Gender sensitisation in the Zambian Copperbelt

This paper examines gender sensitisation in Kitwe, Zambia. My evidence, derived from a year’s ethnographic research, suggests that gender sensitisation is most effective when participants are also exposed to flexibility of gender divisions of labour. Seeing a critical mass of women performing socially valued roles appears to be interpreted as validation of abstract messages of equality. Such synergy is most commonly enabled when gender sensitisation is participatory. By sharing experiences of flexibility in gender divisions of labour, group discussants often come to publicly question widely-shared assumptions about men and women’s differing competence and status. Hearing others express support for gender equality also shifts presumptions about cultural expectations.     

Social differentiation in Australian cities

Contemporary Australian society is highly urbanised. Therefore social differentiation in our cities largely subsumes the broader question of divisions within society generally. Australia has for long been portrayed as unusually egalitarian, with no entrenched class divisions. However, this image bears little resemblance to the actual distribution of wealth, privilege or power in today's affluent urban society. The purpose of this paper is to explore the basis of social differentiation in Australian cities and to show how that differentiation is constituted geographically.     

Power,perception, and adaptation: Exploring gender and social–environmental risk perception in northern Guanajuato,Mexico

This paper examines how gender relations within rural communities in north-central Mexico affect women’s perceptions of and responses to environmental and social risks. Several studies currently exist which suggest various reasons as to how people especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change perceive their risks, and how this influences their responses. In this paper, I take a feminist approach to questions of social–environmental risks and adaptation to argue that risk perception is tightly linked to knowledge production, and knowledge production is a power-laden process involving the constant negotiation of resources, responsibilities and knowledge. I base this argument on the results of fieldwork conducted from September 2009 to May 2010 with women residents of two ejidos in northern Guanajuato, Mexico. In drawing from feminist political ecology studies, I intend to show how gender, environmental knowledge, risk perception and thus, adaptation are constituted by and embedded in social relations of power.     

Transboundary hazard risk: the Gobi desert paradigm

Transboundary hazard risk reflects how different societies interact with disaster in a shared landscape. In the Gobi desert of northern China and southern Mongolia recurring drought, extreme cold, wind and dust storms are the dominant hazards yet disasters vary significantly in the two countries. Research examined national approaches to environmental engagement and livelihoods in the desert through an assessment of disaster risk in two Gobi communities; farmers in Gansu Province, China, and herders in Dundgov and Omnogov Provinces, Mongolia. Exposure and resilience was evaluated and work examined how risk factors are shaped by policy, economics, culture and social memory. Comparison between two state systems reveals how disaster risk and vulnerability are shaped as much by human action as by the physical climatic event. China stressed government-led disaster management whilst Mongolia emphasised adaptation to hazards. Integrating multiple divisions within a hazard zone is essential to address risk reduction; without this disaster mitigation remains state-specific and lacks applicability to a wider area or global context.     

Globalising initiatives for gender equality and poverty reduction: Exploring ‘failure’ with reference to education and work among urban youth in The Gambia and Ghana

This paper focuses on what observers have perceived to be a failure of development leading to a ‘crisis of youth’ as increasing numbers of young people find it more difficult to gain education, access to health, a job and meet standard of living aspirations. For some, a possible escape is offered by migration to Europe, the United States or Australia, often illegally. For those remaining behind, however, international development agencies offer a ‘globalisation of solutions’ to employment, gender inequality and poverty through the millennium development goals and the programmes to attain them. In this paper we do not take the failures of development at face value but look at local contexts to present a more complex picture of the relation between education, work and social life. Based on fieldwork conducted in urban areas of The Gambia and Ghana, we argue that rather than education as a catch-all solution we need to give more attention to the costs incurred by and for young people in pursuing education and training, to the operation of and actual opportunities in labour markets, and to patterns of gender socialisation which give women limited scope to exercise agency. This paper explores key gender dimensions of work and education among low-income urban youth noting that despite on-going efforts to increase young women’s enrolment in schools and access to employment, gender inequalities have been far from eradicated. Our field interviews reveal how social expectations that women should perform the bulk of reproductive labour in their youth as well as in adulthood and constraints placed on young women’s personal freedom in respect of their social relationships reduce time dedicated to education and establish fewer contacts relevant to securing paid employment. The result is for men to end up with more educational qualifications, more skills, and higher-paying jobs, even if unemployment among young people in general remains a major problem.     

