’Old law’ and ‘divine law’ in the German peasant war

The paper treats the two core concepts of the Peasant War in the form of a report on the present state of research on law and social conflict in the late Middle Ages. The author attempts to outline a history of the meaning of the terms, based on the results of legal, constitutional and religious historians. The complex method of inquiry is particularly significant and may very well serve as a model for comparative studies of similar but different ideas of legitimation for revolts. Her tentative results suggest the necessity of revision of many hitherto uncritically accepted simplifications and promises to open up new vistas through in‐depth analysis of the terminology of the rebellious peasants.     

Why was there no ‘Old Poor Law’ in Scotland and Ireland?

This article will attempt to explain why England's system of poor relief was not replicated in Scotland and Ireland until well into the nineteenth century. The difference rests on the development of a nation of wage-labourers in England, the result of agrarian capitalism, a process that was complete by the 1790s, at a time when the population of other European countries was overwhelmingly dominated by peasants. The unique class structure in England led from the 1530s onward to the creation of a poor relief system, state-provided welfare funded from taxation, a type of social assistance that was absent elsewhere.     

The ‘new traditionalist’ discourse of Indian environmentalism

In this article we identify ‘new traditionalism’ as the discourse that dominates the historiography of the Indian environment. We challenge the new traditionalist equation of ‘forests’ and ‘nature’, their assertion that ‘traditional’ agriculture was ecologically balanced, and was practised by self‐contained communities, and their claims that women, forest dwellers and peasants were primarily the keepers of a special conservationist ethic. We next examine the new traditionalist claim that colonialism, modernity and development were exclusively responsible for the degradation of nature in India. Finally, we examine the new traditionalist interpretations of popular politics around environmental issues, specifically the Chipko movement. We make explicit the assumptions and political implications of new traditionalism and provide an alternative reading of Indian environmental history and politics.     

blogging solo: new media, ‘old’ politics

This article focuses on the blogosphere as an oppositional field where the meanings around contemporary Western women's singlehood are contested, negotiated and rewritten. In contrast to dominant narratives in which single women are pathologised, in the blogs by, for, and about single women analysed here, writers aim to refigure women's singleness as well as providing resources, support and a textual community where others can intervene and contribute to the re-valuation of single women. These blogs also function as alternative forms of knowledge, seeking to (re)legitimise women's singleness and to trouble their aberrance and social liminality. Rather than only considering the form in isolation from its content, this article analyses the discourses deployed by bloggers and within blogs and how women bloggers publicly perform their very singleness as part of a personal and political strategy of re-signification. In this way, while cautious not to overestimate the democratic potentialities of the so-called blogosphere, it underscores the important cultural – and indeed political – work being undertaken by single women therein. Moreover, by demonstrating how these blogs use discursive tactics commonly associated with feminism's second-wave – women's consciousness-raising; identity politics; deploying and reiterating the famous feminist dictum: ‘the personal is political’; naming discrimination; and empathy and community-building – it argues that they are using so-called ‘new’ media for what is now problematically believed to be ‘old’ (feminist) politics.     

Contesting ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ difference in emotions through music use in the UK

This article builds on social psychological critiques of ‘hardwired’ gender difference in emotions, looking at the topic through the emotional use of music. Starting from the premise that gender differences in emotion are socially and discursively constructed rather than innate, it moves on to challenge existing work in which masculinity and femininity are treated as singular, oppositional concepts, that are ‘normally’ attached to ideas of existing sex differences. Drawing on data, generated from a UK-based online survey of 914 respondents (male = 361; female = 553), this article highlights that whilst gender plays a significant part in shaping the emotional experience of music, this is often mediated heavily by age and personal experience. It suggests that music is a practical means of moving beyond ideas of differences in gender or sex differences in emotional display, towards ideas of diversity, especially given that existing face-to-face research has often found men to be ‘unable’ to communicate emotional experience in particular ways. Both inductive quantitative trends and open-ended fragments from people's emotional experiences of music are included in order to demonstrate how emotions and gender intersect discursively.     

