What Can the Environmental Movement Learn From Feminism?

At this critical moment after Copenhagen and in the wake of an economic crisis that has posed a serious challenge to neoliberal economic policy, environmentalists should take a lesson from developments in the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. The environmental movement faces the same political economy faced by the feminist movement: a capitalist system and mode of production. Feminists have navigated within or fought against this system on the ground level with their struggle for equal opportunity employment, re-valuing productive work such as childcare, decreasing the gender wage gap, and fighting sexual harassment. Feminist confrontations with capitalism were also manifest in the intense theoretical debates that took place during second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s. Liberal, Marxist, and radical feminists posited different answers to the foundational question of how to position oneself within or against a capitalist political economy

What Can the Environmental Movement Learn From Feminism?

At this critical moment after Copenhagen and in the wake of an economic crisis that has posed a serious challenge to neoliberal economic policy, environmentalists should take a lesson from developments in the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. The environmental movement faces the same political economy faced by the feminist movement: a capitalist system and mode of production. Feminists have navigated within or fought against this system on the ground level with their struggle for equal opportunity employment, re-valuing productive work such as childcare, decreasing the gender wage gap, and fighting sexual harassment. Feminist confrontations with capitalism were also manifest in the intense theoretical debates that took place during second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s. Liberal, Marxist, and radical feminists posited different answers to the foundational question of how to position oneself within or against a capitalist political economy

Social problem construction and national context: news reporting on "overweight" and "obesity" in the United States and France.

Drawing on analyses of American and French news reports on "overweight" and "obesity," this article examines how national context—including position in a global field of nation states, as well as different national politics and culture—shapes the framing of social problems. As has been shown in previous research, news reports from France—the economically dominated but culturally dominant nation of the two—discuss the United States more often than vice versa, typically in a negative way. Our contribution is to highlight the flexibility of anti-American rhetoric, which provides powerful ammunition for a variety of social problem frames. Specifically, depending on elite interests, French news reports may invoke anti-American rhetoric to reject a given phenomenon as a veritable public problem, or they may use such rhetoric to drum up concern over an issue. We further show how diverse cultural factors shape news reporting. Despite earlier work showing that a group-based discrimination frame is more common in the United States than in France, we find that the U.S. news sample is no more likely to discuss weight-based discrimination than the French news sample. We attribute this to specific barriers to this particular framing, namely the widespread view that body size is a behavior, akin to smoking, rather than an ascribed characteristic, like race. This discussion points, more generally, to some of the mechanisms limiting the diffusion of frames across social problems

Social problem construction and national context: news reporting on "overweight" and "obesity" in the United States and France.

Drawing on analyses of American and French news reports on "overweight" and "obesity," this article examines how national context—including position in a global field of nation states, as well as different national politics and culture—shapes the framing of social problems. As has been shown in previous research, news reports from France—the economically dominated but culturally dominant nation of the two—discuss the United States more often than vice versa, typically in a negative way. Our contribution is to highlight the flexibility of anti-American rhetoric, which provides powerful ammunition for a variety of social problem frames. Specifically, depending on elite interests, French news reports may invoke anti-American rhetoric to reject a given phenomenon as a veritable public problem, or they may use such rhetoric to drum up concern over an issue. We further show how diverse cultural factors shape news reporting. Despite earlier work showing that a group-based discrimination frame is more common in the United States than in France, we find that the U.S. news sample is no more likely to discuss weight-based discrimination than the French news sample. We attribute this to specific barriers to this particular framing, namely the widespread view that body size is a behavior, akin to smoking, rather than an ascribed characteristic, like race. This discussion points, more generally, to some of the mechanisms limiting the diffusion of frames across social problems

Foxp1 is an essential transcriptional regulator for the generation of quiescent naive T cells during thymocyte development

Proper thymocyte development is required to establish T-cell central tolerance and to generate naive T cells, both of which are essential for T-cell homeostasis and a functional immune system. Here we demonstrate that the loss of transcription factor Foxp1 results in the abnormal development of T cells. Instead of generating naive T cells, Foxp1-deficient single-positive thymocytes acquire an activated phenotype prematurely in the thymus and lead to the generation of peripheral CD4+ T and CD8+ T cells that exhibit an activated phenotype and increased apoptosis and readily produce cytokines upon T-cell receptor engagement. These results identify Foxp1 as an essential transcriptional regulator for thymocyte development and the generation of quiescent naive T cells