Suchergebnisse

The shift to neoliberalism is rarely narrated from the vantage point of the household, but it is here – in the realm of unpaid bills and mounting laundry – that the contradictions of our political moment are felt most forcefully, writes Laura Briggs. Her US-focused book, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics, retells the story of neoliberal economics 'from inside families' and reframes its legacy through the lens of the care crisis. How did it get so hard, Briggs asks, to find the time and resources to do the necessary work of reproduction? The institutionalisation of the 'double day' – the site of one of feminism's great unfinished battles – has, she observes, eroded Americans' collective capacity to have and raise children, care for the elderly and support the sick and disabled. In Briggs' account, the neoliberal economic reforms of the 1980s and 1990s curtailed the dissenting energies of twentieth-century radical protest movements: this is the historical moment at which 'all politics became reproductive politics'. It is a controversial headline claim: after all, has there ever been a time under capitalism when 'all politics' were not shot through with the contradictions of social reproduction? The book never fully confronts this question, though it does paint a dynamic portrait of the structural contradictions that attend the contemporary organisation of care work in America.

Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) is many things at once: a fictionalised account of its author-narrator's use of synthetic androgens, an alternative history of post-Fordism, and a manifesto for gender revolution. The text juxtaposes a number of disparate genres, including the fictionalized life narrative, the epistolary elegy, political theory, pornography, and the revolutionary manifesto. In this article I suggest that this aesthetic of juxtaposition figures genre as a form of drag, which I understand, in light of Elizabeth Freeman's work, as both a mode of gender performance and a way of articulating the persistence of the past in the present. In Testo Junkie, genre becomes a way of organising a central tension in the book between the hormone's history as an agent of oppression and the hormone's speculative future as an agent of liberation. The text's bifurcated form, I argue, ultimately works to compartmentalise difficult questions about the psychological legacies of racism and patriarchy, and to separate its manifesto for revolution from the histories that produce the revolutionary subject.

Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) is many things at once: a fictionalised account of its author-narrator's use of synthetic androgens, an alternative history of post-Fordism, and a manifesto for gender revolution. The text juxtaposes a number of disparate genres, including the fictionalized life narrative, the epistolary elegy, political theory, pornography, and the revolutionary manifesto. In this article I suggest that this aesthetic of juxtaposition figures genre as a form of drag, which I understand, in light of Elizabeth Freeman's work, as both a mode of gender performance and a way of articulating the persistence of the past in the present. In Testo Junkie, genre becomes a way of organising a central tension in the book between the hormone's history as an agent of oppression and the hormone's speculative future as an agent of liberation. The text's bifurcated form, I argue, ultimately works to compartmentalise difficult questions about the psychological legacies of racism and patriarchy, and to separate its manifesto for revolution from the histories that produce the revolutionary subject.

This collection examines the diverse, and often conflicted, political status of health in the USA from World War II to Covid-19. It moves beyond biomedical conceptions by using the lenses of class, poverty, race, gender, sexuality and locality to study the concepts, policies and lived realities of U.S. healthcare and medicine.

Despite significant developments in understanding the role of women in early-modern business, more is needed to fully understand women's impact on eighteenth-century trading networks. Further, much less is known about the role of wider family members, especially children, in the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy. The formal documentation that is privileged in business histories does not tell the whole story, and it frequently represents mercantile activity as a pursuit dominated by a patriarch at the center of a trading network. This article explores eighteenth-century familial commercial networks through extensive use of the personal family correspondence of three merchant families who lived and traded within different locales of the northern Atlantic: Hugh Hall, a merchant and vice judge of the admiralty in Barbados; the Black family, who were wine merchants in Bordeaux; and Joseph Symson, a mercer and shopkeeper from Kendal, England. This article will show that women appear as autonomous players with the power and ability to make informed and independent decisions that directed the business interests of their families. Moreover, it includes an assessment of the ways in which merchants cultivated the expertise of their extended families to enhance their commercial networks and advance their business pursuits. Focusing on children who supported or enhanced the prosperity of the family firm, this article emphasizes that their participation was intentional, not incidental. This article asks questions about the emotional consequences of such activity—which have rarely been considered in any detail—as well as the financial benefit of operating in this manner.

This chapter uses an assemblage approach to evaluate the development of 'payments for ecosystem services' in Wales, via transformations of agri-environmental governance over the last ten years. Whilst the adoption of PES has led to a shift in governance style and State responsibilities that echoes broader trends in neoliberalisation, we reject readings of hybrid neoliberalism following, instead, Tanya Murray Li's (2006) practices of assemblage to unpick the complex institutional arrangements emerging. Using an assemblage approach enables us to assess how different actors are mobilising and aligning around the PES approach to advance their own agendas. Following the practices used to authorise and render their concerns technical then shows us how and why some actors are being marginalised in this process, particularly as failures emerge and re-assembling is undertaken. Finally, we offer insights on how the State continues to maintain power whilst entering into new relations with other actors, advancing a more experimental mode of governance. The empirical material is based on three qualitative case studies, including pan-Wales agri-environment schemes as well as the 'Pumlumon Project' in Mid-Wales and the 'Ecosystem Enterprise Partnership - Ecobank' in South-Wales.

