The Third Shift? Gender and Empowerment in a Women’s Ecotourism Cooperative

Ecotourism is lauded as a path toward sustainable development and women’s empowerment in rural areas around the world, but little is known about how gendered expectations shape its processes and outcomes. This paper employs an in-depth qualitative case study of a female-only ecotourism cooperative in rural Mexico to investigate how local gender dynamics influence women’s opportunities to benefit from ecotourism development. Findings show that women’s family and work commitments prevent their ability to devote the resources and energy necessary to make the cooperative successful. In this context, women are first expected to be wives and mothers, and to fulfill the substantial daily expectations associated with those roles. In addition, most women work outside the home. This leaves little time or energy for a “third shift” as ecotourism entrepreneurs running their own cooperative. Women put their own interests and goals on the back burner, because of the demands of the first two shifts. If ecotourism is to empower women, localized gender structures must be understood and addressed. Overlooking these challenges can mean that ecotourism projects, even those specifically aimed at empowering women, may only further burden women and reinforce gender models that perpetuate inequality.     

The Formality of Informal Civil Society: Ukraine’s EuroMaidan

Over a period of three months, starting in late 2013, Ukraine experienced a remarkable civic transformation. What started as peaceful protests largely consisting of young idealists, grew quickly into an organized yet decentralized social movement, a conglomeration of semi-formal initiatives, and a loosely defined network of related formal and informal organizations—a process that ultimately prompted significant political and social changes in Ukraine. This paper offers three case studies related to EuroMaidan to provide insight into the formal and informal dimensions of civil society, contrasting those with official designations. The discussion contributes to the long-debated question of the strength or weakness of civil society in the context of Eastern Europe and suggests directions for future research with regard to the conceptualization of civil society and our understanding of formality.     

Piloting a social work doctoral programme: Ukraine’s vignette

In Ukraine the last decade was marked by significant changes in social work education development that evidence its academization and professionalization. International cooperation was a useful catalyst in these processes. The above has specific implications for developing the three cycles of social work education in Ukraine – Bachelor, Master and PhD programmes. Implemented in 2009–2012, an international project involving six European countries supported piloting of the first PhD programme in social work in Ukraine. This programme encountered a set of challenges that originated from the particularities of social work education in Ukraine and the broader academic context. Participatory observations and reflections demonstrate the challenges evident in Global North–Global South professional relations. Ukrainian social work education history evidences permanent localization of the international standards and experiences that have had various effects on social work academization.     

Ukraine’s drive to independence in 1991

The article provides a re-examination of how Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, covering events both in the republic and at the centre in Moscow. It argues that success in 1991 was largely based on a compromise between various forces, including the Communist Party of Ukraine and the democratic opposition, but in turn the failure to address several basic issues, such as the status of Crimea and the centralization of power around the Communist and post-Communist elite, paved the way for the Euromaidan uprising of 2013–14. Virtually all the factors that resulted in protests and conflict in spring 2014 were present in some form in 1988–91 and remained unresolved in the years that followed the declaration of independence.     

Totality from Interiority: The Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel as Epic in Georg Lukàcs’s The Theory of the Novel

In The Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukàcs’s (1885–1971) approach to the nineteenth-century Russian novel evidences underlying conflict: without presenting theoretical justification, Lukàcs continually refers to these works as ‘epic’. Yet according to the opposition he creates between novel and epic, the idea of a work’s belonging to both genres — even peripherally — appears paradoxical. This article explores the possibility that from Lukàcs’s approach within the Theory, the particular history and characteristics of the nineteenth-century Russian novel make it genuinely qualify for the seemingly-impossible classification of renewed epic; hence his continual implication that this is its true genre. Lukàcs’s treatments of nineteenth-century Russian novelists mentioned in the Theory are examined as support for this reading.     

Winning a Battle but Losing the War? Third Sector and Social Policy in Latin America: The Case of Uruguay

This paper analyzes some aspects of the third sector’s involvement process in the provision of public social services. Using evidence garnered in previous research based on in-depth interviews, I offer elements toward an assessment of the consequences this process has produced not only in terms of the gains and losses it has produced for social policy, but also for the very identity and constitutive characteristics of the third sector. The evidence hereby compiled strengthens skepticism toward the hypothesis that sees a transformative potential in the role of the third sector in social policy in Latin America. This skepticism arises from issues detected by involved actors themselves and that are linked to the weakness of the sector as a whole.     

