A Geography of Children's Vulnerability: Gender,Household Resources,and Water‐Related Disease Hazard in Northern Pakistan*

Water‐related diseases continue to pose major threats to children's survival and well‐being in many places in the developing world. This article develops a theoretical perspective on the ways in which children's vulnerability to water‐related disease hazard is produced within the everyday circumstances of livelihood and child care. Central to this analysis is the role that household resources play in mediating or shaping particular microenvironments of health risk. Further, the effects of local geographies of gender on how household resources are accessed and on how child care is structured are examined. Children's vulnerability is evaluated in a community in the District of Gilgit in northern Pakistan, a region presently undergoing tremendous social and economic transformation. The case study highlights household‐level response and adaptation to child health risks associated with diarrheal disease transmission and infection in this mountain environment. The case study draws from ethnographic fieldwork involving qualitative household microstudies and interviewing to elicit mothers' resource and risk‐response strategies in the context of changes in livelihood systems and household dynamics.     

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.     

The first rural women's network in New South Wales: seventy years of the country women's association

The Country Women's Association of NSW (CWA) is the main voice of rural women in the state. It has been the biggest women's organisation in NSW until very recently. Its significant contribution to rural community development has been overlooked. After its foundation in 1922, the CWA established a widespread women's network, as well as many facilities for women and children. The necessary fund‐raising activities required the organisation of regular social activities in country towns. The CWA has always affirmed women's traditional gender roles, and it has never challenged the male hegemony typical of rural Australia. By contributing to the improvement of rural conditions, to the stability of family life and to local social activities, the CWA has helped to develop the rural economy as well as local and national identity. It has helped women put down roots in country areas. Its future role needs to be defined in the context of the difficult economic situation, and of the changes in gender roles, in rural NSW.     

A Geography of Children's Vulnerability: Gender,Household Resources,and Water-Related Disease Hazard in Northern Pakistan

Abstract

Water-related diseases continue to pose major threats to children's survival and well-being in many places in the developing world. This article develops a theoretical perspective on the ways in which children's vulnerability to water-related disease hazard is produced within the everyday circumstances of livelihood and child care. Central to this analysis is the role that household resources play in mediating or shaping particular microenvironments of health risk. Further, the effects of local geographies of gender on how household resources are accessed and on how child care is structured are examined. Children's vulnerability is evaluated in a community in the District of Gilgit in northern Pakistan, a region presently undergoing tremendous social and economic transformation. The case study highlights household-level response and adaptation to child health risks associated with diarrheal disease transmission and infection in this mountain environment. The case study draws from ethnographic fieldwork involving qualitative household microstudies and interviewing to elicit mothers' resource and risk-response strategies in the context of changes in livelihood systems and household dynamics.

     

A Review of “Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina”

Women's earnings, employment, and commutes have generally lagged men's. Geographers emphasize the effects of women's gender roles on their spatial entrapment as limiting their job opportunities and labor market status. This research methodologically advances spatial entrapment research by utilizing a national model of commuting with spatial fixed effects to make more accurate predictions and generalizations. Second, this research found that a control group of same-sex partners allows for more direct isolation and measurement of the gender role effect on women's commutes. This research concluded that women's gender roles are negatively affecting their commuting range and, therefore, their labor market status.     

COMMUTING DISTANCE AND GENDER AMONG NONMETROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY EMPLOYEES*

The applicability of metropolitan-derived explanations of gender differences in worktrip lengths is examined based on a sample of 435 university employees in the nonmetropolitan town of Blacksburg, VA. Women's worktrips are found to be longer than men's in contrast to metropolitan findings. This pattern results from the interaction of spatial structures of housing and employment with women's lower incomes, gender segregation of employment, and the tendency for married women to find jobs after their residence is established. Upward trends in female labor force participation rates and in nonmetropolitan growth require continued analysis of their joint impact on women's spatial behavior.     

