Values for gender roles and relations among high school and non-high school adolescents in a Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico.

In the current study, I describe values for gender roles and cross-sex relations among adolescents growing up in a southern Mexican Maya community in which high school was introduced in 1999. A total of 80 adolescent girls and boys, half of whom were attending the new high school, provided their opinions on two ethnographically derived vignettes that depicted changes in gender roles and relations occurring in their community. Systematic coding revealed that adolescents not enrolled in high school tended to prioritise ascribed and complementary gender roles and emphasise the importance of family mediation in cross-sex relations. Adolescents who were enrolled in high school tended to prioritise equivalent and chosen gender roles, and emphasised personal responsibility and personal fulfillment in cross-sex relations. Perceptions of risks and opportunities differed by gender: girls favourably evaluated the expansion of adult female role options, but saw risks in personal negotiations of cross-sex relations; boys emphasised the loss of the female homemaker role, but favourably evaluated new opportunities for intimacy in cross-sex relations

The role of handbooks in knowledge creation and diffusion: A case of science and technology studies

Genre is considered to be an important element in scholarly communication and in the practice of scientific disciplines. However, scientometric studies have typically focused on a single genre, the journal article. The goal of this study is to understand the role that handbooks play in knowledge creation and diffusion and their relationship with the genre of journal articles, particularly in highly interdisciplinary and emergent social science and humanities disciplines. To shed light on these questions we focused on handbooks and journal articles published over the last four decades belonging to the research area of Science and Technology Studies (STS), broadly defined. To get a detailed picture we used the full-text of five handbooks (500,000 words) and a well-defined set of 11,700 STS articles. We confirmed the methodological split of STS into qualitative and quantitative (scientometric) approaches. Even when the two traditions explore similar topics (e.g., science and gender) they approach them from different starting points. The change in cognitive foci in both handbooks and articles partially reflects the changing trends in STS research, often driven by technology. Using text similarity measures we found that, in the case of STS, handbooks play no special role in either focusing the research efforts or marking their decline. In general, they do not represent the summaries of research directions that have emerged since the previous edition of the handbook.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Informetric

Women and Gender: Useful Categories of Analysis in Environmental History

In 1990, Carolyn Merchant proposed, in a roundtable discussion published in The Journal of American History, that gender perspective be added to the conceptual frameworks in environmental history. 1 Her proposal was expanded by Melissa Leach and Cathy Green in the British journal Environment and History in 1997. 2 The ongoing need for broader and more thoughtful and analytic investigations into the powerful relationship between gender and the environment throughout history was confirmed in 2001 by Richard White and Vera Norwood in Environmental History, Retrospect and Prospect, a forum in the Pacific Historical Review. Both Norwood, in her provocative contribution on environmental history for the twenty-first century, and White, in Environmental History: Watching a Historical Field Mature, addressed the need for further work on gender. Environmental history, Norwood noted, is just beginning to integrate gender analyses into mainstream work. 3 That assessment was particularly striking coming, as it did, after Norwood described the kind of ongoing and damaging misperceptions concerning the role of diversity, including gender, within environmental history. White concurred with Norwood, observing that environmental history in the previous fifteen years had been far more explicitly linked to larger trends in the writing of history, but he also issued a clear warning about the current trends in including the role of gender: The danger ... is not that gendering will be ignored in environmental history but that it will become predictable-an endless rediscovery that humans have often made nature female. Gender has more work to do than that. 4 Indeed it does. In 1992, the index to Carolyn Merchant\u27s The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History included three subheadings under women. Women and the egalitarian ideal and women and the environment each had only a few entries. Most entries were listed under the third subheading, activists and theorists, comprising seventeen names. 5 Nine years later Elizabeth Blum compiled Linking American Women\u27s History and Environmental History, an online preliminary historiography revealing gaps as well as strengths in the field emerging at the intersection of these two relatively new fields of study. At that time Blum noted that, with the exception of some scholarly interest being diverted to environmental justice movements and ecofeminism, most environmental history has centered on elite male concerns; generally, women\u27s involvement tends to be ignored or marginalized.

What is news? News values revisited (again)

The deceptively simple question “What is news?” remains pertinent even as we ponder the future of journalism in the digital age. This article examines news values within mainstream journalism and considers the extent to which news values may be changing since earlier landmark studies were undertaken. Its starting point is Harcup and O’Neill’s widely-cited 2001 updating of Galtung and Ruge’s influential 1965 taxonomy of news values. Just as that study put Galtung and Ruge’s criteria to the test with an empirical content analysis of published news, this new study explores the extent to which Harcup and O’Neill’s revised list of news values remain relevant given the challenges (and opportunities) faced by journalism today, including the emergence of social media. A review of recent literature contextualises the findings of a fresh content analysis of news values within a range of UK media 15 years on from the last study. The article concludes by suggesting a revised and updated set of contemporary news values, whilst acknowledging that no taxonomy can ever explain everything

Combining feminist pedagogy and transactional distance to create gender-sensitive technology-enhanced learning

In this paper, we argue for a new synthesis of two pedagogic theories: feminist pedagogy and transactional distance, which explain why and how distance education has been such a positive system for women in a national distance learning university. We illustrate this with examples of positive action initiatives for women. The concept of transactional distance allows us to explore distance as a form of psychological and communication space, not simply of geographical distance. Feminist pedagogy, on the other hand, has recognised the importance of gender in structuring disciplines as well as teaching strategies. Both theories implicitly position the face-to-face classroom as the ideal learning environment, with the implication that distance learning has to produce a deficient environment. We argue that the evidence for women does not support this and present examples of feminist distance learning provision that has offered successful technology-enhanced learning and educational opportunities

Improving Underrepresented Minority Student Persistence in STEM.

Members of the Joint Working Group on Improving Underrepresented Minorities (URMs) Persistence in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)-convened by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute-review current data and propose deliberation about why the academic "pathways" leak more for URM than white or Asian STEM students. They suggest expanding to include a stronger focus on the institutional barriers that need to be removed and the types of interventions that "lift" students' interests, commitment, and ability to persist in STEM fields. Using Kurt Lewin's planned approach to change, the committee describes five recommendations to increase URM persistence in STEM at the undergraduate level. These recommendations capitalize on known successes, recognize the need for accountability, and are framed to facilitate greater progress in the future. The impact of these recommendations rests upon enacting the first recommendation: to track successes and failures at the institutional level and collect data that help explain the existing trends

Are You With Us? : A Study of the Hoosier Suffrage Movement, 1844-1920

Are You With Us? challenges longstanding assumptions about Hoosier women\u27s political activism by examining participation within the state suffrage movement. Indiana women\u27s history- and especially this topic- is largely overlooked by historians. Existing scholarship on this subject is limited and out-dated; moreover, such research concludes that Hoosier women were ladylike reformers. That is, they were respectable, conservative, and did not desire too much public attention. Because of this, one might think that Hoosier women avoided the campaign for suffrage; yet, my archival research has shown that many women in Indiana were active and dedicated participants. In addition, there were numerous suffragists who were not ladylike reformers. Instead, they were radical, African-American, and from the working class or rural areas. My project highlights the diversity of the Hoosier suffrage movement while simultaneously expanding the narrow field of Indiana women\u27s history