines development and the prospects for improving standards of living. Therefore it has been suggested that policies, which aim at reducing poverty and promoting sustainable development must integrate gender equality, equity and women’s empowerment in its goals. Despite these, the interconnections between a reduction in gender inequality and a reduction in poverty are complex. The paper explores the gender dimensions of poverty in Ghana, and how gender inequalities are manifested and implicated in the reproduction of poverty. It also assesses the extent to which these have been taken into account in poverty reduction strategies and policies to enhance the situation of women. It concludes that if strategies to engender poverty reduction programmes are to be sustainable it is important to recognize unequal gender relations and the structures of power that women confront at all levels in Ghana and how these increase women’s vulnerability to poverty.     

Who speaks? And who listens? The relationship between planners and women’s participation in local planning in a multi-cultural urban environment

In recent decades, the dominant planning discourse has undergone a great change from a previous top-down approach towards collaborative and communicative planning. Instead of merely planning for the people in a technocratic and positivist approach, planners are increasingly expected to pay attention to the voices of the citizens. However, within this new participatory approach there is a growing post-colonial and feminist critique pointing out that not all voices are being heard. This critique sheds light on inherent power relations within the collaborative and communicative planning discourse. In particular, the voices of women in marginalised neighbourhoods are often neglected (Sandercock Towards cosmopolis. Planning for multicultural cities. New York: Wiley, 1998; Cornwall World Development, 31(8), 1325–1342, 2003; Peleman Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 94(2), 151–163, 2003; Cameron and Grant-Smith Urban Policy and Research, 23(1), 21–36, 2005). Participatory planning in marginalised housing areas demands both a great sensibility to citizens’ everyday life worlds, and a more reflexive planner role. However, the complexities of the planner’s praxis and uncertainties in the planner’s roles become an obstacle to develop a more inclusive participatory approach. Difficulties of reaching out to the whole community is often recognised, but seldom fully dealt with, neither in theory, nor in practice.

Contextualising gender empowerment at the grassroots: a tale of two policy initiatives

The policy environment on gender is fraught with contradictions and contestation of varying degrees in India that does not disappear even as recent transformative mode of participatory initiatives seem to place women’s agency at the core of empowerment agenda. Drawing from two collaborative projects at the grassroots, the paper argues that even well conceptualised projects miss the cutting edge distinction between women and gender and continue to engage with an instrumental logic of women’s development and empowerment at the expense of issues of gender equality and equity in translating the intention into action. It is also observed, however, that spatially embedded social and cultural specificities impact policy discourse resulting in very different outcomes of conceptually comparable policy formulations. According to the author acknowledging spatiality of experiences provides a vantage point to critically engage with context-specific strategies to resolve gendered conflicts and tensions resulting from confining social relations and normative gender codes.     

Place,gender and the appeal of video lottery terminal gambling: unpacking a focus group study of Montreal youth

Youth gambling has become an important public health issue in Canada and elsewhere owing to the known associations between gambling and delinquency, family dysfunction and suicide. Modern electronic and virtual gambling activities like video lottery terminals (VLTs) may have particular appeal to youth who have been raised in social environments that are increasingly dependent on information and communication technologies. The main objective of the study was to explore why youth gamble and what makes gambling activities like VLTs popular to youth in the places where youth live, study and play. The research is framed within a population health perspective that recognizes the role of social and physical environments in influencing health-related behaviours. Group discussions were conducted with youth to explore the popularity and appeal of gambling and VLTs, and how gambling fits into the daily routines of youth and the spaces they occupy. Methodologically, this research was conscious of responding to calls in the literature to analyze focus groups as an interactive group process rather a collection of individual responses, and to exercise analytic rigour by explicitly making the research team’s positionality and the data collection process transparent. Group discussions revealed gender differences in the appeal of particular gambling activities with young males being more likely to discuss poker, dice, sports-betting and online gambling as exciting social activities, while females described lottery and scratch (instant win) tickets as fun solitary activities. Substantive results point to the need for interventions to address social aspects of gambling that appeal, in particular, to young males potentially through increased provision of healthier alternatives to social engagement and greater attention to young people’s use of space.     