Transnational Migration and the Gender Politics of Scale: Indonesian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia

Recent research has begun to explore the dynamics of transnational migration from a feminist perspective, and studies of migrant domestic workers have played a prominent role in pushing forward this work. Emerging simultaneously, but largely separately, are explicit debates within geography about the politics of scale, the social construction of scale, and the gender dimensions of scale. This article develops an analysis of the gender politics of the production of scale, specifically, the ‘transnationalisation’ of Indonesian activist approaches to overseas migrant domestic workers' issues. Based on fieldwork in an Indonesian community in West Java that has recently become a sending area for migrants to Saudi Arabia and interviews with activists representing Indonesian migrant women, the article examines the various gender‐specific ways in which migrant women's rights activists construct and deploy the scales of the body, the nation and the transnational. It argues that activist approaches to migrant domestic workers' rights and the ways in which activists mobilise migrant women's narratives represent sophisticated feminist theoretical approaches to scale. By identifying and exploring the scale theory embedded in activist strategies, the analysis highlights the imbrication of feminist theory with practice, and underscores activists' agency in producing the meanings of specific scales. In so doing, the article is aimed more broadly at elaborating the ambivalent relationship between feminist activism/theory and transnationalism.     

SPATIAL CONSTRAINTS ON WOMEN'S WORK IN TARIJA,BOLIVIA

ABSTRACT. This geography of women's work in the less‐developed world is set in Tarija, Bolivia, a small city that has been dramatically changed by economic crisis and structural‐adjustment programs. Explored is the spatial component of women's economic activities in a low‐income barrio following the imposition of structural‐adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s. Women who pursue employment away from home must rely on other women. In particular, households that include more than one woman who is capable of handling important daily chores are more likely to have a woman engaged in income‐generating activities away from the home and the neighborhood. Women at home make it possible for other women to extend their economic activity into the broader community. These findings are important because they draw attention to women's reliance on other women, how women use space, and how they are constrained by spatial factors as they negotiate their daily lives.     

Gender and local soil knowledge: Linking farmers' perceptions with soil fertility in two villages in the Philippines

Scientists often turn to farmers to understand soil management. This process reveals differences and overlaps between local and scientific soil knowledge but rarely considers women and gender issues. This paper examines men's and women's local knowledge of soils in upland, smallholder farms in two villages in Mindanao, the Philippines, using focus group discussions, semi‐structured household interviews, field visits, GIS and soil testing. Farmers' field areas were calculated and delineated based on their perceptions of the different types of soils on their land. Men and women chose the same plots for what they considered their best soil but differed on what they felt were their worst. The fertility of the soils that women considered to be the best and worst was not significantly different from that of the men's respective choices. There was a difference in fertility, however, between the best and worst soils regardless of gender. Although soil fertility analyses showed that the women's chosen soils were similar to men's, analyses of qualitative data showed that their knowledge of soils was different and was based in part on a gendered division of labour. A multidisciplinary approach helped bridge the gap between sociocultural and physical research.     

‘I want to take risks,like my mother’: Memory,affect, and Vietnamese masculinities – the legacy of gendered variations in socio-economic mobility during Ðổi mới

Young Vietnamese men who witnessed their mother's changing economic and labour market situations through the early years of Ð?i m?i (the policy of economic liberalization in Vietnam after 1986) have developed conceptions of masculinity that are ambivalent to notions of male power and authority within what is often termed the ‘traditional’ neo-Confucian family. On the basis of the life narratives of a small group of men in their early twenties, the author suggests that the value young men place on their mother's work and familial influence during Ð?i m?i contrasts with the findings of much gender scholarship on women's social and economic (im) mobility in the 1990s in Vietnam and on young men's own masculinist narratives. Most gender-sensitive research in this area has suggested that Vietnamese women remained curtailed in the early 1990s by a resurgence of male-oriented kinship systems and patriarchal structures at household level. However, the author discusses the young men as being equivocal. While invoking broad Confucian tropes, these men remember their mothers as economically dynamic relative to their fathers. This led to the informants citing their mother's histories of economic risk-taking as exemplifying free-market capability. Further, the finding suggests that Vietnamese women's social and economic mobility in the 1990s strongly affected young men's contemporary ideas and practices related to masculinity.     

