Disrupting disempowerment: feminism, co-optation, and the privatised governance of gender and development

Longstanding debates about the relationship between neoliberalism and feminism have been given new vigour by the somewhat surprising emergence of an 'unabashed feminism' espoused by elite women in political, economic, and cultural institutions of the global North. Women and girls are now highly visible subjects of global development governance, but also 'poster girls' for a variety of neoliberal reforms: Has feminism been coopted by neoliberalism? Reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of feminist accounts of neoliberal co-optation, this article suggests a path beyond the co-optation debate: Why does neoliberalism evince concern for gender inequality as a form of inequality if it is broadly concerned with individual subjects? Empirically, the article applies this conceptual debate to Bottom of the Pyramid development initiatives, focused on the Girl Effect Accelerator. It argues that neoliberalism appropriates dimensions of feminism insofar as it represents gender inequality as a site of accumulation and mechanism for legitimising the increased power accorded to the private sector in development governance

Improved bounds for the number of forests and acyclic orientations in the square lattice

In a recent paper Merino and Welsh (1999) studied several counting problems on the square lattice $L_n$. The authors gave the following bounds for the asymptotics of $f(n)$, the number of forests of $L_n$, and $\alpha(n)$, the number of acyclic orientations of $L_n$: $3.209912 \leq \lim_{n\rightarrow\infty} f(n)^{1/n^2} \leq 3.84161$ and $22/7 \leq \lim_{n\rightarrow\infty} \alpha(n) \leq 3.70925$. In this paper we improve these bounds as follows: $3.64497 \leq \lim_{n\rightarrow\infty} f(n)^{1/n^2} \leq 3.74101$ and $3.41358 \leq \lim_{n\rightarrow\infty} \alpha(n) \leq 3.55449$. We obtain this by developing a method for computing the Tutte polynomial of the square lattice and other related graphs based on transfer matrices

Legal and non-legal barriers to abortion in Ireland and the UK

This article compares abortion laws, regulations and access patterns in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. We focus in most detail on the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and England with a shorter discussion of Scotland and Wales. We attend to the laws and legal reforms in each region but also consider the non-legal factors that restrict or facilitate abortion services in each place. In this article, we seek to illustrate the complex relationship between abortion law and abortion access, noting especially how non-legal barriers shape the way an abortion law functions for the people who live under it

Woodfordian Glacial History of the Champlain Lowland, Burlington to Brandon, Vermont

Guidebook for field trips in Vermont: 64th annual meeting October 13, 14, 15, 1972 Burlington, Vermont: Trip G-

Transnational Abortion Pill Flows and the Political Geography of Abortion in Ireland

The growing availability of abortion pills has transformed the safety and accessibility of abortion worldwide, especially in countries with very restrictive abortion laws. The public health implications of this abortion technology have been widely recognized, but its political and geographical impacts require closer attention. This article examines the geography of illegal abortion pills in Republic of Ireland, where abortion pills became widely accessible through transnational activist networks, despite a constitutional abortion ban. The article contributes Political Geography and International Relations conversations about materiality and sovereignty by mapping the flows of abortion pills into Ireland and discussing the varied ways that the institutions of the state conceptualized and responded to these flows. It argues that the state’s response to the influx of illegal abortion pills was predominantly shaped by its understanding of their territorial significance: the state sought to intercept pills at the border and discourage their use at home while advocating abortion travel abroad, eventually legislating for abortion reform that would offer tightly controlled access authorized by doctors. This article advances the research agendas in reproductive and abortion geographies by bringing them into conversation with broader debates on territory and politics

Examining heterogeneity and wildfire management expenditures using spatially and temporally descriptive data

Increasing costs of wildfire management have highlighted the need to better understand suppression expenditures and potential tradeoffs of land management activities that may affect fire risks. Spatially and temporally descriptive data is used to develop a model of wildfire suppression expenditures, providing new insights into the role of spatial and temporal heterogeneity in determining expenditures. Incorporating heterogeneity improves model fit and predictive ability over a model with data based on the point and time of fire ignition. The model is potentially useful for providing expenditure information for simulated fire applications and post-season evaluation of suppression activities

Linear Momentum Density in Quasistatic Electromagnetic Systems

We discuss a couple of simple quasistatic electromagnetic systems in which the density of electromagnetic linear momentum can be easily computed. The examples are also used to illustrate how the total electromagnetic linear momentum, which may also be calculated by using the vector potential, can be understood as a consequence of the violation of the action-reaction principle, because a non-null external force is required to maintain constant the mechanical linear momentum. We show how one can avoid the divergence in the interaction linear electromagnetic momentum of a system composed by an idealization often used in textbooks (an infinite straight current) and a point charge.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Eur. J. Phy

Planar lattice gases with nearest-neighbour exclusion

We discuss the hard-hexagon and hard-square problems, as well as the corresponding problem on the honeycomb lattice. The case when the activity is unity is of interest to combinatorialists, being the problem of counting binary matrices with no two adjacent 1's. For this case we use the powerful corner transfer matrix method to numerically evaluate the partition function per site, density and some near-neighbour correlations to high accuracy. In particular for the square lattice we obtain the partition function per site to 43 decimal places.Comment: 16 pages, 2 built-in Latex figures, 4 table

The watchdogs of 'Washminster' – parliamentary scrutiny of executive patronage in the UK

The role of legislatures in scrutinising executive patronage has received scant attention in the context of parliamentary democracy. This article addresses this lacuna by focusing on the parliamentary scrutiny of public appointments in the UK. Presenting the results of an extensive programme of research, it reveals how select committees have accrued increasing powers to challenge ministerial appointments, and how this has resulted in a series of unintended consequences that raise critical concerns regarding the overall added-value of pre-appointment scrutiny. The article is therefore of comparative significance for theories of legislative scrutiny in particular and executive–legislature dynamics more broadly