The Pyu Ancient Cities World Heritage application: lessons from Myanmar on transnational advocacy networks

The announcement of 22 June 2014 from the World Heritage Committee that Pyu Ancient Cities had been added to the World Heritage List was significant for Myanmar, since it represented the country’s first World Heritage site. The World Heritage listing was the culmination of a process driven by a convergence of forces originating from within and outside of Myanmar. An interpretation of Pyu Ancient Cities as involving a transnational network of supporters echoes the work on transnational advocacy networks, which looks to phenomena involving transnational efforts to advance particular issues on behalf of activists against their government. This study examines Pyu Ancient Cities by producing a model that helps to illuminate the efficacy of its social network to engage in transnational advocacy.     

外商直接投资区位理论综述

对外直接投资在二战后发展的规模和速度极为突出。作为国际生产的主要载体,跨国公司在对外直接投资时．首先要考虑的一个重要问题就是区位选择问题。跨国公司直接投资的区位因素分析,一直是国际经济学界关注的理论热点之一。在经济全球化背景下,研究跨国公司对外投资区位决策因素的变迁,对分析跨国公司的直接投资行为和投资流向的变化具有重要意义。     

建设东北亚跨国运输走廊的设想及意义

东北亚区域经济合作的主要瓶颈之一是跨国运输和国际物流服务 ,考虑到可操作性 ,因而建设跨国运输走廊和地区国际物流中心就有希望成为启动东北亚区域全面合作的切入点。其建设的基本思路是整合“两纵两横”四条跨国走廊运输硬件设施 ,并构建跨国运输走廊有效运营的制度保障体系 ,同时建立“三大”国际物流中心之间的交流与合作机制 ,这不仅可以彻底消除冷战留给东北亚的后遗症 ,而且有利于地区经济合作 ,实现经济互补 ,创造地区经济繁荣。     

Gender,ethnicity and feminism: an intersectional analysis of the lived experiences feminist academic women in UK higher education

Studies have begun to explore how those women academics committed to social justice, namely feminist academics, are navigating the increasingly managerial Academy. To understand how these multiple social identities, including gender and ethnicity, interact and intersect, this paper adopts an intersectional approach to understanding the heterogeneity of women’s experiences in academia. Five focus groups with feminist academics (n = 6–10 in each focus group) reveal concerns of hampered career progression as a consequence of being female and openly feminist. Some ethnic minority academics felt that they were forced to choose between a feminist identity or that of their ethnic background. For some women, their feminist identity provided opportunities for challenging dominant practices. The paper concludes that the heterogeneity of feminist academics’ experiences within academia is under-researched and that the lens of intersectionality helps to illuminate this. This paper advances understanding of multiple identities at work, though demonstrating that intersectionality can lead to the accumulation of advantage as well as disadvantage in relation to social identities such as gender and ethnicity, and a political identity such as feminist.     

‘I Want to Wear It’: Fashioning Black Feminism in Mahogany (1975)

ABSTRACT

In this article I focus on the portrayal of fashionable clothing in the 1975 film Mahogany and connect it to the history of African American women engaging with sartorial self-representation as a means to assert their visibility in American culture. My aim is to analyse Mahogany’s emphasis on brightly-coloured highly-ornamented clothing, which has a long history of signifying bad taste and became part of accusations of racial and sexual inferiority. I want to show how Mahogany’s representation of fashion undermines the historically entrenched bias against colourful, highly adorned clothing while also revealing how this bias has played a subtle but significant role in the racism and sexism black women have encountered, further (but not finally) impeding them from the forms of recognition the category of femininity offers. Mahogany represents those impediments and repeats the sexual and racial commodification underlying them, but also resists them (albeit quite subtly) through the film’s loving display of fashion and its attention to the work of designing and making clothes. Mahogany tells a story of bright sartorial resistance that can be understood as an articulation of black feminist desires for women of colour to be able to compose the images through which their bodies are perceived.     