THE IMPACT OF FAMILY STATUS ON BLACK,WHITE, AND HISPANIC WOMEN'S COMMUTING

The relationship between women's domestic labor and employment in the paid labor force is central to current debates about gender inequities in occupations and incomes. Recent studies of gender differences in commuting argue that women reduce the journey to work to accommodate the demands of family responsibilities. The empirical evidence, however, is mixed. Equal numbers of studies have reported significant andinsignificant relationships between average commuting times and various measures of domestic responsibilities. Few of these studies have examined the implications of parenthood and, particularly, single parenthood, for the commuting patterns of women from various racial and ethnic backgrounds. Women who are single parents may work closer to home than other women because of their substantial domestic responsibilities. On the other hand, as sole wage earners, single parents may travel long times to obtain better paid employment. Using information about a sample of women in the New York Consolidated Metropolitan Area, we compared the average commuting times of black, Hispanic, and white women from single and two-parent households. The presence and ages of children significantly reduced all women's commuting times, although the effects of parenthood were muted for minority women. Single mothers commuted longer than married mothers, but the size of the disparity depended upon a woman's racial/ethnic background and place of residence. All single mothers commuted shorter times in the suburbs than at the center, but the differences were greatest for minority women living in the suburbs.     

Energy Policy in Australia: A comparison of environmental considerations in New South Wales and Victoria

World-wide, people and governments are gradually becoming more aware of the potential environmental, economic and health effects of climate change and the need for governments to take action to mitigate such impacts. This was emphasised by the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. There has been much discussion on the greenhouse policy response of the commonwealth government of Australia, especially its stance taken at Kyoto in December 1997. Despite the recent nationalisation of Australia's state energy markets, due to Australia's federal political structure, much of the policy responsibility for energy and environmental issues rests with the states. Given these circumstances it is surprising that there has been relatively little academic focus on the energy policies of the states. This paper attempts to partially fill the policy analysis 'gap' by investigating the present environmental aspects of the energy policies of NSW and Victoria, implemented since the signing of the UNFCCC in 1992. NSW and Victoria are Australia's most populous states and are responsible for the bulk of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions with two very distinct policies.     

Developing Contradictions: Women's Participation as a Site of Struggle Within an Indian NGO*

Women are being hired in increasing numbers by development projects to facilitate women's participation components. Once employed, however, women often find themselves marginalized within their organizations. In this paper, I find that the women's participation component of an Indian drinking water project has enabled the exclusion of women fieldworkers employed by the project. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin, I show participatory approaches as multiple, partial, and contentious. Moves to thwart women fieldworkers and women's participation give rise to struggles over development geography. Analysis of project records, interviews with staff, and observation of staff activities provide evidence for results.     

The gendering of work and everyday life in the Swedish countryside

The paper brings together the results of a number of research projects concerning women's working conditions in sparsely populated areas of the Swedish countryside. The specific conditions regarding the job market in such areas can be linked to the issue of equality. Women are more likely than men to have part-time jobs as their main source of income. In the countryside the traditional ‘gender contract’ between a man and a woman is stronger than in the cities. Traditional patterns of gender roles and limited labour market opportunities are the main obstacles to the development of a more gender-equal countryside. This is best illustrated by the fact that, in general, the everyday lives of men and women differ when it comes to working life, taking care of their children and household, and indulging in leisure time activities. For many people, living in the countryside is also a lifestyle issue.     

Cultural and Geographical Influences on Underweight Prevalence among Preschoolers in Ghana

Underweight prevalence among preschool children in Africa has been studied, but the effects of culture and geography remain unclear. This study used the 2008 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey data for 2244 children aged 0‐59 months and generalized linear mixed models to analyze these data. The results showed that culture and geography remained significantly associated with preschool underweight prevalence after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of children, mothers, and households. Additionally, the gender of a child, size at birth, fever status, mother's BMI, insurance coverage and number of children <5 years in the household were significantly associated with underweight prevalence in Ghana. The study concluded that in addition to specific characteristics of children, mothers, and households, culturally motivated childhood dietary restrictions among the Ga/Dangme and Ewe could be reduced through appropriately targeted nutritional messages. Additionally, decreasing North‐South disparities in socioeconomic development, and improving nutritional outcomes among disadvantaged households in southern Ghana should be the focus of policies and strategies directed at reducing preschool underweight prevalence in Ghana.     

