The Infected Republic: Damaged Masculinity in French Political Journalism, 1934-1938

This thesis examines the ways in which four intellectual, weekly French journals of the 1930s mobilized the mobilized the well-worn political symbol of damaged masculinity in order to articulate their unique fears and anxieties. From the inception of the Third Republic, constructed symbols of ideal and deviant masculinity played a critical role in political and popular discourse. My central argument focuses on how they manifest themselves in the debates of polarized political journalism of the 1930s. Leftist and far right wing publications both emphasized the damaged masculinity of their enemies. However, the left primarily used crowd psychology to describe the right as irrational, effeminate and homosexual, while the right focused the notion of an infiltrating Other to highlight the weakness, impotency and unhealthy body of the left and the Third Republic as a whole. Key to both representations is a very physical definition of masculinity. Indeed, the threatening degradations of the male body portrayed in the journals reflect a larger discourse on infection and disease that has deep roots in the divisions that plagued the Third Republic from its inception. Though their focus and tone vary greatly, all four journals use damaged masculinity as a means of articulating the fear of contagion, infection, eroding boundaries and collapsing structure in mid 1930s France. This lexicon constitutes a means of conveying a tone of degeneration and disintegration in French politics

The Infected Republic: Damaged Masculinity in French Political Journalism, 1934-1938

This thesis examines the ways in which four intellectual, weekly French journals of the 1930s mobilized the mobilized the well-worn political symbol of damaged masculinity in order to articulate their unique fears and anxieties. From the inception of the Third Republic, constructed symbols of ideal and deviant masculinity played a critical role in political and popular discourse. My central argument focuses on how they manifest themselves in the debates of polarized political journalism of the 1930s. Leftist and far right wing publications both emphasized the damaged masculinity of their enemies. However, the left primarily used crowd psychology to describe the right as irrational, effeminate and homosexual, while the right focused the notion of an infiltrating Other to highlight the weakness, impotency and unhealthy body of the left and the Third Republic as a whole. Key to both representations is a very physical definition of masculinity. Indeed, the threatening degradations of the male body portrayed in the journals reflect a larger discourse on infection and disease that has deep roots in the divisions that plagued the Third Republic from its inception. Though their focus and tone vary greatly, all four journals use damaged masculinity as a means of articulating the fear of contagion, infection, eroding boundaries and collapsing structure in mid 1930s France. This lexicon constitutes a means of conveying a tone of degeneration and disintegration in French politics

Modeling water resources management at the basin level: review and future directions

Water quality / Water resources development / Agricultural production / River basin development / Mathematical models / Simulation models / Water allocation / Policy / Economic aspects / Hydrology / Reservoir operation / Groundwater management / Drainage / Conjunctive use / Surface water / GIS / Decision support systems / Optimization methods / Water supply

Water management and livelihood choices in southwestern Bangladesh

Coastal Bangladesh faces an increasing number of challenges including cyclones, tidal surges, floods, drought, saline water intrusion, waterlogging and land subsidence, which pose substantial threats to the livelihoods of the coastal inhabitants. In addition to these threats, profound social and land-use changes are complicating the livelihoods of resource users in the region, including the introduction of aquaculture and increasing competition for ground and surface water sources. The government of Bangladesh has targeted this region for investment with irrigation expansion. This paper uses a sustainable livelihood lens to understand the role of investments in water management and irrigation in driving and shaping livelihood changes and transitions over the past ten years and offers recommendations for investments. We find that while water infrastructure development has greatly enhanced the role of agriculture in coastal livelihoods over the last 10 years, further development of irrigation infrastructure should only be prioritized after issues of water governance and inequity across agricultural and aquacultural livelihoods are addressed

Solar or Diesel: A Comparison of Costs for Groundwater‐Fed Irrigation in Sub‐Saharan Africa Under Two Energy Solutions

Sub-Saharan Africa has long been beset with food insecurity and energy poverty. Expanding irrigated agriculture can help boost food production in the region, but this requires energy for accessing water, especially in groundwater-fed irrigation. This paper compared economic performance of groundwater pumping for irrigation under two energy solutions: solar photovoltaic (PV) and diesel fuel. We estimated the life-cycle costs of the power units of two pumping systems for a range of crop and irrigation method scenarios and mapped their relative cost-effectiveness over cropland in sub-Saharan Africa. As a renewable and clean energy source, solar energy has attracted much attention and there is keen interest in investing in solar PV to support the development of irrigated agriculture. Results of this study provide insights into the prospects of promoting solar irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa

