An actor‐oriented approach for strengthening research and development capabilities in natural resource systems

This article is concerned with strengthening research and development capabilities in natural resource systems, especially systems oriented towards reducing rural poverty. It reviews current planning, monitoring and evaluation (PME) literature and identifies five major areas of concern: (1) the lack of systematic and usable methods for qualitative assessment; (2) the narrow focus of current activities; (3) the failure to address the political nature of evaluations; (4) the lack of integration of PME methods with the practice of research and development; (5) the need for methods that facilitate flexibility, learning and replanning in process projects. Major new approaches for PME in process projects are reviewed and some gaps are identified. The article develops an ‘actor oriented approach’ for strengthening research and development (R&D) capabilities in natural resource systems. This holistic approach identifies major actors in an overall R&D system and concentrates on the determinants of flows of information between actors. Two major tools are presented: an actor linkage matrix and a determinants' diagram. The use of these tools is illustrated with a retrospective case study from the Kavango region of Namibia, and the potential strengths and weaknesses of the approach are discussed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Waves of Publications on Chinese Women and Gender Studies

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the evolution of Chinese women and gender studies in academia since the 1970s through a discussion of a number of prominent Western-language book publications that reveal changing scholarly approaches and attitudes toward this subject. It makes evident that within several generations the field has developed from a study favoured by left-leaning academics to a subject fed by multi-disciplinary approaches and integral to China scholarship. The review demonstrates how researchers sought sources and means to expose the once-buried literary and artistic achievements of imperial era women while modern history and literary experts as well as anthropologists and other social scientists countered long-standing narratives of women’s oppression, and pursued alternative scenarios to show how Chinese men and women have transformed their culture and society. There is also attention given to publications about masculinity, same-sex cultures, and the one-child policy. The review concludes that more contact between Western and Chinese scholars on women and gender studies will enrich and expand the dimensions of this field.     

kinship across species: learning to care for nonhuman others

This essay responds to Donna J. Haraway’s (2016) provocation to ‘stay with the trouble’ of learning to live well with nonhumans as kin, through practice-based approaches to learning to care for nonhuman others. The cases examine the promotion of care for trees through mobile game apps for forest conservation, and kinship relations with city farm animals in Kentish Town, London. The cases are analysed with a view to how they articulate care practices as a means of making kin. Two concepts are proposed, ‘learning from’ and ‘facing’ the Other, which are thickened through discussions of how caring takes place in each case in relation to a particular category of nonhuman other: animated tree and urban farm animal. Thus while attendant to situations of care involving a specific nonhuman subject, the cases also broker thinking on learning from and facing (the) other kinds of trees and animals, and the interspecies dynamics of which they are a part. The intersectional implications of the practice sites and participants are elaborated, to complexify and affirm situated but also reflexive approaches to caring. In doing this, the authors attend to their own positionalities, seeking to diversify Western-based ecofeminist engagements with caring, while asking what their research can do for the nonhuman other. They formulate and apply a collaborative methodological approach to the case studies, developed through cultivating attentiveness to the nonhuman subject of research. The authors consider in particular how attentiveness to the nonhuman other can facilitate practices of knowing that further a non-anthropocentric and non-innocent ethic of caring. By further interconnecting situations of caring for nonhuman animals and plants, the authors advocate for practices of care that antagonise how species boundaries are drawn and explore the implications for learning to care for nonhumans as kin.     

the Trauma Risk Management approach to post-traumatic stress disorder in the British military: masculinity,biopolitics and depoliticisation

This paper discusses the political implications of the British military’s Trauma Risk Management (TRiM) approach to personnel suffering from combat-related mental debilities such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Drawing on narratives that emerged from qualitative interviews with trained TRiM practitioners and military welfare workers, I tease out some of the assumptions and beliefs about mental health and mental illness that underpin this mental health intervention programme. I explore TRiM as a biopolitical strategy targeted towards the construction of a particular conceptualisation of mental wellness and militarised masculine personhood. As a biopolitical strategy, I argue that TRiM plays an important role in the construction of ideas around mental well-being and mental frailty that best enable the operation of military power in the contemporary British context. I discuss the narrative of transformation in militarised models of masculinity that emerge from discussions of TRiM, and highlight the important political function that this plays in enabling and legitimating militarism. Finally, I draw attention to the ways in which the focus on individual and cultural factors, rather than war as the primary cause of difficulties for servicemen experiencing psychological distress, functions to neutralise the potential trouble that could be instigated for the British military by the bodies of servicemen psychologically damaged by their experiences of conflict.     

Household production and the national economy: Concepts for the analysis of Agrarian formations

This essay argues that the central concept for analysis of agrarian social relations is the form of production. This is conceived through a double specification of the unit of production and the social formation. The approach allows for the analytical specification of simple commodity production and capitalist relations of production in a manner consistent with the development of new concepts within political economy for agrarian structures which do not correspond to modes of production. The latter have generally been referred to as ‘peasant’, a term derived through empirical generalisation and resting on a (usually) implicit contrast with simple commodity production. The contrast can be made more rigorous through the concept of commoditisation, defined as the penetration into reproduction of commodity relations. Simple commodity production is a concept within political economy, allowing for deduction of conditions of reproduction and class relations. ‘Peasant production is negatively defined as resisting commoditisation, and nothing can be deduced about reproduction or class relations. ‘Peasant’ must be replaced ty a comprehensive and mutually exclusive set of rigorously defined concepts specifying forms of production. Procedures for defining such forms of production are suggested.     

Dynamik und Verbreitung des Matthäus-Effekts

This study traces the reception of Robert Merton’s concept and label, the “Matthew Effect”, from its origin four decades ago to the present day. It has been cited more often as time has passed and its influence has become increasingly wide-spread. The paper reviews the meaning Merton intended the concept to have and why it is of special significance for this author. The diffusion of the Matthew effect is shown through many fields of inquiry (including but not limited to psychology, public health, criminology, and education) and ultimately the popular discourse. Drawing on an analysis of the contents of all publications with the term in their titles, the paper shows that as the use of the Matthew effect spread, so too has the diversity in its applications and the changes in its meaning. Further, the term has been uncoupled from the identity of its originator, that is, while Merton’s name and the proper references continue to be cited, the term itself has also acquired an independent existence. The uncoupling of authors from their term-and-concepts is shown to occur in the case of other sociologists, suggesting that the processes of “uncoupling” and what Merton called “obliteration by incorporation”, are as he observed, a general phenomenon in the scientific literature. So too does the meaning of terms become blurred as they spread and sometimes even acquire connotations altogether different from their origins.