Views,events, and debates

Welcome to Gender & Development's Views, events, and debates section. We'd like to invite readers to respond to any of the views expressed in this section, to contact us with reports of events, and to suggest debates on issues relevant to the journal's concern: to inspire and strengthen development initiatives which support the goals of gender equality and women's empowerment.

We'd also like to invite you to send us your feedback on Gender & Development, and suggestions for future issues, to: gadeditor@oxfam.org.uk     

Views,events, and debates

Welcome to Gender & Development's Views, events, and debates section. We'd like to invite readers to respond to any of the views expressed in this section, to contact us with reports of events, and to suggest debates on issues relevant to the journal's concern: to inspire and strengthen development initiatives which support the goals of gender equality and women's empowerment.

We'd also like to invite you to send us your feedback on Gender & Development, and suggestions for future issues, to: gadeditor@oxfam.org.uk     

Views,events, and debates

Welcome to Gender & Development's Views, events, and debates section. We’d like to invite readers to respond to any of the views expressed in this section, to contact us with reports of events, and to suggest debates on issues relevant to the journal's concern: to inspire and strengthen development initiatives which support the goals of gender equality and women's empowerment.

We’d also like to invite you to send us your feedback on Gender & Development, and suggestions for future issues, to: gadeditor@oxfam.org.uk     

Views,events, and debates

Welcome to Gender and Development's Views, Events and Debates section. We'd like to invite readers to respond to any of the views expressed in this section, to contact us with reports of events, and to suggest debates on important contemporary issues of relevance to the journal's core concern: to strengthen and support development which supports women's empowerment and gender equality as goals. We'd also like to invite you to send us your feedback on Gender and Development, and suggestions for future issues, to: jporter@oxfam.org.uk     

Far Away So Close: Race,Whiteness, and German Identity

Race and nation have been difficult concepts in Germany since the Holocaust. Although race has seemingly disappeared from public discourse, the concept is very present in the narrative construction of white German national identities. In fact in Germany, race, and more specifically whiteness, disappears into a national naming. On the basis of a qualitative study on women activists, I examine to what extent the research participants struggle with the racialized discourse on German identity and what this struggle looks like. Using John Hartigan's (2000 Hartigan, John Jr. 2000. Object lessons in whiteness: Antiracism and the study of white folks. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 7(3): 373–406. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) approach to analyzing ethnographic accounts of whiteness, I show how a racialization of German identity plays out in complex and complicated ways. On the one hand, the narratives are complicit with a racialized Germanness, yet on the other hand, the idea of a unified, white, cultural community is being challenged. To move toward a postcolonial narrative of Germanness that includes Germany's history of colonialism as well as fascism, we need to move away from race, but we also need to move toward race. A starting point would be provided by focusing on racism, not as a fringe issue of German society but rather as an urgent matter that is located at the centre of German politics and is actively shaping its history.     

Generating Dynamic Democratic Discussions: An Analysis of Teaching With U.S. Presidential Debates

Researchers have found that when young people participate in discussions of controversial political issues, they often become more politically engaged and informed (Hess, 2009 Hess, Diana E. (2009). Controversy in the classroom: The democratic power of discussion. New York, NY: Routledge.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Nonetheless, some educators avoid fostering such discussions because they can become heated and distract from academic learning (Hess, 2002 Hess, Diana E. (2002). Discussing controversial public issues in secondary social studies classrooms: Learning from skilled teachers. Theory &; Research in Social Education, 30(1), 10–41.[Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). Presidential elections, including the highly publicized debates, provide substantial material for discussions of major national and international issues, but no published research has examined how educators can leverage these events to generate productive civic learning experiences. In this article, we analyze data collected in seven high school classrooms during the 2012 presidential election to examine the challenges and opportunities associated with generating substantive, dynamic discussions of presidential debates. Our findings indicate that students enjoyed learning about candidates' different perspectives and that certain strategies were especially helpful for fostering substantive discussions: (a) scaffolding students' preparation for discussion; (b) providing opportunities for students to address open-ended questions; (c) redirecting students' engagement in competitive, interpersonal dynamics to learning about public issues; and (d) countering students' partisan tendencies. We discuss implications for practice and research and present a conceptual framework for generating dynamic, substantive democratic discussions.     

