Mediating Role of Transformational Leadership on the Relationship between Pastors’ Training and Healthy Congregations

The church remains a solid center for transformational leadership, bringing the required light to today’s increasingly troubled world. Therefore, this study’s objective was to establish the mediating effect of transformational leadership traits on the relationship between pastors’ training and church congregational health in urban churches of the African Gospel Church, Kenya (AGC-K). The study adopted a descriptive survey design and correlation methods targeting 44 pastors, 44 LCC members, and 383 members in urban churches of AGC-K. Data was collected using pretested questionnaires and was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical methods. The findings revealed that while not all pastors manifested transformational leadership traits in their service, transformational leadership traits significantly, but partially, mediated the relationship between pastors’ training and church congregation health. This could also explain why some of the congregations were exemplary in performance compared to others. Therefore, the study recommends that AGC-K encourage pastors and other church leaders to subscribe to transformational leadership training. Furthermore, transformational leaders within their congregations should also be encouraged to take some other leaders under their tutelage

‘How a Kaynana Should Behave?’ Discussions on the Role of Mothers-in-Law in Two Gün Groups

Gün [day], as a specific form of rotating savings and credit associations in urban Turkey, is a distinct ground for women where middle-class values and norms are performed. In this context, the discussions on being a kaynana [mother-in-law] help us to consider the ways in which the notion of conjugal family is central to the self-perception of women. To oppose the role of kaynanas ‘in the past’ is women’s way of claiming to comply with what they perceive to be the ‘modern’ way of forming a family and, hence, of being ‘modern’. This, in turn, helps us to reconsider the ways in which kinship roles are elaborated in different contexts and shows that the ideas about the proper kinship roles shape the relation of people to the people other than their kin

Women's Shelters and Municipalities in Turkey : Between Solidarity and Benevolence

Les centres d'hébergement pour les femmes ayant subi des violences sont le produit des féminismes de la deuxième vague partout dans le monde. Ils sont un moyen d'être solidaire avec les femmes ayant subi des violences et, en même temps, l'expérience des femmes, basée sur la violence qu'elles ont vécue et sur les relations de solidarité aux centres, donne une base pour faire la politique pour les féministes. Alors, la plupart des études sur les centres d'hébergement s'occupent de ces sujets. Par contre, à partir d'un étude ethnographique dans les centres d'hébergement en Turquie et à partir de la littérature de l'anthropologie de l'État, nous pourrions dire qu'il n'est pas possible d'examiner les centres d'hébergement en Turquie comme des structures féministes mais plutôt comme des institutions bureaucratique, car la majorité des centres en Turquie sont établis dans le cadre administratif des municipalités ou bien des services sociaux assurés par l'État central.Women's shelters, the product of second wave feminisms all over the world, are both a tool for solidarity with women who face violence and a way of doing feminist politics based on women's experiences of violence and solidarity. Accordingly, most academic works on women's shelters focus on these dimensions of feminist shelters. Based on ethnographic work in shelters in Turkey and by dwelling upon the literature of the anthropology of the state, this article, on the other hand, argues that in the case of Turkey, women's shelters are to be treated as bureaucratic institutions, not as feminist structures, as most of the shelters are embedded in the administrative structure of municipalities and central state's social services

Fundamental Challenges in Academic–Government Partnership in Conflict Research in the Pastoral Lowlands of Ethiopia

The Ethiopian government continuously calls for policy-relevant research. However, this admission of policy challenges and attempts to fill the gap cannot ignore the political economy and power dynamics in Ethiopia. This article discusses challenges to an impactful partnership with government, drawing from the experiences of the ‘conflict working group’, the ESRC-DFID-funded project ‘Shifting In/equality Dynamics in Ethiopia: from Research to Application’ (SIDERA). We argue that research should empower communities; however, to government, research is a tool to buttress efforts to ‘secure’ and ‘pacify’ the lowlands to eventually facilitate extraction. The article also addresses the lack of consensus on basic concepts such as conflict. We argue that it is a rational response to environmental change and state-led dispossessions, while to government, it is an expression of ‘backwardness’ and ‘irrationality’. The development of a meaningful partnership in this context was dependent on navigating meanings and power relations.Department for International Development (DFID)Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Narrating Women’s Experiences of Gendered Violence: An Introduction

In this introduction to the special issue, we will take on the use and meaning of narrating experience in feminist politics, through its relation to media. Narration of experience is indeed a common thread that binds different fields/actors together long since feminism became one of the major lines of political thinking: By making women’s experiences visible, feminists intervened in the inequalities that women faced in their everyday lives and initiated a long series of legal and political re..