Women and workplace training: Power relations positioning “the other”

This article presents selected details from an empirical study that examined organisational practices in some Australian workplaces in relation to women and training. The background to the study was Australia's Training Reform Agenda of the 1990s, which offered workers the possibility of significant gains in skill and occupational advancement. The particular focus of my study was training opportunities for women working in “ordinary” jobs, lower down in organisational hierarchies. Feminist poststructuralist theory informed an examination of gender power relations within four workplaces, particularly in relation to training. This theoretical perspective offered insight into how a range of discursive practices in the organisations positioned some women as certain kinds of subjects with low work affiliation and no career path and highlighted the impact of this positioning on women's training opportunities.     

Nonsuicidal Self-Harm Among Community Adolescents: Understanding the “Whats” and “Whys” of Self-Harm

This study examines self-harm in a community sample of adolescents. More specifically, the study identifies the prevalence and types of self-harm, elucidates the nature and underlying function of self-harm, and evaluates the relation of psychological adjustment, sociodemographic, and health-risk variables to self-harm. Self-report questionnaires assessing self-harm, adjustment, health behaviors, suicide history, and social desirability were completed by 424 school-based adolescents. Overall, 15% of the adolescents reported engaging in self-harm behavior. Analyses revealed gender differences across behaviors and motivations. Adolescents who indicated harming themselves reported significantly increased antisocial behavior, emotional distress, anger problems, health risk behaviors, and decreased self-esteem. Results provide support for the coping or affect regulation model of self-harm. Findings suggest that self-harm is associated with maladjustment, suicide, and other health behaviors indicative of risk for negative developmental trajectories. Doctoral student in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Received M.A. in School Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Research interests include self-harm, anxiety, coping, and street-involved youth. Associate Professor in the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Received Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Research interests include adolescent social-cognitive development, developmental psychopathology, and stress and coping.     

Training the “Wizards”: A Model for Building Self Efficacy and Peer Networks Among Urban Youth Workers

This article presents a community's efforts to address the professional development needs of frontline youth workers. A coalition designed a 13-week Youth Worker Training Institute to increase youth workers' knowledge, skills, self-efficacy, and professional networks. After the Institute, participants reported feeling more skillful, connected to other youth workers, confident, professional, reflective, and being more powerful change agents. Based on results from this formative evaluation, we suggest that it was multiple teaching and learning strategies that promoted reflection, peer learning, and networking—that contributed to youth workers gaining knowledge and skills that in turn increased their confidence and sense of self-efficacy.     

Indispensable Outcasts: Harvest Laborers in the Wheat Belt of the Middle West, 1890–1925

This article assesses the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) during the presidency of John J. Sweeney, which lasted from 1995 until 2009. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including press accounts and the AFL-CIO's own papers, it provides one of the first scholarly assessments of the entire Sweeney presidency. Sweeney won office in the first contested election in the AFL-CIO's history, and he came into power promising to revitalize the Federation, which is the largest labor federation in the Western world. Under Sweeney, the AFL-CIO invested an unprecedented amount of resources into both organizing and political mobilization, two key areas. In the early years of his presidency, Sweeney oversaw some important gains, particularly in the organizing arena, but the 2000 presidential election proved to be a turning point. After 2000, Sweeney's reforms were undermined primarily by external factors, particularly mounting corporate opposition, deindustrialization, and a hostile political climate, although internal resistance and division also played a role. As a result, a major campaign to secure labor law reform fell short, and union density continued to decline, yet the rate of decline was slower than it had been in the 1980s and early 1990s. Overall, although the results of Sweeney’s efforts were mixed, the important role that the AFL-CIO played in electing Barack Obama partly justified Sweeney’s emphasis on political mobilization.     

Women and trade unions 1870–1920: The quandary of the reformer

For the first two decades of the twentieth century, syndicalism (revolutionary trade unionism) was the most vigorous of the left's challenges to the capitalist order in many parts of the world. In Britain, syndicalism was reckoned to have had most impact in the South Wales coalfield but there have been no detailed studies of its influence in other British coalfields. This article explores the various ways in which syndicalism's influence can be gauged in the Durham coalfield, comparing it with the South Wales experience. While the two coalfields had a good deal in common, a number of considerations, most importantly relating to the agency of syndicalists on the one hand and Independent Labour Party (ILP) activists on the other, militated against syndicalism's relative influence in Durham.     

‘Organizing’ Meiji Women: the role of the Japanese chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union for individual activists, 1900–1905

Studies of the activities of the Japanese chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU, also known as Reform Society, est. 1886) in the late Meiji period (1868–1912) have primarily focused on its reformist agenda associated with the ongoing imperial nation-state building such as abolition of licensed prostitution, promotion of monogamy, and women’s education. With its strong connections to Japanese elites, Western missionaries, and female sympathizers, however, the WCTU in the early twentieth century provided its ambitious members with useful opportunities to learn necessary skills and broaden their networks. By scrutinizing three individual members with different interests as case studies, including charity for victims of industrial pollution, publication of a household magazine, and anti-war socialism, this paper demonstrates the malleability of the WCTU that extended beyond its renowned agenda and various ways in which individual members benefited from the organization.     

Women’s Rights Facing Hypermasculinist Leadership: Implementing the Women,Peace and Security Agenda Under a Populist-Nationalist Regime

Populist-nationalist ideologies pose a threat to women’s rights. This article examines to what extent national institutionalisation of international frameworks promoting women’s rights can weather the misogynistic political climate accompanying the global rise of populist nationalism. The post-2016 situation in the Philippines offers a testing ground for this problem due to the co-existence of President Duterte’s hypermasculinist national leadership with a strong history of institutionalisation of the UN’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Drawing from an analysis of WPS policy and institutions in the Philippines between 2009 and 2019 and from field research and interviews with government agencies, local civil society organisations and international partners, this article argues that the WPS agenda will likely survive in the hostile environment. But it also finds that institutionalisation alone does not guarantee successful implementation. While the WPS agenda may ostensibly remain a national priority under populist-nationalist regimes, its progression has been halted.

     

Women’s History and Oral History: developments and debates

Women’s history and oral history grew up together. Each developed from a commitment to reveal and reverse, to challenge and to contest what were perceived to be dominant discourses framed by gender and class. In this article the relationship between these two endeavours is explored. Beginning with the 1960s the influence of feminist approaches to research and representation are given due consideration and acknowledgement. In reviewing changes over the last four decades the dilemma for women of being both subject and object in research is explored. The tension in this dilemma is discussed in relation to developments in relation to subjectivity in the interview, the process of doing oral history, the developments in public history and remembering in late life. The article concludes with an overview of new work in the field and concedes that, whatever issues remain unresolved, oral history continues to interest and attract researchers working in a wide range of disciplines with the promise of yet more theorised and gendered explorations of the past in years to come.