Empowerment through work: the cases of disabled individuals and low-skilled women workers on the US–Mexican border

This article discusses workers at two organizations: one employing disabled individuals and another employing low-skilled Mexican-American women. Workers at both organizations show positive effects from employment, including having increased self-efficacy and self-esteem, valuing work as a source of income and personal growth, as well as developing a sense of community. These perceptions contrast sharply with statements presented about how they viewed themselves and their abilities before working in these organizations. Through comparisons between these two sets of experiences, we show how individuals draw meaning, dignity, self-esteem, and empowerment from work.     

Technological change and employment in Brazil,Colombia and Mexico: Which workers are most affected?

This article adopts a task-based approach to analyse employment patterns in terms of skill distribution and occupations in the urban labour markets of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico during 2002–15. The results suggest that employment fell strongly for some medium-skilled occupations, and increased slightly for both low-skilled and high-skilled occupations. Decomposition results suggest that the decreasing share of employment of secretaries and stenographers is fully explained by changes within industries (routinization hypothesis), whereas the decrease in machinery operation and handicraft jobs is mainly explained by changes between industries. By socio-demographic group, technological changes negatively affected women but benefited younger workers and those with higher educational attainment.     

The “male” privilege of White women,the “White” privilege of Black women,and vulnerability to violence: an intersectional analysis of Peace Corps workers in host countries

This article is an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nationality in development work. Using interview, document, and observational data, I situate this inquiry in the context of US women’s work in the Peace Corps, an organization within a field marked by colonialism. I find that White women and women of color have similar and yet instructively different experiences of their gendered identities in field sites, because race and gender differently affect their identities and relative privilege abroad. Specifically, White women volunteers are often afforded some degree of “male” privilege because of their race (though their race may render them vulnerable to sexual violence), while some volunteers of color are afforded a degree of “White” privilege because of their nationality (although their race may also render them vulnerable to violence). However, because the Peace Corps does not challenge conventional race and gender privileges, it lacks the organizational orientation and capacity to effectively address safety and assault among its women volunteers.     

Jean-Paul Sartre and the philosophy of négritude: Race,self, and society

In this article, Jean-Paul Sartre’s relationship to the négritude movement and black intellectuals in Paris between the 1940s and the 1960s is examined in sociological and historical context. Sartre’s version of négritude, developed in his 1948 treatise “Orphée noir” prefacing Léopold Senghor’s collection of African and Malagasy poetry, is analyzed in terms of its role in shaping the discourses and debates surrounding négritude and the relationship of black intellectuals to the rest of French society. Sartre’s phenomenological theories of race, juxtaposing dominant and subaltern ideologies, are contrasted with his dialectic of négritude. The antinégritude movement of the late 1960s is also considered with reference to Sartre’s theories and inspiration. During this period, the relationship that Sartre established with Martinican intellectual and revolutionary Frantz Fanon helped to place Sartre into prominence as an activist and a theorist of decolonization and Third World politics. Sartre’s theories of race, self, and society were integral to both his early and later works and warrant review as approaches to the sociology of culture and sources of reflection for contemporary postcolonial studies.

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The Ecologies of Protest in the Theatre of Aztlán

Abstract

This essay looks at the work of the contemporary Mexican-American woman playwright, Cherríe Moraga. It focuses on two of her plays which were produced during the mid-1990s entitled Heroes and Saints and Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, although other plays from this period, such as Circle in the Dirt: El Pueblo de East Palo Alto, also appear in the study. The plays are based on Moraga’s responses to certain environmental and historical events which took place in California during this period. I explore how each work stages environmental protest in ways that reinscribe gender, myth, and indigeneity. In particular, I explore how Moraga recreates on stage utopian and dytopian and past and present landscapes, and how she stages feminist protest in response to both the levels of pesticides used in large-scale agricultural farming and the exploitation of the workers.     

Financialization,resistance, and the question of women’s land rights

The financialization of food and agricultural land has been a critical driver of the “land-grabbing” phenomenon in the post 2007–2008 period: the potential for land to be both a productive and financial asset has driven interest in long-term land rentals and sales. Scholars and activists have highlighted the negative effects of these trends for rural populations. International institutions have promoted the recognition of land rights as a means to secure land from seizure, ensure equal participation in land acquisitions, and enable low-income populations, including women, to access credit. At the same time, activists are promoting collective land rights, customary modes of land tenure and the rights of Indigenous peoples. For activists, land reform models that promote the collective rights of peoples to govern land are critical to resisting individualized land ownership models that encourage the alienation of land. This article reviews these rights-based frameworks using a critical feminist perspective and argues that both the institutionalist and activist approaches require more nuanced understandings of gender and difference in order to effect gender-equitable change. This article concludes by mapping new feminist research directions that consider land and resources within the context of local–global processes, the global economy, intersectionality and global rights-based discourses.     

‘Run after time’: the roads of suitcase traders

Since the 1990s, the development of informal trade in trans-frontier places bordering Mongolia has offered opportunities for Mongolian people to develop new trade links with China, Kazakhstan, and Russia. These ‘businessmen of the transition’ or informal ‘suitcase traders’ go abroad along roads opened to and through Russia and China. My article analyses the ‘circulatory roads’ opened by suitcase traders. I take two examples of this activity: Mongolian Kazakh traders who go to Russia and Mongolian traders who go to China. The trans-frontier places reveal the particular ways of being and skills of drivers, retailers and wholesalers.     

