Ignorance,Injustice and the Politics of Knowledge

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, feminist epistemology has developed into a vibrant area of inquiry which challenges many of the taken-for-granted assumptions of traditional, mainstream theories of knowledge to work towards developing theories and practices that close a persistent gap between theories of knowledge and knowledge that matters to people in real situations. Here I will examine some of the more startling recent developments in feminist epistemology, where—perhaps improbably—epistemologies of ignorance and questions about epistemic injustice have made significant contributions to feminist knowledge projects. Together and separately, they expose the extent to which knowing is a political activity, while maintaining that it can avow its political involvement without dissolving into facile assertions that ‘might is right’.     

Cold War Kitchen: Americanization,technology, and European users,by Ruth Oldenziel & Karin Zachmann

Abstract

This article concerns women who crossed a frontier both literally, by travelling to Paris – the art centre of the world in about 1900 – and symbolically, by training to be artists in ways which were not open to earlier generations. Paris provided a cosmopolitan environment and the article includes references to women of several nationalities, but gives particular prominence to Scottish women artists as a doubly marginalised group. By considering both their relation to academic training and to the avant-garde, it seeks to explain the comparative obscurity of these first-generation artists and suggests that they often became professionals, but without making the breakthrough to fame.     

Slavery and capitalism

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I look at the relationship between slavery and capitalism through exploring the counterfactual of industrialization without slavery in the United States and by analyzing the deeper connection between slavery and capitalism. As we will see, slavery, and war capitalism more generally, played an important role in industrialization, and slavery and capitalism share an underlying connection that if obscured can facilitate higher levels of exploitation under capitalism at present.     

Methodology

Abstract

Any discussions about specialized helping environments for children or young people would be incomplete without reference to the relationships found between practices in group care centers and schools. This involves thinking of a child's total environment as a curriculum for teaching competencies and learning outcomes important to daily living. The task involves making a conscious effort to deal with a child's functioning in the present, thereby avoiding diagnostic conclusions that emphasize difficulties in one area of their life as the cause of learning problems.     

Appendix D

Abstract

We must work tenaciously for change. We've been lulled into accepting systems without looking into the human faces that are impacted by them. These real, hurting people cry out for us to think deeply and creatively regarding our orientation towards families and the child welfare system.     

Charismatic women in religion. Power,media and social change

ABSTRACT

‘Charisma’ can be a catch-all term that obfuscates more than it reveals. What it does reveal often says more about the historical and cultural context in which ‘charisma’ was deployed than about its subject. In this introduction we trace the concept’s contextual shifts across its intersections with gender, religion and power. We explore the different ways in which women in the religious sphere have been considered charismatic, thereby addressing Max Weber’s definition of ‘charisma’ as well as its subsequent reinventions in the social sciences and the humanities. Particular focus goes to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the mediatization of ‘charisma’ created new opportunities and risks for women in religion.     

The construction of a slave identity: an examination of the dual identity of indentured labourers across the Western Pacific

ABSTRACT

The examination of indentured labour in the Western Pacific has been reported as pure historiography, without the guidance of an explicit theoretical framework. It has concluded that indenture in this case does not meet its own definition of slavery. However, this analysis is highly dated in as much as it is narrowly institutionalist in perspective, relying on legalistic points of distinction, such as the existence of a labour contract. To challenge this established wisdom a new-institutionalist history is conjured from existing social an economic theory. This enables the topic to be brought into the business and organisation disciplines. The examination demonstrates the promotion of a dual identity, which cast native labourers as free labourers, while instantiating norms readily identifiable with slavery. These norms served to encourage low-status natives into acceptance of the disciplines of the plantation and other businesses as part of the natural order, but proved unsustainable over the longer term as a broader range of life choices emerged.     

The land of no taboo: agrarian politics of neglect and care in Madagascar

ABSTRACT

In considering the complex relationships between taboo, culture and landscapes, it is productive to examine not only how people bestow taboos onto places, but also how they take them away. In this contribution, I use as a case study a 35-hectare parcel of agricultural land in Madagascar, where members of an extended family are debating whether or not to continue to follow their ancestral taboos while farming. Analyzing the debate, alternative historical, cultural and political narratives of land relationships emerge, including a fraught colonial history, ongoing battles over land tenure, shifting community demographics, and intergenerational conflicts. Overall, this stretch of land illustrates that agricultural landscapes may be rendered without taboo not because they lack meaning, but because they contain an excess of overlapping – and highly contentious – meanings.     

