Safe Cities programming and campaigning in the ActionAid Federation

In 2011, ActionAid International embarked on an ambitious new programme to prevent violence against women in urban public spaces. By the end of 2014, 13 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America were operating dedicated Safe Cities for Women programming. This article discusses the development of the Safe Cities Programme approach, highlighting how ActionAid has situated its work within – and in response to – the historic feminist global Safe Cities movement. It uses case studies from Nepal and Cambodia to illustrate the importance of coalition and movement building to secure policy change. We reflect on the sensitivities of an international NGO inhabiting space historically occupied by social movements.     

Type I error and power in trials with one interim futility analysis

Futility analysis reduces the opportunity to commit Type I error. For a superiority study testing a two‐sided hypothesis, an interim futility analysis can substantially reduce the overall Type I error while keeping the overall power relatively intact. In this paper, we quantify the extent of the reduction for both one‐sided and two‐sided futility analysis. We argue that, because of the reduction, we should be allowed to set the significance level for the final analysis at a level higher than the allowable Type I error rate for the study. We propose a method to find the significance level for the final analysis. We illustrate the proposed methodology and show that a design employing a futility analysis can reduce the sample size, and therefore reduce the exposure of patients to unnecessary risk and lower the cost of a clinical trial. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reader Letters to Women's Health Magazines

Women's health magazines emerged as a new cultural industry at the end of the twentieth century, representing a commercial application of the “will to health” developing in neoliberal societies. This paper explores recurring discourses in reader letters published between 1997 and 2000 in two Australian health magazines targeting white, middle-class women. Both GoodMedicine and Nature & Health are engaged in a similar cultural politics, tempting their audiences away from the established women's lifestyle, beauty, and fashion publications by representing health magazine content as natural, practical, and generally “good for you.” Reader letters published in these magazines deploy the discourses of pragmatism, authenticity, and critical engagement as new cultural imperatives for performing the “normal, healthy woman.” However, they offer little recognition of the social determinants of health, or the connections between individual practice and global biopolitics. Reader letters inscribe both the successes and failures experienced in performing the “will to health,” and have considerable potential to facilitate new ways of negotiating these cultural imperatives.     

Listening Is… Five Personal Worlds of Listening: An Auto-Ethnographic Approach

What is effective listening? This question intrigues both scholars and the general public. Theoretical explorations provide insight into the listening process as well as pragmatic guidelines for how to be a good listener. But even the most learned listening scholar will often fall back on the observation that they know effective listening best when they experience it.

Five renowned listening experts were asked to respond to the question, “What is listening from the perspective of your lived experience?” Each was asked to work from an auto-ethnographic methodology. The five lifeworlds described in this study represent their responses to this question and offer unique, individual ethnographic contexts describing the listening experience of each of the participants.     

Transnational business feminism: Exporting feminism in the global economy

Business feminism is a brand of feminism that privileges women's advancement in the corporate hierarchy and centres corporations as the ultimate purveyors of gender equity. While scholars have critiqued this formulation, little empirical research has analysed the processes that guide the dissemination and translation of business feminism in organizational settings within global corporate networks. This article advances scholarship on the global processes that drive the export of business feminism logics. We analyse the process of dissemination of business feminism from the headquarters of multinational corporations to corporate hubs located in Hungary. This process relies on women executives who are charged with translating policies and practices originating in the headquarters of western corporations. In‐depth interviews with women executives charged with implementing corporate policies reveal the ways in which business feminism is interpreted, modified and/or resisted by actors within organizational settings.