This paper considers the potential for beekeepers' knowledges to be incorporated into participatory policy processes addressing current challenges to pollinator health. Pollinator decline is a serious issue for future food security and wider environmental resilience, with important implications for rural land use governance. The precipitous decline in global pollinator populations over recent years has resulted in a range of government initiatives to tackle the causes identified. In the UK this includes a National Pollinator Strategy in England and Pollinator Action Plan in Wales. These plans are notable for their introduction of a more participatory approach, incorporating 'lay-knowledge' and citizen science from beekeeping practitioners alongside scientific data. This paper presents evidence from interviews and participant observation with key stakeholders within the beekeeping community in the UK, alongside archival material from the Bee Farmers' Association, to assess the knowledge controversies arising from this strategy. Specifically, the paper considers the distinction of beekeepers' knowledges from typically acknowledged expert sources, whilst also reflecting upon aspects of plurality and tension within the beekeeping community. The paper concludes by outlining some areas of contestation between beekeepers and the wider policy and scientific community, which could impact on the future success of more participatory forums. This includes, firstly, evidence of hierarchies and exclusions in the forms of knowledge considered, when insights from professional scientists are privileged above those from beekeepers and when some beekeepers knowledges are given more credit than others. Secondly, we consider limitations resulting from policy makers' evidence requirements for peer-reviewed science, which can further exacerbate the exclusion of beekeepers' insights and lead to scenarios whereby policy only engages with a narrow set of criteria that may not be beneficial when advanced in isolation from the broader system changes. Finally, aspects of policy clash are outlined between pollinator conservation and wider agricultural strategies that seek to maintain a productivist agenda.

Decentralised forest management approaches are ostensibly designed to increase community involvement in forest management, yet have had mixed success in practice. We present a comparative study across multiple countries in Eastern Africa of how far decentralised forest policies are designed to achieve devolution. We adopt the decentralisation framework developed by Agrawal and Ribot to explore whether, and how, devolution is specified in Tanzanian, Kenyan, Ugandan, Malawian and Ethiopian forest policies. We also compare them to the commitments of the Rio Declaration. In all five countries, the policies lack at least some of the critical elements required to achieve meaningful devolution, such as democratically elected, downwardly accountable local actors and equitable benefit sharing. Calling an approach 'community' or 'participatory', does not mean that it involves all residents: in Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia, policies allow a small group of people in the community to manage the forest reserve, potentially excluding marginalised groups, and hence limiting devolution. This may lead to elite capture, and effective privatisation of forests, enclosing previously de facto common pool resources. Therefore, even without flaws in implementation, these decentralisation policies are unlikely to achieve true devolution in the study countries.

This paper is about rewilding and the tensions it involves. Rewilding is a relatively novel approach to nature conservation, which seeks to be proactive and ambitious in the face of continuing environmental decline. Whilst definitions of rewilding place a strong emphasis on non-human agency, it is an inescapably human aspiration resulting in a range of social conflicts. The paper focuses on the case study of the Cambrian Wildwood project in Mid-Wales (UK), evaluating the ways in which debate and strategic action to advance rewilding is proceeding, assessing the extent to which compromise and learning has occurred amongst advocates. As such, we provide an important addition to the field, by detailing how conflicts play out over time and how actors' positioning and approach shifts, and why. In this case, tempers have flared around the threat that rewilding is seen to pose to resident farming communities. Tensions discussed include the differing social constructions of landscape and nature involved; the distribution of impacts on different stakeholders; and the relative power of different actors to make decisions and gain representation. Responding to these, the paper outlines how rewilding advocates have sought to advance a more peopled and culturally responsive vision, which seeks to champion sustainable livelihood strategies. The changes in approach detailed demonstrate a reflexive stance from rewilders, which suggests that learning and adaptation can occur. Nonetheless, caution is expressed regarding the extent to which rewilding can truly advance inclusive opportunities for rural change, given a continued return amongst stakeholders to exclusionary narratives of belonging and authenticity, suggesting substantive difficulty in moving beyond longstanding concerns over identity and the re-imagination of place. Rewilding, it would seem, is about who we think we are and how we co-constitute our sense of self. We, therefore, close by arguing that tactics and politicking can only have so much bearing, tensions over rewilding are unavoidably emotional.

Moving forwards from an extensive literature on farmers' cooperatives, this Special Issue aims to explore the interaction and interdependence of multiple material and immaterial benefits associated with cooperation. The eight papers gathered here address a range of contexts to explore the inseparability of a set of 'more-than-economic' benefits of cooperation and consider the wider implications of doing so. Responding to their insights, this editorial reflects upon the ontological ambiguity of concepts of economy and the political potentiality of cooperative activities. In addition, we highlight three key themes raised by the papers, which emphasize the complexity of processes and values included in cooperation: Relatedness and Embeddedness; Institutions and Formalisation; Histories and Futures. Reflecting on the transformative capacities of cooperation described in this collection, we argue that valuing cooperation as a process rather than a means to fixed-ends can carry its own emancipatory potential, given the ways in which this can work to counter the compartmentalising tendencies of capitalism. However, we conclude by cautioning that the addressing of more pervasive structural impediments needs to be integrated into cooperative endeavours if such potential is to be fully realised.