Sustainable land management, gender, and agricultural productivity

Land degradation is a pressing global challenge, with three billion people residing in degraded landscapes. The global cost of land degradation is estimated to be about $300 billion per year, with Africa south of the Sahara accounting for 26 percent of the total global costs due to land-use and land-cover changes. In Ethiopia, it is estimated that more than 85 percent of land is moderately to severely degraded due to changes in land use and cover, costing the country an estimated US$4.3 billion annually. In order to halt further degradation and support essential restoration through sustainable land management (SLM) and related investments, the Water and Land Resource Center (WLRC) and its consortium of development partners established six learning watersheds in Central and North-Western Ethiopia with the ultimate goal of improving water security and crop and livestock productivity. REACH and WLRC began collaborating in 2016 to explore the impact of the learning watersheds’ SLM activities on reducing water insecurity for crop and livestock production and domestic use. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) provided technical assistance in collecting and analyzing data on these watersheds, including on the gendered differences in the adoption of and investment in SLM practices. This policy note summarizes the results of the data collection and analysis

Integrated economic-hydrologic water modeling at the basin scale: the Maipo river basin

Increasing competition for water across sectors increases the importance of the river basin as the appropriate unit of analysis to address the challenges facing water resources management; and modeling at this scale can provide essential information for policymakers in their resource allocation decisions. This paper introduces an integrated economic-hydrologic modeling framework that accounts for the interactions between water allocation, farmer input choice, agricultural productivity, nonagricultural water demand, and resource degradation in order to estimate the social and economic gains from improvement in the allocation and efficiency of water use. The model is applied to the Maipo River Basin in Chile. Economic benefits to water use are evaluated for different demand management instruments, including markets in tradable water rights, based on production and benefit functions with respect to water for the agricultural and urban-industrial sectors.Resource allocation., Water resources development Chile., Chile.,

Calibration and evaluation of a semi-distributed watershed model of Sub-Saharan Africa using GRACE data

International audienceIrrigation development is rapidly expanding inmostly rainfed Sub-Saharan Africa. This expansion underscoresthe need for a more comprehensive understandingof water resources beyond surface water. Gravity Recoveryand Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites provide valuableinformation on spatio-temporal variability in water storage.The objective of this study was to calibrate and evaluatea semi-distributed regional-scale hydrologic model basedon the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) code forbasins in Sub-Saharan Africa using seven-year (July 2002–April 2009) 10-day GRACE data and multi-site river dischargedata. The analysis was conducted in a multi-criteriaframework. In spite of the uncertainty arising from the tradeoffin optimising model parameters with respect to two noncommensurablecriteria defined for two fluxes, SWAT wasfound to perform well in simulating total water storage variabilityin most areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, which havesemi-arid and sub-humid climates, and that among variouswater storages represented in SWAT, water storage variationsin soil, vadose zone and groundwater are dominant. Thestudy also showed that the simulated total water storage variationstend to have less agreement with GRACE data in aridand equatorial humid regions, and model-based partitioningof total water storage variations into different water storagecompartments may be highly uncertain. Thus, future workwill be needed for model enhancement in these areas with inferiormodel fit and for uncertainty reduction in componentwiseestimation of water storage variations

Development and validation of Women’s Empowerment in Migration Index (WEMI)

There is little evidence on the association between women’s migration, empowerment, and well-being, driven in part due to difficulty in measuring empowerment in the migration context. To better understand these linkages, we developed a Women’s Empowerment in Migration Index (WEMI) and validated it with survey of 1019 returnee female migrants in Bangladesh, who had returned after working internationally, mostly from countries in West Asia. By incorporating indicators of subjective well-being from migration literature into measures of empowerment, our paper advances research over earlier assessments of women’s experiences in the migration process beyond seemingly objective indicators, such as income, health, and economic welfare. We find that 14% of all migrant women in our sample could be classified as being empowered. Lack of membership in groups, restricted mobility, and lack of asset ownership are the largest contributors to migrant women’s disempowerment in our sample. We find that WEMI is strongly correlated with other measures of well-being, including mental health and livelihood-efficacy. Women with higher empowerment scores are also less likely to experience discriminatory labor practices and unsafe work conditions. With broad applicability to migrants from low- and middle-income countries, WEMI can be used as a tool, helping to identify sources of disempowerment, and enabling stakeholders to develop interventions targeting the welfare of women migrant workers