“Tapping” Women for Post-Crisis Capitalism

Abstract

Girls and women have become the public faces of development today, through the success of “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” policy agendas and similar development narratives that mediate feminist claims through market logic. Women, these narratives assert, are more productive, responsible, and sustainable economic agents for future growth in the context of global financial crisis and therefore their empowerment is economically prudent. In this article, I provide a feminist reading of Foucault's critique of human capital to examine the discursive terrain of the “Smart Economics” agenda and to understand the knowledge it produces about female bodies, subjectivities and agency. Through a discussion of the World Bank's 2012 World Bank. 2012. World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development. Washington, DC: World Bank.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] World Development Report on gender equality, I argue that the current narratives of women's empowerment are premised on a series of gender essentialisms and their “activation” through biopolitical interventions. The activation narrative of human capital appears, under feminist eyes, to reflect the notion that the supposedly intrinsic responsible and maternal nature of women can be harnessed to produce more profitable and sustainable development outcomes and, by extension, “rescue” global capitalism.     

Taking culture (and race) beyond dichotomies: a reply to Gans

Gans' (2012 Gans, H. 2012. Against culture versus structure. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 19(2): 125–134. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Against culture versus structure. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 19 (2), 125–134) indictment of cultural sociology (CS) and his anointment of structural sociology would have us believe the two are incommensurate paradigms. I do not agree. I deconstruct this binary with theory and empiricism from the intersection of CS and the sociology of race and ethnicity (SRE). First, I redefine the project of CS, contra Gans' interpretation. Second, I refute Gans' assumption that ‘CS is not much interested in cultural processes' by demonstrating how CS is concerned with the process and action of the material and symbolic aspects of social life. Third, I examine why well-placed trepidation over ‘culture of poverty’-style explanations may influence a negative view of CS/SRE. Fourth, I map advances birthed from the CS/SRE connection that contest Gans' assertion that ‘CS has not paid much attention to policy’. And fifth, I show how CS avoids tautological arguments in which culture would be ‘its own cause’.     

To Encounter a Child: Maternal Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of Reading

This article offers an outline and preliminary analyses of key aspects of Lisa Baraitser's (2009 Baraitser , L. ( 2009 ). Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption . London, UK, and New York , NY : Routledge . [Google Scholar]) Maternal Encounters as a situating opening piece in a special feature arising from an intensive seminar on Baraitser's work held in Dublin in September 2010. The first section opens out some of the psychoanalytic implications of Baraitser's theory of maternal subjectivity. The second section considers the importance of temporality and the interruption of the “seamless” thinking subject for the emergence of a maternal subject and considers Baraitser's maternal subject in relation to some key queer and feminist positionings of maternity. The final section assesses the text's contribution to philosophical debates. First, it discusses how Baraitser attends to the everyday in developing an aesthetics of ordinariness. Second, it looks at deconstruction and inhabitation. Finally, it considers cultural phenomenology, objects, and the magic Baraitser locates in things.     

A Vygotskian Approach to Heterogeneous Communication and Multi/cultural Literacy: Commentary on David Kellogg's “Taking Uptaking Up,or, a Deconstructionist ‘Ontology of Difference’ and a Developmental One”

In this commentary, I review Kellogg's comments on a recent editorial in the journal Mind, Culture, and Activity (Roth, 2008 Roth, W.-M. 2008. Realizing Marx's ontology of difference. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 15: 87–92. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). Concerning Kellogg's code-switching model for learning language, I present and exemplify a dialectic problem of multi/cultural literacy: the first articulation that crosses the boundaries of cultures and languages presupposes the heterogeneous Self and culture/ language in which the boundaries are already problematized. I take a Vygotskian approach and articulate that the heterogeneous nature of communicative performances constitutes the central aspect for this dialectic constitution of multi/cultural literacy. Therefore, I comment that ontology of difference constitutes the theoretical framework that explains development.     

Comment on Cross,Fine, Jones,and Walsh (2012): Do Mental Health Professionals Who Serve on/with Child Advocacy Centers Experience Role Conflict?