Contesting identity of Taiwanese home-care workers: Worker,daughter, and do-gooder?

One of the administrative dilemmas in home-care delivery is that an appropriate and trusting relationship between the home-care worker and the client must be developed; yet this relationship is not readily visible to service managers. Setting up organizational processes for building allegiance and turning the home-care worker into an ideal one become major administrative tasks for home-care managers. Within such organizational context, the home-care worker is then faced with the issue of developing her own identity. This study lays out the Chinese particulars of what being a home-care worker is all about on the ground in Taiwan. In the Chinese context of family and cultural prerogatives around filial daughter and doing good, being a worker (agency perspective) and being a daughter (client's desire) are both problematic. Many home-care workers view themselves as a do-gooder portrayed by the Buddhist discourse of karma. The findings suggest that administrative tasks, client, and worker relationship may appear similar on the surface but the dynamics are quite different.     

Victims,soldiers, peacemakers and caretakers: the neoliberal constitution of women in the EU’s security policy

Feminist scholars praise and criticize the UNSC Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security for its considerations of women and gender in conflicts. Poststructuralist feminists show how gender is constructed in the UN’s security policies and how these constructions reproduce gendered dichotomies between women and men and representations of women as victims, part of civil society and neoliberal subjects. Although the UNSC Resolutions 1325 and 1820 are implemented by the EU, there is no literature on how the EU is taking up the UN’s discourse. Scholars studying gender policies in and of the EU mainly analyze the (in)effectiveness of EU gender mainstreaming but rarely interrogate its discursive foundations. Using a governmentality perspective, I argue that on the one hand the EU produces a binary and stereotypical understanding of gender, and on the other hand constitutes women as neoliberal subjects responsible for their own well-being, ignoring broader structures of (gender) inequality and war and making gender equality solely an instrument to achieve more security and development.     

‘The invisible enemy’: disability,loneliness and isolation

Abstract

The aim of this article is to quantitatively explore the relationship between disability, emotional loneliness and social isolation. The data analysis presents a number of statistically significant findings which illustrate that disabled people (N?=?250) were at increased risk of experiencing emotional loneliness and social isolation compared with the nondisabled group (N?=?355). This study identifies a number of disabling barriers which result in this overrepresentation of disabled people. The study aims to move away from a pathological explanation of linking loneliness and social isolation to disability, in order to explain this occurrence from a barrier-based approach.     

The impact of Arab-Israeli culture on the characteristics of the therapeutic encounter between women social workers and fathers in Arab parent–child centers

Summary: The aim of the study was to present the impact of the Arab-Israeli culture on the therapeutic encounter between women social workers with fathers in Arab parent–child centers in Israel. The research was qualitative, and was based on in-depth interviews with 15 Arab women social workers employed in nine parent–child centers, where they treat Arab fathers. Findings: The social workers’ perceptions about the fathers’ perceptions of the therapeutic encounter has an impact on the professional encounter. In some cases, these perceptions were a hindrance to the treatment and necessitated work to help the father overcome these perceptions and to reduce his potential resistance to the treatment. In other cases, the social workers’ perceptions about the fathers’ perceptions advanced the treatment. A supportive attitude toward the treatment meant a better starting point, which was reflected throughout the therapeutic process, when the father believed in the treatment and accepted the idea of asking for help. Application: The study findings show the importance of the social workers’ awareness of the fathers’ cultural stance, as well as of the similarities and differences between their own cultural perceptions and that of the fathers.     

Trapped workers,urban freedoms and labor control in Brazilian agriculture: Evidence from Southwest Goiás

Labor entrapment in Brazilian agriculture is not limited to ‘marginal geographies’ or sectors, but is a troubling presence at the core of some of the country's most developed and urbanized agricultural regions. This paper looks at the conditions of labor resistance and control in a dynamic and highly urbanized agricultural region of central Brazil that may explain the use there by employers of entrapped workers from distant regions. Commercial agriculture is intensely seasonal and sensitive to the quality and timing of delivery, so the fulfillment of labor demand continues to be a central concern of rural employers despite arguments for surplus labor. In the context of rural exodus, Brazilian farmers can no longer count on a flexible supply of residential workers. The article considers the importance of two ‘urban freedoms’ derived from the migration of rural workers to cities during the last 35 years. One is the increasing presence of labor unions and regulation in wage markets. The other is the creative strategies that households develop to weaken their dependence on agricultural work. To understand these strategies, gender relations within and outside of the household are taken into account. The paper ends by critically examining the argument that wage compression is the reason that employers in Brazilian agriculture resort to labor replacement in dynamic regions.     

Intact or in tatters? Family care of older women and men in urban Mexico

This article asks how family relationships affect the living conditions of low-income elderly people in urban Mexico. The existence of so many elderly women living alone in the country is at odds with cultural beliefs portraying mothers as the archetypal recipients of family charity. It is evident that there is little state provision of accommodation for the elderly, forcing older people to rely on their families for care. Living with family is usually thought to be a better option for older people. Yet many poorer families cannot afford to provide care, and some are not willing to do so. In addition, families treat elderly men and women differently, with significant consequences for housing conditions and well-being of men and women in later life.