‘Not Simple,Not Pure’: Revisioning of Mythical Wicked Women in the Stories of Sara Maitland

The British novelist, feminist and religious thinker Sara Maitland (b.1950) is renowned for her short stories, many of which involve the rewriting of fairy tale and classical and biblical myth. This article situates Maitland's retellings within the contemporary feminist tradition of literary revisioning, but emphasises that her retelling of old tales is distinguished by a deep—and often discomforting—engagement with questions of morality. This is rooted in Maitland's political commitment and Christian faith, and is particularly evident in her treatment of mythical female evil. Her short stories take a morally ambiguous approach, paying attention to the moral and psychological complexities of the wicked stepmothers in fairy tale, gorgons and child-killers of classical myth, and temptresses of the Hebrew Bible. Maitland's feminist revisioning of mythical wicked women does not flinch from their darkness, or impose simple ethical lessons, but at the same time she is (sometimes horribly) aware of their moral significance. This article examines the portrayal of feminist theology's concept of the ‘female sin’ of passivity in Maitland's revisioning of Delilah (in Daughter of Jerusalem, 1978) and ‘Helen of Troy's Aerobics Class’ (in On Becoming A Fairy Godmother, 2003); how the crimes of mythical wicked women are retold as being motivated by revenge against men in ‘Deborah and Jael’ (Daughter of Jerusalem), ‘Siren Song’ and ‘The Swallow and the Nightingale’ (Far North and Other Dark Tales, 2008). The latter of these raises issues of women's conflicting loyalties, which is also considered in ‘The Swans’ (2008). The taboos of incest and child abuse are explored powerfully and sensitively in ‘Jocasta’ (2003) and ‘The Wicked Stepmother's Lament’ (A Book of Spells, 1987), and resistance to simplistic moralising is encapsulated in the story of a menopausal Eve, in ‘Choosing Paradise’ (2003).     

Transnational policy networks in the migration field: a challenge for the European Union

The migration policy field is a multilayered and fragmented area still lacking a strong global and European regime. Nonetheless, different initiatives and fora have been promoted in the last decade to increase the international dialogue on migration, with the active participation of non-state actors, and particularly civil society organisations (CSOs). The article reviews selected initiatives undertaken at the UN and European level, whereby institutional representatives engage with CSOs in furthering migration policies. These initiatives and platforms may constitute transnational policy networks (TPNs). It explores signals towards the consolidation of more structured and ‘hard’ forms of participatory policy-making on migration issues, as well as obstacles present in this engagement dynamic. The key question addressed in this study is whether and how European institutions have engaged with the TPNs in the field of migration. The article also explores how some of the TPNs influence institutional policy-making at the EU level.     

“众创时代”共青团院校创业教育的发展

在大众创业、万众创新的时代,共青团院校应该通过发挥团青引领优势、创新优势、桥梁优势、覆盖优势等,大力发展创业教育。通过培养大学生、青年、团员的创新创业能力,为社会经济繁荣和社会治理发展做出贡献。当然,共青团院校创业教育要更好地发挥其独特作用,还应该在争取党和政府制定激励共青团院校创业教育的政策、探索"全员创业教育"的新型机制、师生树立多元化创业教育的新观念、将创新创业贯穿人才培养的全过程、与青年企业及机构建立"无缝对接"以及加大创业教育的国际交流与合作等方面做出努力。     

The Young-Girl in Theory

This essay situates Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl within a long history of leftist art and theory that uses the figure of the girl to respond to, reflect on, and even to attempt to subvert the various subjective crises of late capitalism. At the same time, and reading Tiqqun against the grain, it asks whether the Young-Girl might be of any use for thinking through the new questions about subjectivity and representation that neoliberalism has presented for feminism.     

Education of the countryside at a crossroads: rural social movements and national policy reform in Brazil

This contribution explores the strategies used by popular movements seeking to advance social reforms, and the challenges once they succeed. It analyzes how a strategic alliance between the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) transformed the Ministry of Education's official approach to rural schooling. This success illustrates the critical role of international allies, political openings, framing, coalitions and state–society alliances in national policy reforms. The paper also shows that once movements succeed in advancing social reforms, bureaucratic tendencies such as internal hierarchy, rapid expansion and ‘best practices’ – in addition to the constant threat of cooptation – can prevent their implementation.     