The ‘private plot’ in Soviet agriculture

The paper examines the main components of Mexican agrarian populism, and the attractions of the populist position in the light of the current crisis within the Mexican agricultural sector. It is suggested that the ‘campesinistas’ (agrarian populists) have incorporated various aspects of marxist analysis, but have nevertheless emphasised ways in which their approach pans company with that of most marxists in Latin America. According to writers like Gustavo Esteva, perhaps the leading ‘campesinista’, the peasant economy in the process of developing can co‐exist with capitalism for a protracted period, and considerable doubt exists as to whether the peasant economy is ‘ultimately’ inconsistent with capitalist development. The agrarian populists look to the peasantry in Mexico as a vehicle for rural development, believing that a better understanding of the internal logic of peasant production might facilitate an alternative series of policy measures. The weaknesses of the ‘campesinista’ position are explored, and doubts expressed about the viability of the populist stance as long as Mexico has the option of importing basic foodcrops.     

‘Labour and new social movements in a globalising world system’: the future of the past

A new set of questions [is] being created by a changing present. Questions about who constitutes the working class, about how fragmented and divided groups of workers have organised, issues about workplace and community and the democratisation of unions and state policies are assuming centre stage. As the contours of the present shift, it is becoming possible to look back from new perspectives.1 Rowbotham, ‘New Entry Points,’ 68.      

‘for Wales,see England?’ suffrage and the new woman in Wales [1]

With a few notable exceptions, Wales has generally been portrayed as an overtly patriarchal nation, the haven of anti-suffragists. The first part of this article reassesses this reputation. It is argued that national as well as local historical specificities must be taken into account in order to achieve a more accurate representation of suffrage history in Wales and Britain. The second part examines Welsh suffragism in the context of the nationalist Cymru Fydd movement of the 1890s as it appeared in the English language nationalist periodicals Young Wales, The Welsh Review and (the bilingual) Cymru Fydd.     

‘Settled in mobility’: engendering post-wall migration in Europe

The end of the bi-polar world and the collapse of communist regimes triggered an unprecedented mobility of people and heralded a new phase in European migrations. Eastern Europeans were now not only ‘free to leave’ to the West but more exactly ‘free to leave and to come back’. In this text I will focus on gendered transnational, cross-border practices and capabilities of Central and Eastern Europeans on the move, who use their spatial mobility to adapt to the new context of post-communist transition. We are dealing here with practices that are very different from those which the literature on ‘immigrant transnationalism’ is mostly about. Rather than relying on transnational networking for improving their condition in the country of their settlement, they tend to ‘settle within mobility,’ staying mobile ‘as long as they can’ in order to improve or maintain the quality of life at home. Their experience of migration thus becomes their lifestyle, their leaving home and going away, paradoxically, a strategy of staying at home, and, thus, an alternative to what migration is usually considered to be – emigration/immigration. Access to and management of mobility is gendered and dependent on institutional context. Mobility as a strategy can be empowering, a resource, a tool for social innovation and agency and an important dimension of social capital – if under the migrants' own control. However, mobility may reflect increased dependencies, proliferation of precarious jobs and, as in the case of trafficking in women, lack of mobility and freedom.     

Fictionalizing Hospitality in Ahdaf Soueif's Short Story ‘Knowing’

Drawing on Derrida's double conceptualization of the ‘la question de l’étranger’, which he utilizes to unpack the notion of hospitality, this paper explores the question of foreignness in Ahdaf Soueif's short story ‘Knowing’, from her collection I Think of You: Stories (2007). Jacques Derrida uses the interrogative mode to examine the diasporic situation by looking at ‘the question of the foreigner’, which ‘is a question of the foreigner, addressed to the foreigner’. To Derrida, the diasporic condition is determined by the type of hospitality offered or withheld by visiting and hosting countries. Likewise, Soueif questions the notion of hospitality as she introduces homes and locales that seem uncongenial to foreign dwellers. In ‘Knowing’, Soueif portrays the foreigner's position as being marked by the presence or absence of hospitality. In this context, the Derridean conditioned hospitality could become invasive as it colours diaspora with its own peculiar brush. As she fictionalizes hospitality, Soueif blurs the line between home and host as well as that between guest and stranger. In the short story, she introduces the insidious effects of the new receiving culture as her fictional girl is not a guest since the host country withholds the Derridean unconditional hospitality; neither is she a stranger as foreignness dictates a sense of cultural dislocation, which is that of not ‘knowing’.     

