Archiv für Mai 2015

Ingrid Galster: Simone de Beauvoir und der Feminismus. Hamburg: Argument Verlag 2015.

Ingrid Galster hat ihre Schriften zu Simone de Beauvoir und zur Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung in einem Band zusammengeführt. Die Artikel vermitteln klare Einsichten und ergeben ein beeindruckendes Gesamtbild, das die – neue oder erneute – Lektüre lohnt.

Sodobnost | 4/2015

Quelle: http://www.eurozine.com/journals/sodobnost/issue/2015-05-18.html

The resilience of migrant money: how gender, generation and class shape family remittances in Peruvian migration

Scholars and policy makers have argued that because altruism drives remittance sending, migrant money is more resilient to uncertainty than other capital flows. In this article, I question this assumption through ethnographic examination of remittance sending by Peruvian migrant families. When in their lives do Peruvian migrants start to remit? Who are the recipients? What is the purpose of their remittances? How long do they last and why do they stop? I argue that, to answer these questions, we need to investigate how migrants make remittance commitments to different household members, how these attribute value to the remittances and how this value becomes the object of negotiation and contestation. The findings indicate that remittances reinforce existing relations of gender, generation and class in Peruvian society and suggest that while short-lived remittances are based on contractual commitments and driven by altruism, long-term remittances are based on emotional commitments and driven by both non-utilitarian and utilitarian motives.

Ambivalent citizenship and extraterritorial voting among Colombians in London and Madrid

In this article, we explore the nature of extraterritorial voting among Colombian migrants in the 2010 elections in London and Madrid. To address the neglected issue of why voter turnout from abroad has been so low, we take into account the views of voters and non-voters alike to show that, while the external vote privileges the professional and well educated, this does not mean that migrants are not interested in politics back home. Drawing on Bauman (1991), we conceptualize ambivalent citizenship as the paradoxical manner in which, through the external vote, states impose hegemonic notions of citizenship from above, which people embrace in an ambivalent manner from below. We show that the workings of the state make voting a difficult process; they create structural ambivalence for migrants who, even if they practise their citizenship in other ways, exercise individual ambivalence because they find it difficult to engage with a political system back home that they do not trust. The conceptualization of ‘ambivalent citizenship’ therefore encompasses the contradictory complexities inherent in the provision of external voting rights that actively privilege and exclude migrants in mutually constitutive ways.

New Zealand’s turbulent waters: the use of forced labour in the fishing industry

In this article, we make an empirical and conceptual contribution to the emerging debate on unfree labour in the context of labour chains and global value chains. We recast an historical view of poor labour practices aboard some foreign charter vessels fishing in New Zealand’s waters as something more nefarious. Applying the International Labour Organization (ILO) and European Commission (EC) operational indicators of human trafficking for forced labour to 293 interviews, we evaluate the extent to which we can consider migrant fishing crew aboard South Korean vessels as victims of forced labour. We find that they are indeed victims of forced labour and that there is a need to extend the ILO/EC operational indicators to take into account exit strategies. Specifically, there is insufficient recognition of deception, exploitation and coercion at the point of exit, which can prevent a trafficked victim from exiting the employment relationship. Thus, it is crucial to take account of all stages, from recruitment to exit, to understand fully unfree labour in labour and global value chains.

Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik | 5/2015

Quelle: http://www.eurozine.com/journals/blatter/issue/2015-05-18.html

New Eastern Europe | 3/2015

Religion, politics and power

Preaching in thirteenth-century hospitals

Publication date: March 2010
Source:Journal of Medieval History, Volume 36, Issue 1
Author(s): Adam J. Davis
This article uses thirteenth-century hospital sermons as a window into the moral and religious environment of these charitable institutions, large numbers of which were founded during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What emerges from the reportationes of sermons preached in the hôtel-dieu of Paris and ad status sermons directed at hospitals‘ personnel and inmates by Jacques de Vitry, Humbert of Romans and Guibert de Tournai is a spirituality that stressed the penitential (and potentially salvific) power of doing works of mercy (in the case of hospital workers) and bodily suffering (in the case of hospital inmates). The particular social context of hospital preaching is also evident in preachers‘ anxieties about the quality of hospital administration. The sermons that were preached in thirteenth-century hospitals reflect the heightened value placed on caring for the sick and poor, a historical development more often associated with the later middle ages.

The Saxons within Carolingian Christendom: post-conquest identity in the translationes of Vitus, Pusinna and Liborius

Publication date: March 2010
Source:Journal of Medieval History, Volume 36, Issue 1
Author(s): Eric Shuler
The Franks incorporated Saxony into the Carolingian empire through a long, brutal struggle coupled with forced conversion. When Saxons themselves began to write a few decades afterwards, they had to make sense of this history and of their role and identity in their contemporary Carolingian world. In contrast to the portrayal of Saxons in writers such as Einhard and Rudolf, three ninth-century Saxon accounts of relic translations — those of Vitus, Pusinna and Liborius — reinterpreted history to claim a place for the Saxons as a distinct group equal to the Franks within the populus Christianus under the Carolingian monarchs. As a key part of their literary strategies, these authors attempted to salvage from the story of their defeat and forced Christianisation an account of God’s sovereignty, native agency and virtue (especially fidelity) as a foundational element of Saxon identity. These texts prefigure the debates about post-conquest Saxon identity which would underlay the later and better-known Ottonian triumphal self-conceptions. Moreover, the concerns of these authors led them to remarkable hagiographical innovations in grappling with paganism, conversion, miracles, social class and faith.

Food and the middle ages

Publication date: March 2010 Source:Journal of Medieval History, Volume 36, Issue 1 Author(s): C.M. Woolgar The study of food in the middle ages attracted much interest among antiquarians from the eighteenth century on. New perspectiv…