“Miss Remington” Goes to Work: Gender,Space, and Technology at the Dawn of the Information Age*

At the end of the 19th century, the financial services sector underwent a technological “revolution” with the invention of the typewriter, dictaphone, and hollerith machine. At the same time, the gender of labor within this sector was also changing, such that by the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, most of the work taking place in white‐collar offices was performed by women. After introducing the broader research project on which this is based, I consider how technology and social relations shaped one another at the level of the body, the workplace, and with broader networks of branch banking, focusing on early 20th‐century Montreal, Canada. I argue that the financial services sector worked to create a system in which men flowed through and women functioned as fixed points. I further argue that this pattern was echoed at different scales within the financial services industry, from the level of the body and the workplace up through spatially dispersed national‐level networks.     

Gendered spaces - socio-spatial relations of self-employed women in craft production,Orissa, India

The present article concerns female self-employment in craft production in Orissa, India. Although industrial policies in India have attempted to address some of the socio-economic problems in local craft production through cooperative societies and subsidies, issues of the division of labour, factors of production and the processes of constructing individual gender identity are embedded in the gender structure and remain invisible to the new social order. Socio-spatial relations of gendered spaces are also deeply embedded in the traditional Brahmanical social order. The analysis is based on the individual story of one female businesswoman. The significance of the individual narrative is discussed with reference to feminist geographies and the self-reflexivity of the researchers. The story of Mami is about her struggle to become a successful businesswoman, and highlights the interrelationship between her actions, her perceptions of work and the socio-economic spaces that she has to relate to. Her story reveals that self-employed women can act as role models for other women and contribute to increasing their power in local and place-bound situations.     

基于女性主义地理学的消费空间性别关系建构——以西安“世纪金花”购物中心为例

近年来,女性主义地理学的研究内容转向身体、身份认同和象征空间等微观地理,消费空间的性别研究成为关注热点。文章基于女性主义视角,借助对典型消费空间的实证调查,考察空间性别化特征以及性别因素决定下的空间之权力隐喻关系,总结了人—地互动模式中的性别建构特征。研究发现,消费空间为女性提供了参与城市公共空间的场所,见证了女性空间权的觉醒与实践,但女性仍受男性规训与控制;现代女性在消费空间中的行为延续了传统的角色定位,公共空间参与度并未显著改变她们的性别角色和在家务上的性别化分工;消费空间再现和建构的性别关系、性别地位是一种典型的隐形歧视,女性处于实际上的不平等地位。因此,空间和性别不可分割且互为构成,两性在消费空间中的表现实质上是性别权力关系的投射,折射出这一地理空间中两性的宰控关系。     

Women, science and identity: interviews with female physical geographers

Summary Interviews with female physical geographers show that although the significance of gender in influencing a woman's position and identity in physical geography is contested, gender still remains an important social relation that structures the personal relations, institutional practices and material outcomes of academic physical geography.     

'Eating and Earning Your Crust Under the Same Roof'

Telework (paid work performed at home using new communications technologies) is a research site where concerns about globalisation, flexible work, technology and gender relations coalesce. My research suggests that the permeability of the boundary between home and work leads to power struggles around the use of domestic space and is symbolic of the wider negotiation of the conflicted identities of worker, parent and partner.     

Health Seeking Behavior: Q‐Structures of Rural and Urban Women in India with Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Reproductive Tract Infections

I use a gender framework to examine why women need to utilize social networks to discover and resolve problems related to reproductive tract infections (RTI) and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). In India, women's health is linked with social status and perception of their health needs. This paper provides insight on how social networks are gender‐, location‐, and context‐specific and how they are linked to STD issues. This paper examines why social networks are integral to women. The health‐seeking behavior of rural and urban casual sex workers is examined via Q‐analysis, a language of mapping relationships. Results from Q‐analysis reveal women's use of four systems—kinship, belief, traditional medical, and western medical services. Finally, I conclude with important implications for research on gender relations and social networks.     

Gendering Climate Change: Geographical Insights

Although climate change is expected to increase vulnerabilities, marginalization, and sufferings of many in the Global South, impacts will be unevenly felt across social strata. Intersectionalities of social difference, especially along gender and class lines, differentiate the ways in which impacts of climate change are experienced and responded to. Feminist political ecology and feminist geography insights can explain how different groups of people understand, respond to, and cope with variability and uncertainties in nuanced and critical ways, thereby elucidating the gendered implications of climate change. With a regional focus on South Asia, the article underscores the key issues that can be applied geographically elsewhere. Gendered implications of climate change in South Asia are particularly poignant as patriarchal norms, inequities, and inequalities often place women and men in differentiated positions in their abilities to respond to and cope with dramatic changes in socioecological relations but also foreground the complex ways in which social power relations operate in communal responses to adaptation strategies. This is particularly evident in water-related productive and reproductive tasks in agrarian societies that constitute the majority of South Asia. As climate change is expected to exacerbate both ecological degradation (e.g., water shortages) and water-related natural hazards (e.g., floods, cyclones), thereby transforming gender–water geographies, it becomes imperative to undertake careful multiscalar and critical analyses to better inform policymaking. This article elucidates the complex ways that climate change will affect gender and social relations, thereby highlighting the ways that existing policy narratives and adaptation programs might be better informed by geographical insights. To this end, the article encourages feminist and critical geographers to more forcefully and fruitfully engage with global debates on climate change.     