“Functional localities: an integrated spatial approach towards health care locality definition”

This paper demonstrates a spatial approach towards the definition of localities for health care planning. Recent international decentralisation of health care provision, and more specifically devolution within the United Kingdom, emphasises the need to develop a geographical focus in the delimitation of local structures for health care planning. Geographers, but most especially those applying Geographical Information Science (GIS) techniques, have made enormous contributions in this field and more generally in research related to health services. This paper considers some of these previous approaches and moves on in the light of new technologies, and more importantly the availability of appropriate data, to create localities that reflect dynamic spaces of social interaction, administration and policy. The paper’s focus is placed on the importance of flow data that reflects␣the spatial interaction between services and the population. This data, divided into three sub-groups of administration, education and health, allows us to identify the population’s allegiance to place and ultimately create spatially bounded functional localities that reflect this. Whilst the approach is largely technology driven, it also incorporates the expertise of local health care professionals thus recognising the importance of collaboration and multi-sectoral engagement. Although this combined approach impacted upon the way in which the final localities were defined, crucially it enabled us to incorporate features of both rigorous spatial analysis and a wealth of local knowledge.     

Risky bodies: Public health, social marketing and the governance of obesity

The inclusion of obesity within public health rests on a proven and accepted biomedical link between body weight and health status. Drawing on the 2005 controversy over annual death rates attributable to obesity in the US, this paper contends that uncertainty as to the causal mechanisms linking body weight and health are undermining the development of effective obesity prevention policies. Consequently, this also weakens the justification of the inclusion of such policies within public health. This work draws on recent interest in ‘critical geographies of public health’ and the continued attention to the recursive relations between people and places in the context of health which may offer a useful theoretical viewpoint from which unpack such aetiological uncertainty. Without an agreed or universal risk from obesity, the paper argues that public health obesity prevention through social marketing should be geographical in outlook. The three examples of 5 a day, Jamie’s School Dinners and Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster are discussed to illustrate the effectiveness of communicating risk in a manner that allows intention to be effectively translated into risk-minimising behaviour within the dictates of locale.     

Weak ties, immigrant women and neoliberal states: Moving beyond the public/private binary

This paper engages with the vacillations in provincial and federal gender specific service funding in Canada between 2001 and 2007. I connect this state scale analysis to local settlement experiences of Sikh immigrant women living in a small British Columbia community. Using the concept of network analysis, particularly the idea of weak ties, I offer a corrective to the overly positive appraisals of strong ties and institutional completeness. I argue that experiences of settlement, especially in cases where women face various forms of domestic violence, are shaped by the articulation of neoliberalism and patriarchy. This analysis contributes to the ongoing reformulation advanced by feminist geographers with regard to the public/private binary. In its place this case study reveals the multiple public and private intersections and continuums that exist, and how the recognition of these geographies can assist in building effective public resources to tackle the challenges faced by some immigrant women.     

Locating diversity: race,nativity and place in health disparities research

Nancy Krieger has been one of the leading voices in documenting how social ‘axes of difference’, including race, ethnicity and class make people vulnerable to poor health and limit their access to effective health care. We discuss the importance of ‘locating’ diversity in health inequalities research. This includes critically dissecting racial and ethnic axes into more nuanced social categories that incorporate differences based on immigration and other factors. It also involves considering how diverse population groups vary in their perception and use of space for health-related activities and exposures. Examples relating to immigrant populations’ health and access to health care are discussed.     

