Empowerment for development: Taking participatory appraisal further in rural South Africa

This paper examines the potential for Participatory Rural Appraisal techniques to contribute to community development and empowerment in a deprived rural community in the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa. A series of participatory workshops was undertaken in which various new techniques were used to identify people-environment relationships and, in particular, the community perception of the value and problems relating to the river and riparian zone. The workshops led to the community taking positive action to address the problems identified. The study indicates the value and role of participatory research among disempowered communities in rural Africa.     

劳动争议调解机制比较——转化型调解模式与传统的调解模式的区别

常见劳动争议调解模式有四:指导型调解、分析性调解、评估型调解及转化型调解.前三种的成败有赖于调解员在和解的过程中说服双方达成协议的主导性能力,侧重利益的分割,因而压抑了当事人对纠纷解决的主动性.而转化型调解则要求发挥当事人的作用,即通过协助当事人健全自我认知、体会对方的立场,转变对事件的感知,促成理解,重建共识,化解纠纷.可见,这不仅减少了制度负担,也有更好地尊重当事人意愿,更大程度上修复社会关系的效果.     

Reviews

Ways of Seeing Red

Mary Joannou, ’Ladies, Please Don't Smash These Windows’: Women's Writing, Feminist Consciousness and Social Change 1918–38, Oxford: Berg, 1995, £14.95.

Gen Doy, Seeing and Consciousness: Studies in Women, Class and Representation, Oxford: Berg, 1995, £14.95.

A Fragile Space

Gill Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant‐Garde: Modernism and ‘Feminine’ Art, 1900 to the late 1920s, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, £45, £16.99 (pbk.).

Poetic Dissent

William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (eds.), The Poems of Anna Letetia Barbauld, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Fictional and Actual Nobodies

Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670–1820, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, £25.

Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money: Women's Fiction in England 1790–1820, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, £35.     

Human rights for women: an argument for 'deconstructive equality'

The status of universalism has been much debated by feminists at the end of the twentieth century. Poststructuralist feminism is readily positioned in these debates as antagonistic to normative universalism. It is criticized as such: how is injustice to be judged and condemned if contestation and the openness of ungrounded universalism are the only ideals? This paper is a 'sub-philosophical' enquiry into the normative commitments to equality implicit in poststructuralist feminism and its relationship to 'actually existing' human rights for women as they have been re-worked by the international feminist movement. It argues that poststructuralist feminism can be used to provide support for one possible understanding of equality encoded in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. It addresses feminist concerns over universal rights as androcentric and ethnocentric, arguing that extending human rights to women is compatible with poststructuralist commitments to anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism and required by the model of 'deconstructive equality' implicitly shared by CEDAW and poststructuralist feminism.