Gender,Place, and Social Contacts: Understanding Awareness of Vulnerability to Terrorism

Abstract

Creating resiliency, accomplished in part by individuals preparing for disaster, is the primary strategy outside of law enforcement for responding to the threat of urban terrorism. Individuals prepare when they perceive a need to do so, yet little is known about what shapes a person's awareness of vulnerability to terrorism. Because evidence indicates that social contacts act as conduits of information and affect perception of risk to natural hazards, it is possible that such contacts also affect terrorism vulnerability awareness. Because social contacts are also known to be systematically segmented by gender and location, we hypothesized that conversations about terrorism vary by gender and place, specifically the home and work place. Drawing on data from 93 interviews with householders in Boston, the study demonstrates that: (1) family networks generated discussions of home preparedness, whereas workplace networks engaged a wider variety of topics; (2) women discussed terrorism more frequently and in greater depth than did men; and (3) women heard more preparedness messages for the home than did men, whereas men undertook preparedness activities external to the home. The findings bridge geography and terrorism studies by theorizing emplaced and subjective human experiences that prompt conversations about terrorism. These conversations, in turn, help urban emergency managers and risk-hazards geographers promote rational dialogue and action vis-à-vis terrorism. Hazards researchers have shown that the more people discuss terrorism, the less they seek extreme and unwarranted responses.     

The difference that space makes. A way to describe the construction of local and regional gender contracts

The role that space and place play in the construction of gender relations on different geographical scales is examined in this article. It is easy to identify national variations in the relation between sexes, and such comparisons are common. In many cases, the nation-state constitutes the level of analysis in gender-oriented studies. Comparative studies within nations are not so numerous. Nevertheless, geographical research has the potential to develop an analytical model capable of identifying the spatial dimension in gender constructions. A place-based approach visualises how local places shape gender relations and contribute to gender identities and understanding of men and women. This article shows how geographical analysis can be used to describe how physical and human geography interplay with economy, politics, religion, culture, etc., in the construction of gender contracts at a local level. Gender contracts are unwritten rules that regulate relations between sexes, and re-create and reform relations as everyday actions within the framework of these local structures. Together these various local contracts construct a regional structure.     

Organizing accountability: co-production of technoscientific and social worlds in a nanoscience laboratory

Nanotechnology exemplifies the intensification of policy concerns both with relations between science and innovation, and with the public authority of scientific knowledge. This paper focuses on the negotiation of accountability by a nanoscience laboratory both to the state for public funds and to wider society for the social aspects of nanotechnology. This paper argues that geographical approaches can address questions of accountability by paying attention to the laboratory as a site for the co-production of scientific, technological and social orders. In particular, this paper focuses on how concepts of innovation and citizenship are configured through particular moments of laboratory accounting.     

Gender Issues in the Use of Interviewing as a Research Method*

The open-ended interview is gaining widespread acceptance within human geography as a research method. Frequently, such interviews can provide researchers with a richer account of events than can larger scale, standardized statistical approaches. However, researchers using interviews as part of their information gathering practices need to be aware of the social relations within which the interviews are conducted. In this paper I argue that gender relations are an important dynamic shaping the interview process which can significantly influence the sorts of data obtained using this particular research methodology.     

Leisure and community assessments: Emotional place relations among young teenagers in a Norwegian industrial stronghold

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the article is to explore the role of participation in organized leisure activities in young teenagers’ emotional place relations. Data from a survey of students in lower secondary schools were analysed using multivariate linear regression models to address the research questions concerning whether participation in organized leisure activities was associated with more positive community assessments in youths in line with early Nordic welfare theory and the role played by socio-economic hardships and gender in the association. The results showed that for boys there were no indications of a general positive association between participation in organized leisure activities and community assessments, while for girls the association was modest. Students who experienced socio-economic hardships had more negative assessments of community compared with well-off students, even when they participated in organized leisure activities. The author discusses the results according to a welfare theory approach to emotional place relations, supplemented by other theoretical perspectives. From a theoretical perspective, the findings point to social exclusion and inclusion dynamics instead of early Nordic welfare theory approaches to leisure participation. The author concludes that gender, class and school relations are strongly associated with young teenagers’ emotional place relations.     

An Introduction to Scientific Research and Methods in Geography

Amidst ongoing and far-reaching shifts in the spatial organization of social relations, ethnographic researchers have struggled to develop adequately nuanced critical analyses of the subjectivities and agencies involved. In this context, many contemporary ethnographic studies have posited key social forms as “global,” external, or otherwise largely given. Important social and political issues can get lost in this articulation. Interweaving preliminary findings from an ongoing study in New York City with work by geographers who employ a process-based conceptualization of their objects, I outline a geo-ethnographic approach to understanding extralocal social relations that infuses a critically conscientious spatialization into these debates.     