Feminism and the Technological Age

Abstract

Feminism advocates for the inclusion of women within the modern economy, but this has implicated feminism in a hyper-capitalist and instrumental mode of organising social life. Feminism has helped to legitimise the ubiquitous reach of this regime into all areas of social life, even parenting. Feminism can learn from Heidegger's proposition that in questioning modern technology we may open up a way of coming into a free relationship with it—to be open to the divinity of living beings and things. Jessica Benjamin's account of the relationship between the mother and her infant in terms of intersubjectivity seems to fit Heidegger's proposition for it highlights a dynamic and receptive exchange between two unique living beings. The question for feminism at this time is: how can it own its complicity with modern technology while opening up its distinctive contribution to finding a way of coming into a free relationship with it?     

An Aristotelian paradox: Wollstonecraft and the implications of marriage as friendship

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that Mary Wollstonecraft interprets marriage in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as a relationship reminiscent of Aristotelian higher friendship. This position presents an Aristotelian paradox: Wollstonecraft shows how marriage – an institution Aristotle explicitly viewed as a husband ruling a wife – can be the basis of the Aristotelian fulfilment political society structurally provides to the best men. Overall, Wollstonecraft suggests that marriage should be recognized as a concrete contract of friendship between two individuals as opposed to a male-female complementarity that ends in the propagation of the species through childbirth. Her work enables us to challenge ideas of marriage – from Aristotle to Rousseau to the new natural law tradition – that overlook how the structure of marriage dominates possibilities for partnerships. By thus dignifying marriage, Wollstonecraft both critiques eighteenth century marriage practices and broadens the scope of gender expression today.

Abbreviation: VRW - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman     

Chinese state capitalism and neomercantilism in the contemporary food regime: contradictions,continuity and change

ABSTRACT

A significant proportion of critical agri-food literature has, to date, focused on the uneven relations of power between the Global North and the Global South, and the neoliberal characteristics of the corporate food regime. This literature has often overlooked the nuances in varieties of capitalism, particularly in East Asia. China is re-emerging as a powerful state actor in an increasingly multipolar global food system. It is also an important hub of capital, facilitating agribusiness mergers and acquisitions, as well as new East–South and South–South flows of agri-food trade, technology and capital. This paper aims to contribute to understanding state-led capitalism in China and neomercantilist strategies in the agri-food sector. The paper provides a critical analysis of a case study of China's state owned agri-food and chemical companies ‘going global’. It contends that the current food regime is in a period of transition or interregnum – a period of fluidity separating the continuity of successive regimes. Arguably, the analytical contours of a contemporary food regime in transition cannot be adequately comprehended without recognising the incipient importance of state-led capitalism and neomercantilism, and how contemporary socio-political and economic dynamics are reshaping relations of power in the global political economy of food.     

Female education and full-time employment in Guinea: an ambiguous relationship

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the direct and indirect effects of female education on full-time labour market employment using Guinean demographic and health surveys. It addresses potential endogeneity of female education, unobserved heterogeneity and sample selectivity concerns using the control function model and a non-self-cluster identification strategy. Results show that female education has a diminishing direct effect on full-time employment, with the inverted-U-shaped relationship portraying that women with seven-plus years of schooling are less likely to be regularly employed than their counterparts with less years of schooling. Interacting female education and its square with the corresponding reduced form residuals increase the probability of full-time labour market employment – an indication that female education and unobserved correlates are complementary. Thus, highly educated Guinea women do not increase their full-time market engagements – a pointer of the importance they may be attributing to home-produced goods and services that push them to perhaps prefer flexi-work arrangements such as occasional or seasonal market engagements.     

Touring a once pious nation: gender,medievalism, tourism,and Catholic nation-building in early twentieth-century France

ABSTRACT

In 1900, the first of the Guide national et catholique du voyageur en France appeared. Published by the Assumptionist Order alongside the Exposition Universelle, the guidebook suggested sites for Catholic travellers visiting Paris that year. Additional volumes on other regions of France soon followed. Known for their national pilgrimages to Lourdes, the Assumptionists departed here from their usual publications by presenting a religious travel experience based on curiosity more than faith, yet motivated by nostalgia for a medieval, pious France; a nation anchored in its regional traditions. Central to the guidebooks were female religious personalities—saint, visionaries, and miracle workers—who reflected this idealized vision of the nation. Using the lens of gender, this article explores the Guide's use of female religious figures and Marian apparitions in the construction of a Catholic nation to be explored, reaffirmed, and travelled at the beginning of the twentieth century.     