`Our resistance will be as transnational as capital': Convergence space and strategy in globalising resistance

This paper analyses the emerging globalising networks of communication, solidarity, and information-sharing between social movements and other resistance formations in opposition to neoliberal globalisation. In particular, the paper focuses upon People's Global Action – a network of various social movemnets and grassroots intitiatives from around the world. The paper argues that such a network represents not an organisation, but rather a convergence space – a heterogenous affinity of common ground between resistance formations wherein certain interests, goals, tactics and strategies converge. The paper analyses how space and strategy are negotiated in these globalising terrains of resistance, and argues that place-specific struggles are engaging with alliances and collaborations across diverse boundaries of gender, generation, class, and ethnicity – globalising the common ground between different struggles. Explaining how the internet has been crucial to the development of these networks, the paper argues that the strategies of such networks can be interpreted, in part, through the Taoist text, The Art of War, especially the Taoist notions of terrain, knowing others, and form/lessness. In addition, the paper argues that convergence spaces are fragmented by important issues of language, power, and mobility.     

Landscapes of flexibility or landscapes of marginality? spaces of livelihood formation in a changing South African city

This article examines the idea of ‘flexibility’ within the context of a city. It uses the idea of livelihoods to contribute to the debates on flexibility, particularly on the role that ordinary people play in the transformative potential of cities. A closer examination of ordinary people’s activities show that although livelihoods are crucial to how they adapt to the changing social and economic conditions, such activities largely constitute survival strategies. Importantly, and without subscribing to a paradigm that promotes a city as a closed space, the continuing socio-spatial divisions in the city of Rustenburg, South Africa underscore the fact that ordinary people’s remarkable resourcefulness occurs under circumstances of marginality.     

Gender and the GeoWeb: divisions in the production of user-generated cartographic information

The GeoWeb presents an opportunity to expand the array of potential contributors describing the earth through digital geographic information. However, the adoption of user-generated geographic information has not been uniform, resulting in an uneven distribution of content and more nuanced digital divides. This paper uses a survey of Internet users to measure the gender divide in the contributions of cartographic information to the Internet and examine the impact of this divide within the context of OpenStreetMap and Google MapMaker. This paper argues that in both publicly available basemaps the gender divide results in men serving as the gatekeepers of local knowledge leading to gendered user-generated representations. As these digital basemaps are reproduced and utilized by almost every mobile application or web-based map, the gender divisions in the creators and content are endlessly reproduced.     

Masculinities, femininities and the geographies of public and private drinking landscapes

Geographers have been slow to address issues about abstinence, drinking and drunkenness, but the importance of alcohol on the social and political agenda has underpinned recent growth in this field. Explorations of the gendered geographies of drinking are one important strand in this emerging field, but there is currently a paucity of research on women and gender (as opposed to men), and a dearth of research which looks beyond a rather narrowly specified range of public drinking environments. This paper addressed these short-comings through a quantitative and qualitative examination of different men’s and women’s alcohol consumption in private as well as diverse public drinking environments in 21st Century Britain. The paper emphasises the importance of gendered moralities in shaping gender and intra-gender differences in drinking levels, locations and motivations, and explores the connections between apparently separate public and private drinking environments.     

Explaining divided cities in China

Explanations of the existence of socio-spatial divisions in Western Europe and the United States revolve around the importance of economic, demographic, political, and socio-cultural macro developments and often also on the role of globalization. Much of the literature also emphasizes the role of institutions, especially the national and local state as well as individual and household constraints and opportunities. Many authors explain socio-spatial divisions by a mix of these factors and developments. This paper provides an account of the current state of affairs concerning the literature and theory on divided cities in China. Concentrating on a selection of 88 articles published in international journals during the last decade, we examine how authors explain urban socio-spatial divisions in Chinese cities. The paper indicates that a five-category framework of trends, policies, players, position, and preferences are useful in addressing the complexity of explanations attributed to current urban divisions and inequalities in Chinese cities. While the spatial patterns in the Western and Chinese contexts share rather similar characteristics, the interplay of mechanisms is significantly different. The influence of the state, its institutions, and the cultural background has a much stronger explanatory power in China than in the West.     