Raising citizens in ‘mixed’ family setting: mothering techniques of Filipino and Thai migrants in Belgium

As states increasingly regulate ‘mixed’ family formation, self-positioning has become central to the lives of migrant spouses, including women. To understand this process, the present article investigates the mothering techniques of Filipino and Thai migrant women in Belgium, that is, the decisions, actions and ways of being they consciously enact in response to state policies ‘here’ and/or 'there' to secure the mother–child bond in space and time. Interviews and observations reveal these women’s main techniques: obtaining Belgian nationality for themselves, prioritising a single nationality (Belgian) for their children and staying at home (in the case of Filipino migrant women) or working (in the case of Thai women). This self-positioning sets these women’s own path and prepare their children’s route towards full, active membership in the nation. Mothering appears therefore as a fertile site of citizenship, which from afar echoes the public–private divide but in close-up reveals the porosity of such dichotomy.     

Patriarchal unions = weaker unions? Industrial relations in the Asian garment industry

This paper explores how gender ideologies shape industrial relations in the Asian garment industry. Drawing on ethnographic research, it illustrates how widespread norm perceptions of acquiescent women and assertive men reinforce patriarchal, authoritarian unions. Even if privately critical, women may be reluctant to protest if they anticipate social disapproval. Such beliefs reinforce patriarchal unions, curbing women workers’ collective analysis, engagement, and activism. This weakens the collective power of labour to push for better working conditions. Tackling norm perceptions and building more inclusive unions may help strengthen the labour movement.     

‘Ringleaders and Troublemakers’: Malawian (Nyasa) migrants and transnational labor movements in Southern Africa,c.1910–1960

The article examines the transnational role of Malawian (Nyasa) migrant laborers in the emergence and development of African labor and proto-nationalist movements in Southern Africa. Using both archival and secondary evidence mainly from Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, it argues that the history of Southern Africa’s labor consciousness from the early to mid-twentieth century can be enriched by exploring the place of Nyasa migrants in shaping anti-colonial processes across the region. Nyasa migrants, a product of the colonial labor migration system (chibaro/mthandizi), laid the foundations for, and influenced trade unionism in the region, especially between 1910 and 1960. The colonial wage economy created ambiguities of dependence for Africans forcing many into a migrant and capitalist world laden with dilemmas, tightropes, and frustrations that fueled social movements. Malawian migrants who were at the core of such movements within a regional colonial economic system, gained a reputation for being ‘ringleaders and troublemakers’ to the colonial governments. Existing literature has not fully historicized the centrality of Nyasas in molding this critical episode of Southern African history. The historiography has dealt with these dynamics in an ad hoc manner, approaching this Nyasa ‘annoyance’ on a national basis, without drawing on the underlying regional connections.     

Birth Registration and Protection for Children of Transnational Labor Migrants in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Policies on transnational labor migration do not consider workers' needs as parents or the rights and welfare of their children, including a child's right to an official identity through birth registration. A study of birth-registration decision making by migrant parents in Lombok, Indonesia underscored the need for targeted responses to uniquely challenging circumstances and priorities of migrant parents. Free birth registration through birthing and health centers and village-level leaders can overcome problems of decentralized implementation of national strategies and an exploitive registration brokerage industry, mitigating risks of de facto statelessness for children and a multigenerational pattern of undocumented and unsafe migration.     

Expo afterlife: corporate performance and capitalist futurity in the Carousel of Progress

This article discusses a theatrical spectacle created by Walt Disney and General Electric for the 1964 New York World’s Fair that has run for the last five decades: the Carousel of Progress, a history pageant that stages the evolution of domestic technology in the twentieth century. As a spectacle dedicated to celebrating tools that bolster women’s participation in the social reproduction of capitalism, the author argues, the Carousel shows how expos utilize theatricality in order to inscribe industrial technologies within corporate ideologies. By apprehending the Carousel of Progress as a site of corporate performance, the author demonstrates how the Carousel’s afterlife in theme park entertainment has enabled Disney to theatricalize disparate modes of capitalist futurity in response to shifting cultural sensibilities. The author situates the Carousel within an economy that has consistently presented female domestic labor as subordinate to corporate capital, culminating with its late-1990s staging of an illusory prefeminism, which fantasizes a twentieth century in which no feminist movement took place. Engaging with theories of corporate performance, this article takes up the Carousel of Progress’s production history as an indication of theatricality’s longstanding utility to corporate capitalism.