gendered representations in Hawai‘i’s anti-GMO activism

The aim of this article is to analyse some of the representations of intersectional gender that materialise in activism against genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It uses the case of Hawai‘i as a key node in global transgenic seed production and hotspot for food, land and farming controversies. Based on ethnographic work conducted since 2012, the article suggests some of the ways that gender is represented within movements against GMOs by analysing activist media representations. The article shows how gender, understood intersectionally, informs possibilities for movement-identification, exploring how themes of motherhood, warrior masculinities and sexualised femininities are represented within these movements. The article suggests that some activist representations of gender invoke what could be considered as normative framings of gender similar to those seen in other environmental, food and anti-GMO movements. It is suggested that these gendered representations may influence and limit how different subjects engage with Hawai'i anti-GMO movements. At the same time, contextual, intersectional readings demonstrate the complex histories behind what appear to be gender normative activist representations. Taken together, this emphasis on relative norms of femininities and masculinities may provide anti-GMO organising with familiar social frames that counterbalance otherwise threatening campaigns against (agri)business in the settler state. Understood within these histories, the work that gender does within anti-GMO organising may offer generative examples for thinking through the relationships between gendered representations and situated, indigenous-centred, food and land-based resistances.     

‘Control Grabbing’ and small-scale agricultural intensification: emerging patterns of state-facilitated ‘agricultural investment’ in Rwanda

The Rwandan government's ongoing reconfiguration of the agricultural sector seeks to facilitate increased penetration of smallholder farming systems by domestic and international capital, which may include some land acquisition (‘land grabbing’) as well as contract farming arrangements. Such contracts are arranged by the state, which sometimes uses coercive mechanisms and interventionist strategies to encourage agricultural investment. The Rwandan government has adapted neo-liberal tools, such as ‘performance management contracts’, which make local public administrators accountable for agricultural development targets (often explicitly linked to corporate interests). Activities of international development agencies are becoming intertwined with those of the state and foreign capital, so that a variety of actors and objectives are starting to collaboratively change the relations between land and labour. The global ‘land grab’ is only one aspect of broader patterns of reconfiguration of control over land, labour and markets in the Global South. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the state is orienting public resources towards private interests in Rwanda, through processes that have elsewhere been termed ‘control grabbing’ [Borras et al. 2012 Borras, S.M., et al. 2012. Land grabbing and global capitalist accumulation: key features in Latin America. Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d'études du développement, 33(4), 402–416. doi: 10.1080/02255189.2012.745394[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 402–416].     

‘Sentimental Follies’ or ‘Instruments of Tremendous Uplift’? reconsidering women's same-sex relationships in interwar Britain

In 1985 Sheila Jeffreys alleged that the rise of sexological discourse concerning female inversion in the early twentieth century obliged women of the interwar period in the UK to reject female affection for fear of being labelled lesbian. Several historians have demonstrated that sexological ideas gained very little general currency before Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). Research on specific women suggests that such fears were less prevalent than surmised. An influential discourse invoking tropes of emotional femininity, rather than inversion, was embodied in Clemence Dane's Regiment of Women (1917), presenting female same-sex relationships as mired in morbid emotions and parasitic manipulation. It had significant cultural resonance for well over a decade. A counter-discourse argued that emotionally healthy, reciprocal female friendship might form a sustaining element for women unable to marry. Stress, however, was laid on the need for self-knowledge and psychological understanding.     

Ephemeral ‘communities’: spatiality and politics in rangeland interventions in Mongolia

In recent years, the number of community-based natural resource management projects for rangeland conservation and development has grown rapidly in Mongolia. Such projects seek to develop social capital through the formation of herder groups and pasture user groups, in order to enable the coordination of complex, collective tasks needed for sustainability. Through analysis of social networks, interviews and ethnographic data from two places where such projects have been implemented, Bayanjargalan, Dundgovi, and Tariat, Arkhangai, the paper demonstrates that the spatiality of pastoral social relations is much more extensive than assumed by these projects. Furthermore, rather than being neutral technical interventions, such projects are embedded in and proliferate politics. They often bolster the informal power of wealthy herders who gain more access to pasture, while at the same time leading to tensions between different levels of government and becoming objects of struggle between Mongolia’s two dominant political parties. For all of these reasons, these efforts have tended not to build trust, and the ‘communities’ they create, in the form of herder groups and pasture user groups, have tended to be ephemeral.