Straight disasters: the (hetero)sexual geographies of Hollywood disaster movies

Since the silent era, Hollywood has maintained a particular fascination with disasters. Up on the screen buildings collapse, volcanoes erupt and tornadoes destroy all in their path. This article investigates the Hollywood disaster genre for its depiction of sexual and gender identities. Researchers increasingly recognise the significance of sexuality and gender in how ‘real-world’ disasters are experienced. Social marginality linked to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) identities has specific consequences within the social impacts of a disaster. In Hollywood disaster films, LGBT identities are almost entirely absent. This does not mean, however, that sexuality is positioned as irrelevant to the disaster experience as represented by Hollywood. Instead, these films valorise and naturalise a particular vision of heterosexuality and represent disasters as mechanisms for the creation of heterosexual space.     

The structure of urban space, movement and co-presence: The case of Atlanta

Urban areas in Atlanta are analyzed using a computer based technique known as ‘space syntax’ to reveal an underlying systematic and consistent relationship between pedestrian or vehicular movement and spatial configuration. This provides a framework for discussing how far different urban morphologies are characterized by similar regular patterns; how design choices can affect the social use of space; and how methodological and theoretical issues, such as the study of the effects of scale, can be formulated with greater clarity.     

Masculinities and femininities of drinking in Finland,Italy and Sweden: Doing,modifying and unlinking gender in relation to different drinking places

In this article we analyze how Finnish, Italian and Swedish men and women are doing, modifying and unlinking gender in relation to different drinking places and situations. In the study, Finland and Sweden represent the Nordic intoxication-oriented drinking cultures, whereas Italy, in turn, represents the Mediterranean meal drinking cultures. The data were collected in a similar way in Finland, Italy and Sweden from 2007 to 2010, covering four different age groups. From each country at least eight male and eight female groups were selected, i.e. two male and two female groups from each age group, one representing higher and the other lower social status professions. All focus groups were asked to interpret a set of pictures representing different kinds of drinking places and situations, such as a couple’s moderate wine drinking at a sidewalk table, heavy drinking among men in a bus, and playful drinking among women while dancing. In the analysis we emphasize the flexibility of doing gender and the possibility of challenging conventional gender performances. We assume that doing gender is a multi-dimensional process mediated by structures, hierarchies, identities, situations and agency. Our analysis presents a mosaic repertoire of masculinities and femininities that change shape depending on how the place is seen in terms of a drinking space or situation. The masculinities and femininities are not reducible to any single hierarchy of dominant and subordinate masculinities and femininities. Rather, the doing, modifying and unlinking of masculinities and femininities vary by geographical area, age and/or education, as well as by drinking situation.     

(Re)producing gender cultures: Theorizing gender in investment banking recruitment

Recent work within human geography and the social sciences more generally has attempted to explore and theorise the unfavourable gender relations within organizations which continue to produce a disadvantageous position for women. This paper argues that there is a need to implement a more spatially aware epistemology in the production of such theory. It develops a theoretical approach to organizational gender relations centred around the concept of ‘gender culture’, arguing that to understand gender in the workplace more effectively, it needs to be theorized through the daily social practices which occur in specific organizations. This argument is explored through a case study of the way in which investment banks in the City of London reproduce masculine ‘gender cultures’ through the recruitment process. Building on the recent work of McDowell (Capital culture: gender at work in the city. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), the research presented considers the way in which the ‘pre-organizational gender culture’ of investment banking recruits contributes to the reproduction of masculine gender cultures in those organizations. It also explores how the recruitment process itself—in the shape of interviews, assessment techniques and selection criteria—is also imbued with masculine cultural attributes, and thus aids the reproduction of hegemonic masculinities within the investment banking workplace.     

Return migration and the reiteration of gender norms in water management politics: Insights from a Chinese village

Recent work on return migration in China suggests return migrants bring with them new knowledge, skills, and potentially beneficial relationships accumulated during their sojourns, enabling them to introduce new forms of leadership and community action. Social remittances of this kind could be read as carrying the potential to enhance collective action in support of sustainable local natural resource-based livelihoods. This study of the links between return migration, leadership and collective action in water management sounds a more cautionary note, demonstrating that home communities may respond to return migrants in ways that repeatedly mark and reiterate gender and kinship norms, reiterating gender, generational and clan-based social hierarchies. The paper draws on and contributes to recent feminist political ecology approaches to show how migrant returnees’ ’social remittances’ translate into leadership in collective action in a rural Chinese village in ways that reinforce existing gender hierarchies and social positions within the community, thus questioning the extent to which any influx of new ideas, relationships and practices acquired from migrant experiences necessarily destabilizes power and authority in the village in any meaningful way.     

