Felt Power

Too often, women from the Global South have been portrayed as victims of gender violence in need of empowerment. Yet in the rural south of Mexico City, many Indigenous women expressed feeling strong, even powerful, despite their varied experiences of violence. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that their felt power was often rooted in their realities. Nahuatl‐speaking communities have historically recognized certain kinds of power in women (including healing magic) and others in men (including political power). Women's narratives revealed complex interactions between women's and men's power. Women often represented themselves not as helpless victims but as having the power to change their circumstances, for better or worse. I introduce felt power as a conceptual tool for centering Indigenous women's experiential, embodied, and spiritual knowledge in addressing the gender‐based violence they often experienced. Felt power is derived from Dian Million's framework of felt theory, which represents Indigenous people's narratives as feeling‐based theory‐making, rather than raw data to be theorized into abstraction by non‐Indigenous thinkers. I suggest that considering and respecting Indigenous women's felt power in the face of violence will contribute to decolonizing the study of gender violence and development agencies’ responses to it

Warrior women: contested understandings of violence and gender in Highland Mexico

Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in Milpa Alta, a rural, southern municipality of Mexico City, this thesis focuses on local understandings and contestations surrounding “violence against Indigenous women”, while questioning the meaning of “violence”, “Indigeneity”, and “femininity,” and the relationship between these concepts. I argue for rethinking violence, as present interventions in Milpa Alta may contribute more to perpetuating than alleviating it. Newly circulating discourses of human rights and women’s rights, and high numbers of femicide and sexual trafficking victims in the region, have made Milpaltenses aware of the issue of violence against women. Paradoxically, many acknowledged it to be widespread, while insisting that women and men are equally powerful: Local ideologies of work and love emphasise complementarity and interdependency in marriage. In practice, interdependent work and love contain within themselves potential for violence. Instead of directly discussing “violence”, Milpaltenses often spoke of “order” and “chaos”: They interpreted certain acts as maintaining or changing embodied states and the social order. Violence was also often likened to love, as one may find expression in the other, and both engender transformation. Instead of viewing women as “victims”, a pejorative epithet, they were frequently lionized as “strong women”, “hard workers”, “strugglers”, and “warriors”, protecting their families and communities from all kinds of harm. Historically, women have fought alongside their men in the communal struggle to defend the local forest against the interests of mining companies and paper factories. In sum, my analysis of local discourse, life history interviews, historical and mythic narratives, religious practice, and gendered work shows that violence against Milpaltense women can neither be understood in terms of “culturally legitimate violence”, nor in terms of patriarchal oppression alone. Thus, anti-violence strategies promoting an individualist notion of women’s rights are not only inefficient, but also risk socially isolating the women accepting this approach. I conclude that intervening to save women from “cultural violence” and imposing a particular understanding of violence, is ineffective. Development initiatives would be more likely to meet women’s needs if they built on local understandings, which link love and violence, rather than oppose these

Short-term operating plan for farms and ranches

stats082022upload"Timely decision making is essential for farm and ranch businesses. Decisions are a part of daily operations and vary greatly from prioritizing tasks to choosing inputs and deciding how much product to sell at a certain price. Most operations have primary decision makers who routinely make these decisions. It is important however, that others know how to proceed if the key decision maker(s) is/are unable to make decisions. This plan was developed to help farm and ranch families continue operating their businesses with minimal interruptions should the primary decision maker(s) be unable to make short-term decisions. The plan could be helpful in an unexpected situation such as hospitalization or military deployment."--Page 1.Mary Sobba (Field Specialist, Agricultural Business and Policy), Joni Harper (Community Engagement Specialist, Agriculture and Environment), Catherine Neuner (Community Engagement Specialist, Agriculture and Environment), Kyle Whittaker (Community Engagement Specialist, Agriculture and Environment

Short-term operating plan for farms and ranches

"Timely decision making is essential for farm and ranch businesses. Decisions are a part of daily operations and vary greatly from prioritizing tasks to choosing inputs and deciding how much product to sell at a certain price. Most operations have primary decision makers who routinely make these decisions. It is important however, that others know how to proceed if the key decision maker(s) is/are unable to make decisions. This plan was developed to help farm and ranch families continue operating their businesses with minimal interruptions should the primary decision maker(s) be unable to make short-term decisions. The plan could be helpful in an unexpected situation such as hospitalization or military deployment. For this plan, the short term is generally considered two weeks to six months. The purpose is to have organized information for family members to use to continue operating the farm or ranch business. Locating key information is stressful and time consuming, and this plan will help to reduce stress and save time."--First page.The following authors contributed to this plan: Mary Sobba (Field Specialist, Agricultural Business and Policy, MU Extension), Joni Harper (Community Engagement Specialist, Agriculture and Environment, MU Extension), Catherine Neuner (Community Engagement Specialist, Agriculture and Environment, MU Extension), Kyle Whittaker (Community Engagement Specialist, Agriculture and Environment, MU Extension)New 07/202

A multidisciplinary review essay of Francisco Cantú’s book "The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border", Vintage, London, 2019

What makes this review essay on Francisco Cantúʼs bestselling book on the US-Mexican border regimes uniquely thought-provoking – and, in equal measure, challenging – is the diversity of the disciplines involved and their relationship to the subject matter. Our working groupʼs aim has been to analyze notions of ›subjectivation‹, that is, the process of becoming a subject in relation to practices of vigilance. Thus, our working group explored what different disciplines can gain from reflecting on and analyzing the same text and which aspects of it they consider particularly relevant to ongoing debates on vigilance and subjectivation. What kind of subtexts are brought to light by these divergent readings and what aspects do some disciplines stress that others would not have noticed in such detail

Becoming Vigilant Subjects

Becoming Vigilant Subjects argues that practices of vigilance are key to forming individual subjectivity. The book emerged from a multi-disciplinary working group at the Collaborative Research Center for ›Cultures of Vigilance‹ at LMU Munich. The authors include anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars. They draw on historically and culturally diverse case studies to examine how individuals develop their own vigilant selves in response to being observed by (often powerful) others – be they present, absent, or imagined. The authors argue that, in the interplay between this assumed observation and individual watchfulness, subjectivity emerges. However, as shown in the case studies, this is an ambivalent process. The focus of this book is therefore on the becoming – rather than being – of subjects against the backdrop of heightened attention, which is directed towards objectives beyond individual goals and tasks. The different cases, relating to the realm of religion, citizenship, and migration, show how individuals engage with, and potentially change, the social world within which they are embedded. All of these examples emphasize that subjects are not just shaped by the context of vigilance, but have agency and the ability to transform their own circumstances. Becoming Vigilant Subjects makes a valuable contribution to the as yet understudied topics of subjectivity and vigilance, by interrogating how both inform one another