Gender analysis of fear and mobility in the context of ethnic conflict in Kayah State,Myanmar

Kayah State has faced prolonged conflict for the past six decades. The conflict has affected all the people of Kayah, though the nature and extent of the impact varies by age, gender and class. Caught between the ethnic armed groups and military and brutalized by both, the people of Kayah have struggled to survive. The conflict has further restricted the mobility of an already isolated people. This lack of mobility has affected every aspect of their lives including livelihood, access to education and markets, and religious and social networks. Women's mobility is more restricted than that of men, and the different levels of mobility have in turn led to different strategies to survive the conflict. While men can leave the area for work and education, women cannot. Staying in the conflict zone increases both their vulnerability and isolation. The increased isolation affects their position within the family and community, as they have less confidence, voice and decision‐making power. Women use silence and submissiveness to escape from both the military and the ethnic armed groups. However, such strategies, in the long term, continue to perpetuate women's subordinate position in society. They also reinforce women's powerlessness and maintain the current power structures and hierarchies.     

Operationalizing the new concept of sexual and reproductive health in Indonesia

The new politics of family planning in the 1990s has involved the articulation of a comprehensive concept of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Following the ratification of the SRH concept and goals at recent international conferences, one major issue is how governments translate the broad statements into operational policies and programs. The authors consider the ways in which the process is occurring in Indonesia, defining SRH, and reviewing the levels of its attainment in 8 of its components in Indonesia. The policy process in Indonesia is explored with regard to pre-existing reassessments, setting important priorities and moralistic and pragmatic policy orientations. The following SRH components are discussed: family planning, infertility, maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, adolescents' needs, sexual health, and gender issues. In terms of SRH, Indonesia has achieved considerable success in addressing family planning and infant and child mortality, limited success in addressing maternal mortality and HIV/AIDS, and very little progress in addressing STDs, adolescent needs, and positive sexuality. There are few data on gender issues.     

Children's Geographies: Tracing The Evolution and Involution of a Concept

This essay traces the evolution of children's geographies as a concept through three phases. First, in the early 1970s as a beginning impression influenced heavily by developmental and environmental psychology. Second, beginning around 1990, children's geographies cohered politically as geographers focused on young people's identity through feminism and Marxism, and global policy initiatives on children's rights. The third phase, covering the last couple of decades, coming from issues of political identity, challenges what we think we know about young people and their geographies, and also advocates a set of loose theories about the ways young people create and re‐create spaces and themselves. Cognate disciplines coming to geography for insights about children and their worlds characterize this current phase. To offset this seeming linear progression the essay also notes an involution of the concept that defies clear categories and sequences, but suggests the fluidity of tensions and accommodations that comprises children's geographies.     

Contextualizing other political ecologies: Japan's environmental aid to the Philippines

This paper argues for the utility of a focus on contextualized sources of environmental change to address the ever more diverse contexts of political ecology. In order to overcome the conventional approach to contextual sources that has tended to be analytically one‐dimensional and limited, I seek to provide a more nuanced account, notably by examining the neglected case of green aid of a nonwestern aid donor, Japan. Using conceptual tools that are both conjuncture‐based and multiscalar, the paper examines the way in which a post‐Rio international policy drive to promote so called green aid during the 1990s was translated into and conditioned by the historically and geographically specific contexts of Japan and the aid recipient featured herein, the Philippines. This focus on contextual sources helps to elucidate (i) how the ambiguous nature of international aid criteria combined together with Japan's own domestic political economy to render problematic an ostensibly environmental project, (ii) the manner in which neoliberal economic restructuring was translated into one of Japan's key policy initiatives in the 1990s and formed the backdrop to the specific aid case project discussed here, (iii) how Japan's environmental aid process in the Philippines was shaped through a repoliticization of various green discourses, and (iv) how the complex dynamics among stakeholders ended up compromising the very nature of the case study project.     

Faculty Reappointment,Tenure, and Promotion: Barriers for Women

Women faculty continue to experience academe differently than male faculty. A review of recent literature indicates that women's representation on university faculties has advanced slowly; women are less likely to be tenured or promoted compared to male faculty; and women faculty earn less than their male colleagues. A recurring theme is that the intellectual and social isolation of women faculty affects their research productivity. Gender stereotypes held by colleagues, departmental and college administrators, and students also contribute to the difficulties women face in the reappointment, tenure, and promotion process. A personal perspective on the reappointment process is provided in order to illustrate how isolation and naïvete regarding the social structure of academe can affect a woman's career advancement. The benefits of greater representation of women on university faculties are reviewed, and departmental and college administrators are reminded of the important role they play in ensuring future gender‐balanced faculties.