Contextualizing the Employment Decisions of New Mothers

This paper suggests that the employment behavior and stated preferences of new mothers are not simply a product of choices that individual women make or characteristics that they have. Rather, using qualitative interview data from a sample of new parents, this paper illustrates some of the interactional and institutional contexts in which new mothers' approaches to paid work are embedded, with a particular focus on gender. Among the themes explored are the influence of husbands' preferences on women's decisions, the role of economic processes in structuring parenting arrangements, as well as the prominence of gendered cultural imagery in new parents' accounts about their work and family arrangements.     

Brown rats (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Rattus norvegicus</Emphasis>) in urban ecosystems: are the constraints related to fieldwork a limit to their study?

Nowadays, the majority of human beings live in urban ecosystems, with this proportion expected to continue increasing in the future. With the growing importance of urban rat-associated issues (e.g. damages to urban infrastructures, costs of rat-control programs, rat-associated health risks), it is becoming indispensable to fill the identified gaps in knowledge on the urban brown rat regarding, among others, its density, home range, genetic structure, and infectious status. In this context, live-trapping is a crucial prerequisite to any scientific investigation. This paper assesses the main constraints and challenges regarding the urban field and describes the major steps to be considered when planning research on urban rats. The primary challenges are i) the characterization of the urban experimental unit; ii) the choice of a trapping design: the use of live-trapping in capture-mark-recapture design, in association with modern statistics, is highly recommended to answer ecological questions (although these methods, mostly developed in natural ecosystems, need to be implemented for the urban field); iii) the potential ethical considerations with regard to animal welfare and field-worker safety; iv) the building of mutually-beneficial collaborations with city stakeholders, pest control professionals, and citizens. Emphasis must be put on communication to the public and education of field-workers. One major need of modern urban rat research is a peer-validated field methodology allowing reproducibility, repeatability, and inference from urban field studies and enabling researchers to answer long-standing key questions about urban rat ecology.     

Accounting for Divorce: Gender and Uncoupling Narratives

Past research about uncoupling processes has focused on the differing narratives people offer to explain the end of their marriages, depending on whether or not they perceive themselves to have initiated the ending. This article extends previous work by adding gender to the analysis, exploring intersections between accounts of divorce and accountability to cultural assumptions related to gender. In this inductive study, we examine qualitative interview data—particularly discrepancies in the narratives of some men and women—and suggest that gender mediates how people talk about the process of uncoupling as well as their motives for divorce.     

UNHCR Operations in Pakistan in the Early 1980s

The aim of this article is to describe the largest and longestoperation carried out by the UNHCR in providing protection andassistance to refugees from April 1979, when the Governmentof Pakistan requested UNHCR to urgently help deal with the risinginflux of Afghan asylum-seekers. This refugee crisis was butone consequence of the engagement of the superpowers in thisstrategically significant part of the world. The analysis focuseson three main factors: the magnitude of the refugee crisis,the complexity of the logistics, and the nature of the securitysituation. The challenge facing the Government of Pakistan,as well as the international community, was an enormous one.UNHCR, in addition to its mandated protection role, assumedthe overall coordination of the international relief effort,including the mobilization of resources, as well as being responsiblefor the international procurement of relief supplies, materialand equipment. This task was complicated by the security situationand the fact that local population was outnumbered by the refugeeswith whom it had to share already meagre resources.     

Prevalence and risk factors of Leptospira infection in urban brown rats (Rattus norvegicus), Vienna,Austria

Urban Ecosystems - Leptospirosis is a worldwide bacterial zoonosis which incidence is expected to increase in conjunction with global change. In urban ecosystems, synanthropic rats are the key...