Women and radio: sounding out new paths in women's history

ABSTRACT

Since its early introduction in the domestic sphere in the 1920s, radio has been used as a medium for the expression of women's voices, needs and concerns. In this introduction we would like to mobilise an understanding of radio as a vital source for doing women's history. Women's radio programming, women broadcasters, and women listeners provide a lens through which a number of histories can be analysed. This introduction provides an overview of the historical relationship between women and radio. It is further dedicated to research that explores the overlapping spaces of radio and women's history, and in particular, points to how radio-related source material can provide new points of departure for women's history.     

Soft budgets and elastic debt: farm liabilities in the agrarian political economy of post-Soviet Tajikistan

ABSTRACT

Since Tajikistan’s independence, market reforms and pressure from international donors have brought changes to the state’s role in the economy. The official narrative holds that the post-socialist state reduced its control over agriculture, but there are still various mechanisms through which it exerts control over farming. In this paper, I examine Tajikistan’s post-socialist agrarian change through the prism of farm debt. Farm debt used to be an accounting nuisance in Soviet agriculture as a result of so-called soft-budget constraints. In the political economy of post-socialist transformation, farm cotton debt has been transformed into indebted land. I classify this debt ‘elastic’ for its ambiguous nature. It ties farmers to land and makes farmers’ independence illusory. With an in-depth analysis based on original ethnographic insights, I aim to provide a theoretical contribution to the way in which debt is conceptualised and politicised in post-Soviet Tajikistan.     

Rules of thumb: British history and ‘imperial culture’ in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain1

Abstract

This paper examines the traditions of both British imperial and British domestic historiography and calls for a re-mapping of both so that the so-called separate spheres of ‘home’ and ‘away’ may be brought back into the same fields of debate. Its central claim is that imperial ideology and its effects were not phenomena ‘out there’. Empire was not a singular place; nor did ‘home’ exist in isolation from it. In spite of the polarization, which has been characteristic of their historiographies, their relationship was dialectic rather than dichotomous. These insights, while derived in part from new trends inside British history itself, owe both their theoretical rigor and their self-avowedly political concerns to post-colonial and feminist historiographical work, which together insist on the desacralization of ‘Britain’ proper.     

Queering the World or Worlding the Queer? New Readings of Anna Kavan’s Who Are You?

Abstract

This essay explores world-literary and queer approaches to Anna Kavan’s little discussed 1963 novel Who Are You?. It argues that world-literary scholarship demonstrates the centrality of white colonial masculinity to capitalist modernity, while a queer reading highlights the anxious performativity at the heart of such power. The most distinctive feature of Kavan’s text is its unusual format, whereby the story is told once, in detail, before immediately being retold, in more concise fashion and with some adjustments. What both fields add to the analysis of this formal deviation is a shared concern with the failings of normative order—whether that be the bourgeois, heteropatriarchal family or the capitalist system itself—and, in turn, the relationship of such failure to narrative disjuncture.     

Feminist biography and feminist history

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the relationship between biography and the many new developments evident in feminist history. Taking as its particular focus the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English feminism, it looks at the divergence between an approach to biography which assumes it to be concerned with the lives of exceptional individuals and an interest in the history of feminism which has ceased to regard it as being the story of heroic victories on the way to women's emancipation. The growing interest in the lives, experiences and activities of past feminists who were not the leaders of major national campaigns suggests a new approach in general to the biographies of feminists – exploring how they lived and understood the broader situation of women     

The making of Nordic "women-friendlyness" and the language of emancipatory politics: A feminist genealogy

What made it possible to develop thinking about Nordic "women-friendlyness"* during the 1980s? What does Nordic "women-friendlyness" have to offer feminist theory today? This study examines and interprets the foundations of Nordic "women-friendlyness" using a feminist genealogical discursive analysis designed as a set of interrelated and overlapping stories. The aim of the study is to analyse the official textual academic formulations of Nordic "women-friendlyness", as well as to interpret the cultural, historical and institutional contexts of Nordic "women-friendlyness" that lie behind these formulations and how these constitute its present formulation.     

Housework,Wages and Money

Abstract

According to a range of authors and popular commentators, the post-Fordist socioeconomic order has produced a new category of female labourer, the ‘female principal breadwinner’. This article opens out this category of worker to critical scrutiny. We suggest that while the very idea of the female principal breadwinner is open to all manner of existing lines of feminist critique, beyond this it forces a confrontation with a number of issues vital to feminist analyses of transformations to women's labour—both waged and unwaged—in contemporary financialised post-Fordism. We pursue two issues in particular. First, transformations to the labour of social reproduction—including transformations to the measurement and valuation of domestic labour—and second, the financialisation (and shifting capacities) of wages specifically and money more generally. We suggest that if transformations to women's labour are to be fully grasped and understood feminist theory must renew and rethink its analyses of domestic labour, wages and money.