Mobilizing Gender to Promote Peace: The Case of Machsom Watch

The binary model that presents women as peaceful and men as warfaring is a common conception of war and peace. Despite increasing levels of gender equality in most spheres of public life and decreasing gender segregation in institutions in many parts of the world, the associational link of men to war and women to peace remains widespread. Focusing on the Israeli women??s peace organization, Machsom Watch, this article uses a content analysis of interactions between Machsom Watch activists, soldiers and Palestinians to examine how gendered political opportunity structures affect and are affected by interactions between individuals, organizations and institutions. The paper highlights the contradiction between Machsom Watch??s form as a women-only organization and their framing and report language, which is non-gender specific. I argue that this contradiction emerges from their strategic negotiation of the gendered political opportunity structure as well as their culturally bounded experiences of gendered interactions and embodied gender norms. More generally, I argue that by understanding political opportunity structures as being bound by cultural norms that create distinct sets of opportunities and constraints for different groups of people, scholars can better understand the particular manifestation of social movement action and thereby more fully account for human agency in social and political structures. Additionally, this paper encourages social movement scholars to understand social movement framing as both a product of political opportunities and constraints as well as an influence in the formation of the political opportunity structure.     

Turn-taking patterns in deaf conversation

This paper will focus on the turn-taking patterns of Deaf signers and will compare them with turn-taking patterns found in spoken interaction. Turn-taking in the conversation of hearing people has been the subject of considerable attention, but the way conversation is organised by Deaf conversationalists has received less attention. This paper reports on a small project involving conversational data obtained from two Deaf friendship groups, one all-female and one all-male. Our main aim was to establish whether Deaf interactants orient to a one-at-a-time model of turn-taking, or whether there was any evidence to suggest they can also orient to a more collaborative model. It has been assumed by researchers in the field of Deaf Studies that Deaf interactants orient to a one-at-a-time model since, where the medium of communication is visual rather than sound based, participants can attend to only those sources of talk that they can see. The paper also examines the data to see if there are any gender differences in the way Deaf interactants organise conversation.     

The Beginnings of Tool Use by Infants and Toddlers

Children (aged 9, 14, 19, and 24 months) were encouraged to use tools to achieve a demonstrated goal. Each tool was most efficiently applied when held by the handle with the thumb toward the head of the tool in a radial grip. The tools were presented at midline and oriented to the left and right on alternating trials, so the children who managed to grasp a tool in both orientations with the radial grip demonstrated planning of actions in advance. The tools included a spoon, hairbrush, toy hammer, and magnet; the goals were to feed one's self, feed another, brush one's hair, brush another's hair, hit pegs, and retrieve metal objects. Children were found to use more radial grips with the self‐directed tools (i.e., hairbrush‐to‐self and spoon‐to‐self), indicating that they could plan their actions better when directed toward the self than toward an external goal.     

Lessons From Infants: 1960–2000

Our image of the infant as an organism interacting with the environment has changed dramatically in the past 40 years. A new surge of infancy research began in the 1960s and continues unabated today. The view of the infant has been transformed from that of a primarily reflexive organism to a highly competent being, exquisitely sensitive to sensory and perceptual information. Controversy still swirls around the issue of when infants acquire specific knowledge about objects and events. New work is reviewed on how infants and toddlers use knowledge to guide their behavior in challenging situations. Despite the tremendous growth of knowledge about infant development over the past 40 years, it seems that we are on the threshold of even more exciting discoveries.     

Space,time, and self: Rethinking aging in the contexts of immigration and transnationalism

Critical gerontology views aging as a social construction that reflects the intersections of micro-processes with the macro-level forces of individual aging experiences. In the contexts of immigration and transnationalism, however, the macro-structural conditions, dynamics and experiences of aging have become further diversified and complicated. The dearth of empirical and explanatory knowledge in this area has inhibited us from comprehending aging in a changing world. Drawing on data from a study of Chinese grandparents' experiences of transnational caregiving in Canada, this article examines the impacts of such experiences on three interconnected dimensions – spatial, temporal and cognitive – of aging. Although the practice of transnational caregiving allows skilled immigrant families to mobilize care resources outside Canada, it has not only ruptured the traditional trajectories of aging for their elderly parents, but also complicated the inequalities that they have to bear on individual, familial and transnational levels. I argue that the critical examination of aging in the context of transnational caregiving helps us take into consideration those dimensions (such as place, space, time, and knowledge) that are changed by immigration processes, and rethink aging from a broader perspective that links seniors' experiences with their relationship with their adult immigrant children's families and macro-structures outside national borders.     

Beyond the Preschool Years: Children’s Perceptions About Starting Kindergarten

This article describes a research study that investigated three‐ and four‐year‐old Canadian preschool children’s perceptions about starting kindergarten. Findings from 33 focus‐group discussions suggest that children begin to formulate ideas about starting kindergarten prior to school entry. Children’s responses were grouped according to three themes, play versus academic activities and homework; getting bigger but still needing help; and rules. Overall, the responses highlighted their expectations regarding continuity and discontinuity between the two environments. These findings support the position that children should be given the opportunity to contribute to the planning of transition practices.     

Hindsight,foresight and insight: The challenges of longitudinal qualitative research

This paper describes a UK based longitudinal qualitative study following approximately 100 young people over 9 years. It provides an overview of the research design, methods of data collection and analysis as well as reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of the strategies employed. We focus on the value of a devolved research design, complementary cross-section and temporal analytic approaches and the effects of being involved in a longitudinal study on researchers and participants. The paper aims to contribute to a growing understanding of the practical, ethical and epistemological challenges presented by longitudinal qualitative methods, and highlights those challenges that are specific to this method as well as those which are amplified by this kind of approach.