Working Girls: Femininity and Entrapment in Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls

Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966) and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956) are novels that have long exerted a powerful hold on the popular imagination. The bestselling Peyton Place was adapted into a successful film in 1957 before becoming an iconic television series, running from 1964 to 1969. Valley of the Dolls was similarly re-imagined in two films, Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which, even today, retain a cult following. These books are typically remembered for their scandalous bringing to light of such ‘taboo’ issues as adultery, abortion, female sexuality and sexual abuse. But this article suggests that Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls are equally preoccupied with a sympathetic examination of the role of women in the post-war workplace. In both of these novels, the process of female self-fashioning is integrally related to a woman's entry into the workforce, and to the making and controlling of her own money. But this entry into the male-dominated workforce is inherently fraught with danger, and Metalious and Susann expose some of the myriad ways in which the so-called ‘American Dream’ is contingent on the entrapment, suppression and regulation of various forms of female desire and agency.     

Is there a global environmental justice movement?

One of the causes of the increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world is the changing metabolism of the economy in terms of growing flows of energy and materials. There are conflicts on resource extraction, transport and waste disposal. Therefore, there are many local complaints, as shown in the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJatlas) and other inventories. And not only complaints; there are also many successful examples of stopping projects and developing alternatives, testifying to the existence of a rural and urban global movement for environmental justice. Moreover, since the 1980s and 1990s, this movement has developed a set of concepts and campaign slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include environmental racism, popular epidemiology, the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous, biopiracy, tree plantations are not forests, the ecological debt, climate justice, food sovereignty, land grabbing and water justice, among other concepts. These terms were born from socio-environmental activism, but sometimes they have also been taken up by academic political ecologists and ecological economists who, for their part, have contributed other concepts to the global environmental justice movement, such as ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ or the ‘ecological footprint’.     

关 于 民 办 高 校 人才 培养适 应 市 场 需 求 的 研 究

民办高校的人才培养模式必须适应市场需求,在社会经济体制改革和高等教育发展转型的背景下,民办高校人才培养模式对市场需求的适应性存在着许多亟待解决的问题。而解决民办高校人才培养适应市场需求的主要途径有:一是重视对领军人物的引进与培养,稳步提升师资水平;二是合理定位,加强专业内涵建设;三是改进课程设置,强化实践教学;四是创新人才培养途径和方法,满足人才培养的市场需求。     

National identity-building and the “Ustaša-nostalgia” in Croatia: the past that will not pass

Most scholarship on post-Communist Croatia claims that the first Croatian president, Franjo Tu?man, intentionally rehabilitated the legacy of the World War II (WWII) Croatian Usta?a and its Nazi-puppet state. The rehabilitation of the Usta?a has been linked to Tu?man’s national reconciliation politics that tended toward a particular “forgetting of the past.” The national reconciliation was conceptualized as a joint struggle of both the Croatian anti-fascist Partisan and the Croatian WWII fascist Usta?a successors to achieve Croatian independence. However, the existing scholarship does not offer a comprehensive explanation of the nexus between national reconciliation and the rehabilitation of the Usta?a. Hence, this article will present how “Usta?a-nostalgia” does not stem from Tu?man’s intentions, but rather from the morphological gap occurring in Tu?man’s nation-building idea. Namely, Tu?man’s condemnation of the entire idea of Yugoslavism and Yugoslavia eventually brought about the perception that any historical agent advocating the idea of an independent Croatia is better than any form of Croatian Yugoslavism. Finally, the article will present how contemporary Croatian society is still seeped in “Usta?a-nostalgia” due to the hesitation of the post-Tu?man Croatian politics to come to terms with the legacy of his national reconciliation politics.     

Decentralisation,socio-territoriality and the exercise of indigenous self-governance in Bolivia

This article analyses the ‘indigenous autonomy’ being constructed in two dozen Bolivian municipalities and territories, in accordance with the 2009 Constitution. It finds that Bolivia’s 1994 decentralisation reforms, which created the country’s system of municipalities, are central to understanding the contemporary implementation of indigenous autonomy. Some indigenous people view as favourable the representative and material gains achieved by municipalisation, which helps explain why more majority-indigenous communities have not yet chosen the new option of indigenous autonomy. However, the new legal framework also limits indigenous self-governance, because territorial delimitations of the country’s municipalities are generally inconsistent with indigenous peoples’ ancestral territories. The new institutions of self-governance are legally obligated to include discrete legislative, executive and administrative functions, reflecting not indigenous norms but a municipal structure of liberal design. This study illustrates the way that indigenous self-determination may encounter obstacles where indigenous territorial jurisdictions must coincide with contemporary boundaries of colonial origins, rather than with pre-colonial territories.