Research as gendered intervention : feminist research ethics and the self in the research encounter

En este artículo exploro las maneras en que un ‘yo’ – en tanto investigadora, académica y feminista – ha sido constituido a través de mis prácticas de investigación, y considero las formas en que este ‘yo’ es/está disciplinado: ¿cuáles son las dimensiones de silenciamiento en torno a la constitución de mi ‘yo’ y cómo estos silencios revelan la importancia de dar cuenta de sí en clave reflexiva, en el marco de una ética feminista de la investigación? Propongo que mi individualidad es tejida a través de mis prácticas de investigación, mientras al mismo tiempo doy cuenta de las opciones que tomo y explico cómo y por qué llegué a las decisiones que tomé durante el proceso de investigación. Estoy implicada en, y soy producida por, mis prácticas académicas. Considero que la ganancia política de reflexionar sobre la investigación como una intervención ‘con género’ es mostrar la ilusión de certeza, completud y estabilidad como la quimera que es. Este pequeño acto de resistencia está al servicio de la transformación de la academia en un espacio de humildad, incertidumbre y esperanza. No hay mucha esperanza cuando todas las preguntas han sido contestadas y todas las posibilidades exhaustas. Identificar las prácticas performativas a través de las que soy constituida y explorar dichas prácticas por medio de una aproximación narrativa a mi ‘yo’, contribuye a una visión del mundo social como no fijo o cerrado sino en proceso de devenir, donde las posibilidades están abiertas

How (not) to make WPS count

Anu Mundkur and Laura Shepherd offer a commentary on the WPS Index and caution those attempting to measure progress in the complex worlds of peace and security

Power and danger in the third decade of women, peace and security

A decade ago, Dianne Otto identified the trouble at the heart of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda: the collision between the power of feminist ideas and the danger of cooptation and tokenism. The ‘power’ was not just that of an “imperial and hegemonic” Security Council which might act on behalf of a global women’s movement, but also of feminists themselves using the machinery of state. The ‘danger’ lay in those same institutions, where feminist ideas would likely be curtailed and distorted, the more radical elements jettisoned in favour of a veneer of legitimacy for the superpowers and the perpetuation of structures feminists otherwise criticised

Twenty years of Women, Peace and Security National Action Plans: analysis and lessons learned

National Action Plans (NAPs) are a strategic tool for policymakers to operationalise and translate the international mandates of the WPS agenda into the domestic context. However, despite the adoption of UNSCR 1325 in the year 2000, NAPs did not become a UN priority until the release of two Security Council presidential statements, in 2004 and 2005, encouraging the adoption of NAPs as a means of implementation. Researchers and practitioners alike had, in the years prior, pointed out a lacuna in WPS implementation strategies. NAPs, then, became a means to ‘effectively translate this international framework into actionable changes at the national and local level’, and UNSCRs 2122 and 1889 encouraged UN member states to develop NAPs for the implementation of WPS. NAPs represent the institutionalisation of UNSCR 1325 by states. As of August 2019, 42% of states – or a total of 82 countries – had released NAPs. For policymakers and scholars of the WPS agenda, NAPs represent a concrete step by states to fulfil their objectives regarding UNSCR 1325 and the other resolutions that make up the WPS agenda. In this paper, we use both qualitative and quantitative analysis to answer the following research questions: 1. Which pillar(s) of the NAPs are dominant? Is this changing over time? 2. What are the dominant categories of lead, including over time and by region? 3. To what extent are new and/or emerging security issues – such as terrorism, climate change and reproductive rights – represented in the NAPs? 4. To what extent is a budget specified in the NAPs? 5. To what extent do the NAPs contain provisions for monitoring and evaluation activities? 6. To what extent do the NAPs document the participation of civil society in production and implementation? We conclude briefly with a discussion of the insights drawn from the analysis and some considerations and recommendations for future NAP development. In the following section, we briefly outline our dataset and the analytical approach that we took

‘Frustrated’ hydrogen bond mediated amphiphile self-assembly – a solid state study

Herein, we present the synthesis of ten structurally related ‘frustrated’ amphiphiles, from which were obtained eleven single crystal X-ray structures, allowing observation of the hydrogen bonding modes present in the solid state. We previously reported the synthesis of a novel amphiphilic salt which contains both hydrogen bond donating (HBD) and hydrogen bond accepting (HBA) functionalities. This amphiphilic salt was shown to self-associate in the solution state, aided by the formation of hydrogen bonds. The exact nature of the hydrogen bonding modes involved in this self-association process remains unclear due to the combination of HBD and HBA groups present in the amphiphile structure. This results in a ‘frustrated’ system with access to a variety of possible hydrogen bonding modes