Patterns and trends in the perception of seismic risk. Case study: Bucharest Municipality/Romania

This research looks at the very nature of perception of seismic risk, an issue that is not only academically important, but also it can save lives and reduce injury and community costs. The background idea is that citizens in big cities, vulnerable to seismic hazard are living with latent and permanent concerns about a possible earthquake. We were interested in revealing significant aspects of Bucharest citizens’ orientations and tendencies in relation to the possible seismic event. Bucharest, the capital of Romania, is exposed to the greatest seismic hazard compared with other European capitals. The dimensions of study were: the anticipations of seism occurrence, the behavior during the event, evaluations of consequences, support factors, and individual vulnerability. This article is an example of the low cost approach on a sample of 190 citizens, understood as an exercise in attempting to relate population characteristics to various aspects of risk perception. The methodology used was based on a field investigation, where the research agents’ applied one questionnaire containing free/post codified/fan answers concerning: demographic variables, the buildings’ features, and perceptions about the possible earthquake event. The findings of this study showed that the hazard perception significantly associates with aspects concerning the subjects’ orientation toward institutional factors/human relations/negativism, and toward financial/material/moral support in case of disaster etc. It is hoped that this issue will serve to inspire further investigations into this very important and socially sensitive field, due to the fact that hazard analysis and mitigation would be more effective when it takes into account the human dimension of disasters.     

“This is the mess that we are living in”: residents everyday life experiences of living in a stigmatized community

This paper is part of a larger community health study aimed at delineating the determinants of health in Sarnia. The paper specifically investigates Sarnia residents’ daily lived experiences, perceptions of and responses to living within the St. Clair River “Area of Concern” (AOC) as designated by the federal government based on the hypothesis that relatively high levels of environmental pollution in the region are negatively influencing human health. Results from in-depth interviews (N = 27) show that residents of Sarnia are conflicted by the elevation of awareness about environmental health threats by being labelled within an AOC. Residents use their emotional and sensual experiences to adopt appropriate coping strategies to live within a contaminated community. In contextualizing their everyday lived realities, residents argued that living in an AOC demands personal acceptance of the conditions in Sarnia and awareness of “bad air days” to cope with pollution exposure. Yet, residents were not willing to abandon Sarnia because of their cultural, social, and economical attachments to the place they call home. These findings suggest the need for local health policies that incorporate local concerns and perceptions of how environmental pollution affects people’s experiences and well-being. There is a necessity to involve community members as central participants in the process of policy making.     

Expanding horizons: Women’s voices in community-driven development in the Cameroon grasslands

Communities are increasingly becoming development spaces where members are dynamic actors in fashioning issues of common interest. This paper explores women’s efforts at building social capital for communitarian ventures in selected rural localities of the Cameroon grasslands. It is argued that effective participation in raising livelihoods and infrastructure provisioning is facilitated through women’s social networks (njangis). The paper situates the gender concerns in community participation, rekindled through village development associations (VDAs) – crucial in needs identification, prioritization and execution of identified projects. Based on focused field studies in selected localities, it is established that due to their low social status, workloads and tight schedule, women remain on the sidelines of the leadership in VDAs. However, women’s in-cash or in-kind contribution remains crucial to the successful implementation of projects. Enhancing female participation hinges on efforts at erasing cultural stereotypes that project women as domestic workers, improving literacy, increased access to productive resources especially land, direct support to women’s agricultural activity and improved rural infrastructure (roads, water supply, and electricity) that is compromising women’s participation and empowerment drive.     

Key barriers to community cohesion: views from residents of 20 London deprived neighbourhoods

The notion of community has been central to the political project of renewal of New Labour in the UK. The paper explores how the discourses of community are framed within New Labour and discusses these in the light of the results from research which focuses on how people within urban deprived areas construct their community. It draws upon the results of one part of a larger research project (the ‘Well London’ programme) which aimed to capture the views of residents from 20 disadvantaged neighbourhoods throughout London using an innovative qualitative method known as the ‘World Café’. Our results show the centrality of young people to the development of cohesive communities, the importance of building informal relationships between residents alongside encouraging greater participation to policy making, and the need to see these places as fragile and temporary locations but with considerable social strengths. Government policies are only partially addressing these issues. They pay greater attention to formally encouraging citizens to become more involved in policy making, largely ignore the contribution young people could make to the community cohesion agenda, and weakly define the shared norms and values that are crucial in building cohesive communities. Thus, the conclusion is that whilst an emphasis of the government on ‘community’ is to be welcome, more needs to be done in terms of considering the ‘voices’ of the community as well as enabling communities to determine and act upon their priorities.     