Cross, Fine, Jones, and Walsh's (2012 Cross, T. P., Fine, J. E., Jones, L. M. and Walsh, W. A. 2012. Mental health professionals in children's advocacy centers: Is there role conflict?. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 21(1): 91–108. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) article “Mental Health Professionals in Children's Advocacy Centers: Is There Role Conflict?” challenges two recent publications' criticisms that child advocacy centers create role conflict for mental health professionals and explains how child advocacy centers actually work, describing the different roles for mental health professionals who participate in them. This commentary points out that more precise data would have helped to specifically address the critics' concerns. Furthermore, professional ethics and licensure issues may have served as an additional but unacknowledged check on the “spillover effect” that the critics have alleged comes with being associated with prosecution. This commentary also highlights three main strengths of the Cross and colleagues' article.     

Community-Based Participatory Research as a Social Work Research and Intervention Approach

Social workers are now often expected to base their practice on solid empirical findings, but research can vary in terms of its usefulness and relevance to practice. Some social workers have criticized traditional research approaches, suggesting that they are not consistent with the profession's mission to serve vulnerable and disadvantaged populations (e.g., Finn, 1994 Finn, J. L. 1994. The promise of participatory research. Journal of Progressive Human Services, 5: 25–42. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). Community-based participatory action research may be an appropriate alternative that is participatory, empowering, and committed to social justice (Minkler & Wallerstein, 2008 Minkler, M. and Wallerstein, N. 2008. “Introduction to CBPR: New issues and emphases”. In Community-based participatory research for health, 2nd, Edited by: Minkler, M. and Wallerstein, N. 5–23. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.  [Google Scholar]). This article explores the connection between social work and CBPR, illustrating how CBPR can contribute significantly to achieving the field's goals.     

The Second Time ’Round: Gender Construction in Remarried Couples’ Wedding Planning

Humble, Zvonkovic, and Walker (2008 Humble, A. M., Zvonkovic, A. M. and Walker, A. J. 2008. “The royal we”: Gender ideology, display, and assessment in wedding work. Journal of Family Issues, 29(1): 3–25. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) studied division of labor in first-time marriages, finding a range of gender construction. This study applied their conceptualization to remarried couples, for whom little is known about division of labor or wedding experiences. Fourteen couples in which at least 1 spouse had recently remarried were interviewed about their wedding planning. Data analysis consisted of direct content analysis, rank order comparison, and matrix analysis. Contrasting Humble et al.'s findings, traditional and egalitarian couples were more common than transitional couples. Although remarriages tended to involve smaller and less complicated weddings, the majority of the couples replicated gendered patterns from their first weddings in subsequent weddings.     

Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive—Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender

The author offers a revision of melancholy gender (Butler, 1995 Butler, J. 1995. Melancholy gender.. Psychoanal. Dial., 5: 165–180. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) in which sex differences are theorized. Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic feminist theory that emphasizes the mother's role as primary caretaker and as pre-Oedipal object for both boys and girls, the author suggests that, in heterosexual development and within heterosexual cultures, same-sex object-desire is likely to be unavowedly lost for girls but preemptively foreclosed for boys. While the theory of melancholy gender does not differentiate between loss and foreclosure, the author argues that this is an important distinction such that Freud's two preconditions of melancholy—unavowed loss and ambivalent identification—are more likely to be part of female development than of male development, leading to melancholy femininity in girls and obsessive-compulsive masculinity in boys. This argument allows the theory of melancholy gender to speak to the empirical and clinical finding that femininity and depression tend to be associated whereas masculinity and depression do not.     

Righteous Dopefiend and AIDS,Sex, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa

This essay offers a comparative reading of two ethnographies, Ida Susser's AIDS, Sex, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa (2009 Susser, I. 2009. AIDS, Sex, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), a multisited text focused on community responses to dynamics of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in Southern Africa, and Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg's Righteous Dopefiend (2009 Bourgois, P. and Schonberg, J. 2009. Righteous Dopefiends, Berkeley: University of California Press.  [Google Scholar]), a photo-ethnographic exploration of lumpen subjectivity within an encampment of homeless drug addicts in San Francisco. Pointing out these texts' common focus on circumstances of the precarious and marginal poor under conditions of neoliberalization, social conditions shaping dynamics of HIV prevention, and poor people's negotiations of affliction and structural violence, this essay highlights the theoretical and practical effects of these books' divergent methodologies, scopes of analysis, and differing degrees of emphasis on subjective experience as well as women's experiences. It also considers a key commonality across these texts: their attention to the role of historical experience and political-economic context in shaping responses to affliction and structural violence.     