江苏省地质环境调查与区划主要研究成果综述

开展地质环境区划研究,对有效保护地质环境、履行地质环境保护管理职能具有重要意义。本项目既是国土资源部规划司开展全国地质环境区划的试点,又是江苏省地质环境保护规划的支撑性工作,是在国内尚无成功的范例,又没有成熟的理论研究体系下开展的。项目在分析地质环境区划概念与内涵的基础上,明确了江苏省地质环境区划“六专(专题区划)一综(综合区划)”的区划思路;从地质环境的自然属性和社会属性两个层面考虑,采用层次分析法,建立了地质灾害(防治)、矿山地质环境(保护)、山体资源保护、地质遗迹保护、地下水污染防治和土壤污染防治等6个专题区划评价指标体系;以MapGIS的空间分析模块为评价平台,进行了6个专题区划评价;基于6个专题区划成果,建立地质环境综合区划评判体系,以地质环境问题为导向进行一级区划,以地质环境功能为导向进行二级区划;从地质资源保障及地质环境安全角度,提出了地质环境保护规划建议。     

Towards a gender conscious counter-discourse in comprehensive physical planning

This article is based on a research project “Gender perspectives in comprehensive planning” where the aim is partly to ascertain how planners incorporate a gender perspective in comprehensive physical planning, and partly to identify the conceptions of gender/sex held by planners in this area. In our investigation, the question is raised whether comprehensive planning is perceived as neutral in terms of gender, if there are discussions or reflections that question this point of view and if there have been any contributions from a gender equality point of view. The aim is to expose how these discussions take place, examine reflections on this topic and to report and analyse how efforts to achieve gender equality in comprehenisve planning are shaped. To accomplish this goal, the study draws more on feminist theorization than on planning theory.     

Feminism and the new multi-scaling in employment policy

In the last decades, employment policy design and implementation partly shifted from the national to local and regional scales in most European countries. In addition, the European Union appeared as an important new actor in this policy field in the late 1990s. We argue that the new geographical multi-scaling of employment policy can be used strategically by feminists to promote different aspects of gender equality simultaneously: Feminist claims related to gender equity, i.e., demands to secure equal participation of women and men in the labour market, should be advocated at the national scale. Claims related to the recognition of gender difference, i.e., demands related to typical female and male employment needs and their social recognition should be promoted at the local scale. The regional scale is the most appropriate one to advance gender plurality, i.e., non-traditional employment of women and men. In the empirical part of the paper we discuss how the ideal leverage of claims at different spatial scales and inter-linkage between scales could operate. We will show that the link to EU policy strengthens feminist claims in the highly gender-differentiated societies and political settings of Austria and Germany. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The political ecology of hegemony in depression-era British Columbia, Canada: Masculinities, work and the production of the forestscape

This article attempts to empirically demonstrate how the struggle for bourgeois hegemony in depression-era British Columbia, Canada, was fought for through the production of new natures. Bringing together Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualization of hegemony with marxist understandings of political ecology, I examine how the legitimacy of particular groups’ dominance over subordinate groups and the survival of specific social relations was built and contested through the (re)making of the material-symbolic landscape. However, I also take seriously Stuart Hall’s argument that we must take note of the multi-dimensional character of hegemony by paying attention to the entanglement of class, gender and ecological relations during the 1930s. In order to demonstrate these arguments I examine the economic, social, moral and ecological crisis that rippled across the socionatural fabric of B.C. during the depression years. I detail how the federal and provincial states responded to the interlaced crises of class, gender and ecological relations through launching a series of public works programs and training programs. These projects were intended to modernize the forestry industry and remake unemployed men in body and soul. In doing so, I demonstrate how ideologies regarding nature come to be both enrolled in the struggle for hegemony and materialized in the making of the forestscape. By weaving theoretical insights through the socionatural history of British Columbia, I demonstrate how a gramscian sensibility pushes us to take seriously the relationality of socionatural processes and the embededdness of concepts in material histories.