Academic Achievement in the High School Years: The Changing Role of School Engagement

School engagement is an important theoretical and practical cornerstone to the promotion of academic accomplishments. This article used a tripartite—behavioral, emotional, and cognitive—model of school engagement to assess the relationship between school engagement and academic success among high school students, and to determine whether a reciprocal relationship exists between these constructs. Data were derived from 710 youth (69 % female) who took part in Waves 6 through 8 (Grades 10 through 12) of the 4-H study of positive youth development. Longitudinal confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the invariance of the tripartite model of school engagement. Results of a structural equation model showed that the components of school engagement and academic achievement were mutually predictive and that these predictions varied from grade to grade. Future possibilities for evaluating the relationship between school engagement and academic achievement, as well as the implications for educational policy and practice, are discussed.     

The Feminisation of Finance

Abstract

This article focuses on recent reconfigurations of the home as a space of financial calculation and speculation that requires new kinds of domestic labour. It considers the 2008 financial crisis, but redirects the analysis towards the ordinary and normalised presence of financial capitalism at the level of domesticity, home-life and the everyday ‘calculative agencies’ which households are now regularly called on to perform. It also examines the constitution of ‘women’ as a target group for personal financial products and services, and addresses the various strategies that promote financial inclusion as a means to secure individual responsibility, autonomy and entrepreneurial consumer participation in a financialised ownership society. The article argues that this feminisation of finance suggests a considerable challenge to received understandings of the relationships between gender and economy, production and reproduction, and life and labour.     

Sketching Women in Court: The Visual Construction of Co-accused Women in Court Drawings

This paper explores the visual construction and representation of co-accused women offenders in court drawings. It utilises three case studies of female co-defendants who appeared in the England and Wales court system between 2003 and 2013. In doing so this paper falls into three parts. The first part considers the emergence of the sub-discipline, visual criminology and examines what is known about the visual representation of female offenders. The second part presents the findings of an empirical investigation, which involved engaging in a critical, reflexive visual analysis of a selection of court drawings of three female co-offenders. The third part discusses the ways in which the court artists' interpretation, the conventions of court sketching, and motifs of female offenders as secondary actors, drew on existing myths and prejudices by representing the women as listening, remorseless ‘others’.     

The Prime Minister's Women

This is a biographical account of the early years of the Women's Affairs Branch, later the Office of the Status of Women, within the Canberra bureaucracy. It invokes personal experience in order to set the record straight, to address historical absences and to bring past strategies to bear on present policy.     

The Mechanisms of Exclusion: Women in Conflict

Women across geographical and temporal locations have faced similar experiences in conflict and post-conflict situations due to broad conceptualisations of gender and its perceived implications, which play out within all conflict dynamics. This article draws on case studies from the work of WOMANKIND Worldwide, a UK-based international women’s human rights and development organisation, to outline the challenges faced by and innovative strategies used by women’s organisations internationally to ensure their participation, voice and rights and the role of the women’s movement in uniting disparate groups and individuals. It recognises that women are not a homogenous group and that their experiences differ widely across geographical and temporal locations. To guard against biological foundationalism and to ensure a comprehensive approach to peace-building, both a human-rights approach and a gender analysis are therefore required. Only then will sufficient voice, resources, participation, services, support, reparations, documentation and respect for human rights be ensured—both for women and men.

The Australian National Council of Women

This article describes the political style and practice of the Australian National Council of Women (ANCW) as it developed up to 1975. The historical significance of this lies in the fact that, during the first three quarters of the last century, the ANCW was effectively the peak body representing the great majority of women's groups in this country: groups whose activities focused on politics, religion, morality, health, education, the media, philanthropy and also peace, women's economic and political rights, child welfare and legal reform. The Council spoke on behalf of these constituents to all levels of government, and internationally through the International Council of Women. It generally did not represent women associated with trade unions and the Australian Labor Party, and the politically active women amongst its leaders tended to be members of the Liberal Party. The conduct of the Council avoided party politics; its leaders co-operated with trade unionists on issues of women's rights such as equal pay, and worked as willingly with Labor governments as with non-Labor ones. An assessment of the effectiveness of the Council's political activities is therefore an assessment of the political practice and achievements of mainstream Australian feminism before the advent of radical feminism in the 1970s.     

Susannah Izzard and Nicola Barden,eds. Rethinking Gender and Therapy: The Changing Identities of Women.. Philadelphia: Open UP, 2001

Alice Walker, by Maria Lauret (New York: St. Martin's P, 2000).

Power, Race, and Gender in Academe: Strangers in the Tower?, edited by Shirley Geok‐Lin Lim and María Herrera‐Sobek (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2000).

Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman, by Frances Esquibel Tywoniak (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000).

Just Anger: Representing Women's Anger in Early Modern England, by Gwynne Kennedy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000).

Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920, by Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999).

States of Conflict: bender, Violence and Resistance, edited by Susie Jacobs, Ruth Jacobson and Jennifer Marchbank (London and New York: Zed Books, 2000).

The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject, by Juliet Flower MacCannell (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000).

The Sounds of Feminist Theory, by Ruth Salvaggio (Albany: State U of New York P, 1999).

Literary Feminisms, by Ruth Robbins (New York: St. Martin's P, 2000).

Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, edited by Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999).

Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War, by Elizabeth Young (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999).

Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, by Suzanne Smith (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999).

Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, edited by Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett (Minneapolis and London: U of Minneapolis P, 1999).

Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives, by Cynthia Enloe (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000).     

Women in science—The astronomical brain drain

After briefly reviewing the literature on the position of women in science, this article reports the results of a study concerning the long-term employment profiles of doctoral students of radio astronomy. In particular, attention is focused on explaining the divergencies in the subsequent career paths of males and females. Indicators of the ‘quality’ of students' doctoral work are employed to demonstrate that the relative lack of career success shown by women astronomers is most likely to be the result of social factors concerning their role within the family rather than any inherent lack of ability as a scientist or direct discrimination in employment.     

在构建和谐社会中应充分发挥女职工作用

女职工是构建和谐社会的重要人力资源。在建设和谐社会中,企业和工会组织必须结合女职工特点,创造各种有利条件,不断提高其素质,使其充分发挥“半边天”作用。     

The limits to accumulation: Changing land tenure in Fiji

Processes of class formation in rural Fiji have been suggested in a number of recent works. Land accumulation has been seen as a vital part of this and the effects observed have included landless‐ness and poverty. However, this article suggests that the limits to such land accumulation may have been reached in some areas. Because Fiji has retained a form of communal tenure over most of its land, indigenous Fijians have been able to resist continued loss of land through leasing. This is not because they are opposed to commercial agriculture or individual gain but more because their effective sovereignty over land has been lost to the state and returns to leasing are minimal.