Transhumance in the Middle Ages: The eastern Pyrenees

The political and cultural rise of early modern Europe was made possible by the economic expansion of the Middle Ages. This, in turn, was predicated upon increased agricultural production and the development of the textile industry. In England, the Low Countries, and northern Italy the peasants participated to the extent that workers were required to process wool and weave cloth. Towns grew, the population increased, and the socio‐economic structure became more sophisticated. It is natural to assume, then, that peasants in all wool producing regions benefited from this new state of affairs; it is argued that transhumance brought increased wealth and important social changes to rural communities, especially in the mountains. In fact, transhumance has been misunderstood: the peasants were not full participants. On the contrary, in the eastern Pyrenees as elsewhere the mountain folk suffered from the introduction of large flocks on to their communal pastures.     

Diversity in gender and visual representation: a commentary

Visual images deserve our critical attention more than ever. In this commentary, I draw together the papers in this Special Issue on Diversity in gender and visual representation. The collection here is ‘diverse’ in terms of the breadth of visual representations, and through the methodological interdisciplinary approach of its contributions. I consider the overlaps within this diversity, and identify the contribution that these articles make in opening up discussion of activism, the body, history and emotions. I conclude with particular attention to how this Special Issue highlights the importance of returning to the politics of visibility, and how collectively these articles ask us to question the costs, limitations and possibilities of being represented in today's visually mediated societies.     

“Girl talk”: gender, equity, and identity discourses in a school-based computer culture

This article describes how a feminist intervention project in Canada focused on girls' more equitable access to and use of computers created significant opportunities for girls to develop and experience new identities as technology ‘experts’ within their school. In addition to a significant increase in participants' own technological expertise, there was a marked shift in the ways in which they talked about and negotiated their own gender identities with teachers and other students. Most significantly, the participants in the project became increasingly vocal about what they saw as inequitable practices in the daily operation of the school as well as those they were subject to by their teachers. This created, within the otherwise resilient macro-culture of the school, a more supportive climate for the advancement of gender equity well beyond the confines of its computer labs. We suggest that while equity-oriented school-level change is notoriously difficult to sustain, its most enduring impact might rather be participants' initiation into a discourse to which they had not previously experienced school-sanctioned access: a discourse in which to give voice to gender-specific inequities too long quieted by complacent discourses of “equality for all.”