Ecofeminism in the twenty-first century

This paper considers the influence of ecofeminism on policy concerning gender (in)equality and the environment during the past 20 years. It reviews the broad contours of the ecofeminist debate before focusing on the social construction interpretation of women's relationship with the environment. It will argue that there have been substantial policy shifts in Europe and the UK in both the environmental and equalities fields, and that this is in part a result of lobbying at a range of scales by groups informed by ecofeminist debates. Nevertheless, the paper cautions that these shifts are largely incremental and operate within existing structures, which inevitably limit their capacity to create change. As policy addresses some of the concerns highlighted by ecofeminism, academic discourse and grass roots activity have been moving on to address other issues, and the paper concludes with a brief consideration of contemporary trajectories of ecofeminism and campaigning on issues that link women's, feminist and environment concerns.     

Fishing in the Amazonian Forest: A Gendered Social Network Puzzle

We employ social network analysis (SNA) to describe the structure of subsistence fishing social networks and to explore the relation between fishers’ emic perceptions of fishing expertise and their position in networks. Participant observation and quantitative methods were employed among the Tsimane’ Amerindians of the Bolivian Amazon. A multiple-regression quadratic assignment procedure was used to explore the extent to which gender, kinship, and age homophilies influence the formation of fishing networks. Logistic regressions were performed to determine the association between fishers’ expertise, their sociodemographic identities, and network centrality. We found that fishing networks are gendered and that there is a positive association between fishers’ expertise and centrality in networks, an association that is more striking for women than for men. We propose that a social network perspective broadens understanding of the relations that shape the intracultural distribution of fishing expertise, as well as natural resource access and use.     

Networking

This essay outlines the ways that networks structure opportunities foremployment and advancement and the ways that networks build frameworks of support, particularly for women in geography. I consider the evidence supporting the contention that personal contacts and social networks affect careeroutcomes. I then note that each person's networks are likely to be biased in favor of others who share common interests and concerns. In particular, gender affects network composition in significant ways. Because network composition affects how a network functions, it is worth considering the personal and professional advantages of building diverse networks. In the final section I suggest ways to build such networks.     

Relational Agriculture: Gender,Sexuality, and Sustainability in U.S. Farming

Although 97% of U.S. farms are “family-owned,” little research examines how gender and sexual relationships – inherent in familial dynamics – influence farmers’ practices and livelihoods. Gender and sexual dynamics – shaped by race and class – affect who is considered a farmer, land management decisions, and access to resources like land, subsidies, and knowledge. We use feminist and queer lenses to illuminate how today’s agricultural gender and sexual relations are not “natural,” but when left uninterrogated are constructed in ways that harm women and queer farmers while limiting potential to develop sustainable practices. Women and queer farmers also resist, “re-orienting” gender and sexual relations in ways that expand possibilities for achieving food justice and ecological sustainability. We offer “relational agriculture” as a tool for making visible and re-orienting gender and sexual relations on farms. Relational agriculture brings sexuality into food justice and demonstrates the centrality of gender and sexuality to agricultural sustainability.     

Changing patterns of residential and workplace segregation in the Stockholm metropolitan area

Immigrant–native segregation is present in the spaces in which individuals from different ethnic/racial groups practice their everyday lives; interact with others and develop their ethnic, social and spatial networks. The overwhelming majority of academic research on immigrant segregation has focused on the residential domain, thus largely overlooking other arenas of daily interaction. The present study contributes to the emerging literature on immigrant residential and workplace segregation by examining changes in patterns of residential and workplace segregation over time. We draw our data from the Stockholm metropolitan region, Sweden’s main port of entry for immigrants. The results suggest a close association between residential and workplace segregation. Immigrant groups that are more segregated at home are also more segregated in workplace neighborhoods. More importantly, we found that a changing segregation level in one domain tends to involve a similar trend in the other domain.     

Gender and Water in Mongolia

Global institutions, academics, and practitioners have long acknowledged the need to consider gender in creating sustainable water management plans. However, for most countries a dearth of context-specific information on gender and water relations hinders gender-sensitive plan development. Mongolia is particularly poorly represented in the gender and water literature. This article presents fieldwork revealing distinctive gendered practices around water use, decision making, and management including an unusually high degree of men's participation in water collection. This research adds new context-specific data to the understanding of actual gender and water relations and underscores the need for further investigation into the Mongolian context.     

'This is like my comfort zone': Senses of place and belonging within Oruāmo/Beachhaven, New Zealand

Abstract:  This paper examines the culturally specific experiences of belonging within Oruāmo/Beachhaven, a suburb in North Shore City. In-depth interviews with 32 caregivers of young children expose the fact that the ethnic groups represented – Māori, Samoan and Pākehā– vary in their uses and understandings of, as well as feelings for, residential neighbourhood. Examination of the themes of natural environment, social relations, continuity of residence, facilities, organisations and place transformation reveal that, while representatives of all groups had views on these matters, there was a variable degree of engagement with and priority afforded to these concerns.