Funding precarity and women's peace work in Colombia, Nepal, and Northern Ireland

The study was funded by the UKRI GCRF Gender, Justice, 1065 and Security Hub (grant ID AH/S004025/1) and approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of Sydney (project number 2020/660).Civil society supports peace work in many ways, including through education, advocacy, health outreach, data gathering, expertise- and experience-sharing, event-running, community mobilization, conflict prevention, and peacebuilding. However, there are limited funds available to support this work, even though key development, peace, and security actors, including the United Nations Secretary-General, have acknowledged that developing the capacity of civil society to support peacebuilding efforts required increased investment. Scarcity of funding has created important political dynamics that affect the work that civil society can do. This study uses a qualitative semi-structured interview design to elicit information about donor funding dynamics and imperatives from expert research informants across three conflict-affected countries: Colombia, Nepal, and Northern Ireland. We explore funding dynamics, various organizational features that influence mobilization strategies, and the impact of COVID-19 on women's civil society groups working on peacebuilding. We argue that, while it is an ongoing concern, scarcity of funding is not the only inhibitor to effective peace work. Donor priorities, and embedded assumptions about the value of peace work—largely undertaken by women and women-led organizations—also challenge the viability of continued efforts toward sustainable peace.Peer reviewe

Radio Sources in Galaxy Clusters at 28.5 GHz

We present serendipitous detections of radio sources at 28.5 GHz (1 cm), which resulted from our program to image thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect in 56 galaxy clusters. We find 64 radio sources with fluxes down to 0.4 mJy, and within 250 arcseconds from the pointing centers. The spectral indices (S ~ \nu^-\alpha) of 54 sources with published low frequency flux densities range from -0.6 to 2 with a mean of 0.77, and a median of 0.84. Extending low frequency surveys of radio sources towards galaxy clusters CL 0016+16, Abell 665, and Abell 2218 to 28.5 GHz, and selecting sources with 1.4 GHz flux density greater than 7 mJy to form an unbiased sample, we find a mean spectral index of 0.71 and a median of 0.71. We find 4 to 7 times more sources predicted from a low frequency survey in areas without galaxy clusters. This excess cannot be accounted for by gravitational lensing of a background radio population by cluster potentials, indicating most of the detected sources are associated with galaxy clusters. For the cluster Abell 2218, the presence of unsubtracted radio sources with 28.5 GHz flux densities less than 0.5 mJy, can only contribute to temperature fluctuations at a level of 10 to 25 \muK. The corresponding error due to radio point source contamination in the Hubble constant derived through a combined analysis of 28.5 GHz SZ images and X-ray emission observations ranges from 1% to 6%.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, to appear in April 1998 issue of A

Care conversations

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Overview and application of the Mitscherlich equation and its extensions to estimate the soil nitrogen pool fraction associated with crop yield and nitrous oxide emission.

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The end of the world, or just 'goodbye to all that'? Contextualising the red deer heap from Links of Noltland, Westray, within late 3rd-millennium cal BC Orkney

As part of a major international research project, The Times of Their Lives, a programme of radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling was undertaken to refine the chronology of activities in one small but important part of the extensive Late Neolithic and Bronze Age settlement on Links of Noltland on the island of Westray, Orkney. The selected area (Trench D) is well known for having produced, next to a wall, the remains of a heap of at least 15 red deer carcasses, on top of which had been placed a large cod, a gannet’s wing along with part of a greater black-backed gull, and a pair of large antlers. This remarkable deposit had been preceded by, and was followed by, periods of cultivation and the deposition of domestic refuse. Refined date estimates have been produced, based on 18 radiocarbon determinations obtained from 16 samples from Trench D (including nine newly obtained dates, three from individual deer in the heap). These clarify when, during this long sequence of activities, the deer were heaped up: probably in the 22nd century cal bc, around the same time as Beaker pottery was deposited elsewhere on the Links. This allows comparison between the dated activities in this part of the site with activity elsewhere on the Links and also with other episodes of deer deposition in 3rd-millennium cal bc Orkney. It encourages exploration of the possible reasons for what appears to be a remarkable act of structured deposition. The significance of an earlier, much larger scale deposit featuring cattle remains at Ness of Brodgar is discussed in exploring the nature of Orcadian society and practices during the second half of the 3rd millennium cal bc