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In international welfare state scholarship and political discourse the Nordic Model has become a standard concept. But how precise is the concept and to what extent do the five Nordic countries fit into this overall pattern? In this book a group of Nordic historians trace the historical origins and developments of welfare in the five Nordic countries. The aim of this book is to modify the standard concept by emphasizing both the common features and the variations between them. As a work hypothesis the authors regard "Norden" as a model with five exceptions. The articles in this book are all written by historians who have worked within the framework of a Nordic research project operating under the title The Nordic Welfare-Model - a Historical reappraisal.
Until recently, histories of women tended to be segregated from the larger historical context. This pioneering volume places the role of women within the history of the interwar years, whenboth the women's and socialist movements became prominent, and raises the key question of how power was distributed between the genders in a historical setting. The emblematic title of this volume highlights the fundamental conception of this comparative study of eleven West European countries: that in the interwar decades two great movements gained in strength, converged, diverged, competed, and cooperated. Each of these movements is viewed as acomplex matrix of organized and unorganized participants. How...
Gender Equality on a Grand Tour. Politics and Institutions – the Nordic Council, Sweden, Lithuania and Russia explores the politics around the establishment, development and transformation of gender equality institutions in the Nordic countries (on the example of Sweden), in the former communist countries east of the Baltic Sea region (the example of Lithuania) and in the northwestern part of Russia. The authors analyze the interplay between the internationalization and Europeanization of gender equality on the one hand and national and local contexts on the other. Gender Equality on a Grand Tour also is the first study to explore the role of one of the leading transnational actors in the region - the Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers - in gender equality institutionalization in the Baltic Sea region.
This book illuminates intricate and unexpected connections among the past of academic feminism, the geopolitics of the Cold War, and the concept of intersectionality as it is articulated in scholarship on and by U.S. women of color.
Are reports of the death of conventional fieldwork in anthropology greatly exaggerated? This book takes a critical look at the latest developments and key issues in fieldwork. The nature of 'locality' itself is problematic for both research subjects and fieldworkers, on the grounds that it must now be maintained and represented in relation to widening (and fragmenting) social frames and networks. Such developments have raised questions concerning the nature of ethnographic presence and scales of comparison. From the social space of a cybercafe to cities in India, the UK and South Africa among others, this book features a wide range of ethnographic studies that provide new ways of looking at the concepts of 'locality' and 'site'. It shows that rather than taking key fieldwork processes such as globalization and mobility for granted, anthropologists are well-placed to examine and critique the totalizing assumptions behind these notions.
Just a few years ago, most Russian citizens did not recognize the notion of domestic violence or acknowledge that such a problem existed. Today, after years of local and international pressure to combat violence against women, things have changed dramatically. Gender Violence in Russia examines why and how this shift occurred—and why there has been no similar reform on other gender violence issues such as rape, sexual assault, or human trafficking. Drawing on more than a decade of research, Janet Elise Johnson analyzes media coverage and survey data to explain why some interventions succeed while others fail. She describes the local-global dynamics between a range of international actors, from feminist activists to national governments, and an equally diverse set of Russian organizations and institutions.
With the onset of a more conservative political climate in the 1980s, social and especially labour history saw a decline in the popularity that they had enjoyed throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This led to much debate on its future and function within the historical discipline as a whole. Some critics declared it dead altogether. Others have proposed a change of direction and a more or less exclusive focus on images and texts. The most constructive proposals have suggested that labour history in the past concentrated too much on class and that other identities of working people should be taken into account to a larger extent than they had been previously, such as gender, religion, and ethnici...
The YMCA and the YWCA have been an integral part of America's urban landscape since their emergence almost 150 years ago. Yet the significant influence these organizations had on American society has been largely overlooked. Men and Women Adrift explores the role of the YMCA and YWCA in shaping the identities of America's urban population. Examining the urban experiences of the single young men and women who came to the cities in search of employment and personal freedom, these essays trace the role of the YMCA and the YWCA in urban America from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The contributors detail the YMCA's early competition with churches and other urban institutions, the associations' unique architectural style, their services for members of the working class, African Americans, and immigrants, and their role in defining gender and sexual identities. The volume includes contributions by Michelle Busby, Jessica Elfenbein, Sarah Heath, Adrienne Lash Jones, Paula Lupkin, Raymond A. Mohl, Elizabeth Norris, Cliff Putney, Nancy Robertson, Thomas Winter, and John D. Wrathall.
Human rights are axiomatic with liberal freedom. Yet more rights for women, sexual and religious minorities, has had disempowering and exclusionary effects. Revisiting campaigns for same-sex marriage, violence against women, and Islamic veil bans, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights lays bare how human rights emerge as a project of containment and unfreedom rather than meaningful freedom. Kapur provocatively argues that the futurity of human rights rests in turning away from liberal freedom and towards non-liberal registers of freedom.
Taking up the challenge of Saba Mahmood to feminist studies in religion, that there is a liberalist understanding of agency and a tendency to mix the feminist political project with the analytical, the authors of this anthology discuss the relations between pieties and politics, pieties and methodologies, virtuous masculinities, and symbolic gender representations. Several articles discuss highly controversial questions: Muslim piety, religion in the European Union between the Vatican and the Muslim populations, the religiously motivated abstinence policies of the US. Furthermore, there is an interesting section about religious masculinities in a historical and contemporary perspective.