The Influence of Gender Role Attitudes on Perceptions of Women's Work Performance and the Importance of Fair Pay

Gender role attitudes and their influence on perceptions of male and female work performance are important aspects understanding workplace gender inequality. Reskin (2000 Reskin , B. 2000 . “Proximate Causes of Employment Discrimination.” Contemporary Sociology 29 ( 2 ): 319 – 328 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) suggests researchers must look to non-conscious causes in order to understand and alleviate gender inequality in the workplace. Also critical to understanding workplace gender inequality is the differential importance placed on being paid fairly. Using a survey sample of 525 traditional undergraduate students from a public university in the middle south of the United States consisting of approximately one-third African Americans and two-thirds whites, race and sex differences are examined. The more liberal the respondent in terms of gender roles, the less they perceived performance inferiority of females. Excluding white males, those more liberal on gender roles perceived fair pay as more important. Gender differences are stronger among whites. Implications for the gender inequities at work are discussed.     

Children's Development as Participation in Everyday Practices across Different Institutions

Children participate in different institutional collectives in their everyday life. Home, school, and kindergarten are the institutional contexts that most children share. Although there are variations between home practices and school practices, they collectively share a common core framed by societal conditions. In drawing upon Vygotsky's (1998) Vygotsky, L. S. 1998. The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (M. J. Hall, Trans., Vol. 5, Child Psychology), New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.  [Google Scholar] theory of the social situation of development and Hedegaard's (2009) Hedegaard, M. 2009. “Children's development from a cultural-historical approach: Children's activity in everyday local settings as foundation for their development”. In Mind, Culture, and Activity Vol. 16, 64–82. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] theory of development conceptualised as the child's participation within and across several institutions at the same time, it has been possible to examine how school practices influence home practice and the child's social situation of development. A case study of an Australian child's participation across different institutions (family and school) was undertaken to capture and analyse the dynamic processes through which development was afforded. In the case study there was a large disjunction between institutional practices of the home and school that the child had to negotiate. Due to teacher knowledge of only the child's relation to the school institution, and not the home institution, the affordances for development and the child's changing relations to his environment, were invisible to the educators in this study. The findings suggest foregrounding an understanding of children's development as changes in children's activities and thereby changing their relations to reality across institutional practices in order to support a broader view of development in early childhood education.     

Advanced Concentration Macro Competencies for Social Work Practitioners: Identifying Knowledge,Values, Judgment and Skills to Promote Human Well-Being

The Association of Community Organization and Social Administration (ACOSA) was formed in 1987–88; thereafter, the annual ACOSA meetings became part of the Council on Social Work Education's (CSWE) Annual Program Meeting (Roberts-DeGennaro, 2002 Roberts-DeGennero, M. (2002). History of ACOSA. http://www.acosa.org/history.html (http://www.acosa.org/history.html)  [Google Scholar]). ACOSA's purpose is “to promote teaching, research, and social work practice in the areas of community organization and social administration” (ACOSA, 2011a Association of Community Organization and Social Administration. (2011a). Goals and Focus for the Decade, Approved by the ACOSA Board of Directors, January 11, 2011. http://www.acosa.org/CO_ACOSA_Goals_Focus.pdf (http://www.acosa.org/CO_ACOSA_Goals_Focus.pdf)  [Google Scholar]). Most schools of social work have some required content for students in the areas of policy practice, program development, community planning, organizational development, administration, management, and community and neighborhood organizing. Organizational members sought to support these areas with research, best practice identification, and effective teaching/learning strategies.     

Comment on Cross,Fine, Jones,and Walsh (2012): Good Therapeutic Services— Therapeutic Advocacy and Forensic Neutrality

Cross, Fine, Jones, and Walsh (2012 Cross, T. P., Fine, J. E., Jones, L. M. and Walsh, W. A. 2012. Mental health professionals in children's advocacy centers: Is there role conflict?. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 21(1): 91–108. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) provided a thoughtful review and critique of a book chapter describing the interview process at Child Advocacy Centers. They observed some of the ways that concerns raised in that chapter are being addressed and described revised guidelines that further clarify issues. Ongoing research and examination of the important processes carried on by child advocacy centers and the role fulfilled by mental health professionals in the investigation of child sexual abuse contributes positively to service delivery.