Third Sector in Ukraine: Civic Engagement Before and After the “Euromaidan”

This study explores the determinants of the low level of civic engagement in Ukraine. Applying the methodological framework of analytical sociology, we consider different social mechanisms that explain the weakness of the Ukrainian third sector. First, we discuss how the political system and economic performance of the country have shaped beliefs, values, and motives of people by creating the context for their actions. Second, we focus on different aspects of people’s experiences during the Soviet times to formulate a number of hypotheses concerning unwillingness of citizens to join CSOs. Analyzing the survey data of the years 2010 (beginning of Viktor Yanukovych’s presidency) and 2014 (survey conducted right after the “Euromaidan”), we argue that some specific features of Homo Sovieticus, such as passivity, absence of political identification, and reliance on informal networks negatively affect the propensity of people to participate in CSOs. These effects are complemented by disappointment with the post-Soviet transformation and low subjective social status. Based on the results of analyses, we formulate suggestions concerning possible ways of fostering the development of civil society in Ukraine.     

Symbols in Anderson’s The Egg

The application of symbolism makes Sherwood Anderson's The Egg better in the depth of thinking and in the portrayal of people' s life and destiny.This essay is going to interpret different symbols embodied in this short story.     

‘Race War’: Black American GIs and West Indians in Britain During The Second World War

During the Second World War some three million American service personnel came to the British Isles. Among them were more than 130,000 African-Americans who were segregated and subjected to the discrimination that crossed the Atlantic with their white countrymen. However, while many of the British hosts often welcomed the African-American GIs, the American-style Jim Crow was not welcomed. But while it has often seemed that the wartime British were free of race prejudice, treatment of troops and workers from the colonies, particularly the West Indies, suggest that this was not so. This article looks at the response to black GIs and West Indians in order to demonstrate that there was in fact greater continuity between British wartime and post-war race relations than has often appeared to be the case.     

Nikolai Gogol'’s Self-Fashioning in the 1830s: The Postcolonial Perspective

This study examines Gogol'’s complex self-fashioning during the time of the creation and reception of his Ukrainian tales Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan'ki [Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka] (1831–1832) in light of the postcolonial concept of mimicry. Gogol'’s self-fashioning is studied through his submission to the symbolic power responsible for branding him as the Other in imperial Russian culture, as well as through his deliberate strategy of mimicry. Not only did Gogol'’s marginal social status and his Ukrainian ethnicity create a social hierarchy responsible for fashioning him as “an outsider within” imperial culture, Gogol' himself engaged in the colonial mimicry, trying to reverse the colonial gaze that imagined him as a “sly” Ukrainian. Challenging the accepted view of Gogol' as one who internalized the colonial stereotype of a “sly” Ukrainian, this study treats Gogol'’s identity as strategic, positional, and ambivalent. The first part of the study focuses on the manipulation of stereotypes of the Other within the Russian nationalist imagination in the early 1830s; the second part examines Gogol'’s ambivalent visual self-representation and social performance that simultaneously mimicked and menaced the colonial authority.     

The political is the personal: women’s participation in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential.     

Women’s activism as public relations in a patriarchal society: The case of Kuwait

This paper addresses an important era of women’s activism in Kuwait. In the 1950s, when the government recognized women’s rights for education, the wave to obtain other civil rights clashed with culture, tradition and religion which became serious obstacles facing women in their struggle for basic rights. This historical study focuses on the establishment of two women’s organizations -- the Arab Women’s Development Society in December 1962 and the Kuwait Women's Cultural and Social Society in February 1963. To sway the negative image of women in a patriarchal society, women used activism as a public relations tool to achieve their social, civil and political rights. The study uses cultural-economic model (CEM) to illustrate how activism and public relations were articulated as synonymous to foster women’s rights in Kuwait. Archived documents and content analysis of media content published in the 1960s reveal that activism played a vital role as a public relations strategy and that social activism was more effective than political activism. The study highlights the implications of culture within the context of both public relations and activism.