Connecting Women's Histories: the local and the global

ABSTRACT

The articles in this Special Issue are drawn from some of the contributions to a conference held at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, from 29 August to 1 September 2013 titled ‘Women's Histories: the local and the global’. The articles reflect on diverse aspects of the entangled histories of women across the world, mainly, but not exclusively, during the twentieth century. They explore the range of ways in which women's history, international history, transnational history and imperial and global histories are interwoven.     

“You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow”: the Freedom Riders of 1961 and the Dilemma of Mobility

This article offers an exploration of what it meant to move under “cramped conditions” for African Americans and their compatriots during an era of often violent racial discrimination and segregation in the 1950s and 1960s in the USA. As the example of the Freedom Rides shows, these conditions included both moments of closure and entrapment determined by the rule of law as well as acts of resistance resulting from a century-long legacy of resistances. Particularly, I try to understand the complex “constellations of mobility” as a fragile entanglement of the politics of movement, representations of movement, and the embodied practices of movement. This paper proposes an approach to mobility that takes both historical forms of mobilities and immobilities seriously. On the one hand, my analysis relates to regulatory power and technologies used by state and non-state actors in order to retain white privilege over issues of mobility during the period preceding and accompanying the Freedom Rides. On the other hand, I argue along the lines of “mobility as resistance” by showing the strategies used to transgress written and unwritten laws and normative standards of the Jim Crow era.     

Feminism,imperialism and race: a dialogue between India and Britain

Abstract

During the partition period and up to 1918, Polish women's interests and aspirations outside the family were in increasingly frequent cases directed to taking up paid work and resorting to other measures in order to sustain their family. In other cases women's activity was shaped by experiences of resistance to national and sometimes also religious discrimination. In the early twentieth century only small groups of women put forward demands for equality, and even if they did so, they usually thought that this would be possible only after the rebirth of an independent foolish state. It is to this supreme aim that they subordinated their interest and their struggle for equality.     

Security-sector reform: development breakthrough or institutional engineering?

This article provides the academic background to the development community’s recent and growing interest in security-sector reform. It seeks to understand how this debate has evolved and the direction it may take, especially in relation to its impact on policy and the resources available for security-sector reform in developing states. Although there are numerous initiatives underway that relate to security-sector reform, the input of the development community would be valuable towards establishing a more holistic and comprehensive perspective. This provides an enormous opportunity to influence the transformation of the security sector in certain countries. Yet such progress requires a broad and sustained level of cooperation among a range of different government departments in donor countries. This has never happened before and the outlook is bleak, which will severely constrain future attempts to move from ‘institutional engineering’ to holistic security-sector reform.     

Re-centring British Government: Beliefs, Traditions and Dilemmas in Political Science

Bevir and Rhodes have offered a useful addition to the tools of political scientists by developing an interpretivist approach to political science. Interpretation is a crucial mechanism for understanding the social world but one that has been underused in political analysis. This article welcomes Bevir and Rhodes' emphasis on interpretivism but suggests that there are a number of problems in the way they use the approach. In particular: they use a narrow definition of interpretivism; they caricature the nature of existing work in political science; the concept of tradition does too much work; and they pay insufficient attention to power and power relations.     

The Mistreatment of Others: Discrimination Can Undermine University Identification,Student Health,and Engagement

Past research documents the extent that discrimination experiences and observations can undermine people’s health and performance. In addition to discrimination’s direct consequence for targets, discrimination implicates the morality of the larger community where it occurs. Perceptions of community morality could predict community identification that, in turn, could predict health and performance. To test this serial mediation hypothesis, 615 second- and third-year university undergraduates reported the frequency of discrimination observations and experiences. Students’ perceptions of the university community’s morality mediated the relationship between discrimination and the extent that they identified with the university. In turn, university identification mediated the relationship between university morality and students’ academic engagement and mental health. However, only university morality reliably mediated the relationship between discrimination and physical health. Discrimination can affect the health and engagement of all community members, even observers who are not part of the targeted group.