Women's status, environmental changes and child health in the riverine area of Ondo State, Nigeria

The viewpoint that most health problems are environmentally related has always been promoted by medical geography. In recent times, concern about environmental degradation has been of high priority for many national and international organizations as ‘we human beings become a threat to our planet’. There is also a need to specifically focus attention on the impact of so-called development efforts on the health of women and children, in particular those living in highly marginalized regions which often contribute substantially to the overall development of their countries. This paper uses the concept of vulnerability as a departure point from which to map the health risks to children in Igbekun area of Ondo State, the ‘transgressive muddy’ oil-rich coastal area of Nigeria. The paper attempts to highlight the poor quality of life and health of children in particular, and how it is becoming much more difficult to practice health intervention programmes, especially oral rehydration therapy (ORT) in the area. The Igbekun area is an unhealthy and harsh environment, complicated by the devastating effects of oil drilling in recent years. The siltation and sedimentation of the creeks and lagoons have serious health dimensions as human faeces float in and around villages because the ‘bush toilets’ can no longer be reached. The on-going environmental crisis has also deprived women of their traditional means of livelihood; fishing. There is a relatively high level of ignorance (compared with other women living in the same local government area (LGA) of causes of the commonest diseases such as diarrhoea, acute respiratory infection (ARI) and measles. A majority of the women have never heard of family planning, immunization against diseases and interventions such as ORT. Promotive health care services, especially those that strive to reduce the high mortality of children have passed the mothers by. It is also becoming impracticable to promote ORT because of the widespread ‘salty and oily’ water supply in the area. The greatest concern of the women now is that oil drilling activities have further amplified their stressful conditions especially their health and that of their children. Unfortunately, their plight is not acknowledged by the Nigerian authorities and the oil companies are least concerned about alleviating the poor health status of the community, in particular the most vulnerable groups, children under the age of five. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Young people’s voiceless politics in the struggle over urban space

This article discusses the particularity of young people’s politics as it unfolds in the practice of everyday life. By exploring a conflict concerning the use of a public park in the City of Oulu, Finland, we discuss how young people may participate in struggles over urban space trough politics that is not based on voice but voicelessness. This political engagement can be understood as a form of nonparticipatory politics that is easily left unnoticed—politics that shirks civic involvement, customary participatory practices and articulated resistance. We deem it important to acknowledge such action as political for two reasons. First, voiceless politics is a weapon of the weak: It is used when other political agencies are not feasible e. Viewing non-participation as apolitical will only further marginalize those who practice politics in such ways. Second, it is important to find ways of acknowledging nonparticipatory action because, while not commonly understood as politics, it is not easily bypassed in political struggles either. By distinguishing political aspects from young people’s urban behaviors, instead of hearing their presence as mere noise, provides tools for bringing their politics to the public agenda and thus developing more democratic urban spaces.     

(Re)constructing rural–urban spaces: gendered livelihoods,migration, and natural resources in South Africa

Critical approaches to development theory and practice provide alternative perspectives that focus on counterhegemonic and discursive dimensions of the development process. Feminist development is one such approach that opens up new spaces and opportunities to promote socially progressive and sustainable economic strategies. This paper uses feminist development geography as a framework to highlight the intersection of diverse spaces and economic strategies at the household and community levels. The analysis focuses on gendered livelihoods that are linked to circular migration and use of natural resources as a way to understand the integration of rural and urban spaces of development. The empirical section of this paper examines demographic patterns and socio-economic trends in Limpopo Province, South Africa as a context for the case study of two community-based women’s producer groups. These examples illustrate how economic strategies and social identities are embedded in and integrate both rural and urban spaces. This analysis contributes to feminist and post-structural development theory and practice by highlighting the potential for progressive forms of economic and social empowerment.