Masculinities, Femininities, and Fundamentalisms: Gender Confrontations and Collaborations in Global Conflict

In this multimedia presentation, I combine images and text to argue that organized violence in the global system depends on shared gender cultures, networks, and transactions: Wars are violent confrontations AND collaborations among men and manhoods. Contemporary conflicts are very often depicted as clashes of civilizations, but in many important respects they are collaborations of masculine cultures and systems of honor. Although organized violence involves men on opposing sides of ethnic or class or national boundaries, ironically, such violence depends on cooperation both among allies and among enemies. Men join forces with comrades as bands of brothers, as men in arms, as buddies bound together fighting the good fight. Men also rely on enemy men to serve as credible and admirable adversaries. Men reach across battle lines to hold both allies and antagonists in combat theatres; they are teammates in the martial arts, costars in honor, and vocabularies of dominations and resistance constitute a gendered cultural [battle] field upon which conflicts are fought. Femininities and women occupy a problematic and contradictory place in confrontations between masculinities. Like men, women are collaborators in war. They are often enlisted in men\u27s conflicts either as potential victims to be defended or as enemy property militarized masculine performances. Womenandchildren are one answer to the question, why we fight? In this presentation I present quotes from religious and political extremists Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Osama bin Laden and images from Western popular culture, military history, and recent U.S. wars to illustrate the role of gender confrontations and collaborations in armed conflicts

International Funding of Educational Development: External Agendas and Internal Adaptations: The Case of Liberia

This is the published ersion. Copyright 1989 University of Chicago Press.The past quarter century has been a period of tremendous educational growth in developing countries. During the period from 1960 to 1985, primary school enrollments in developing states rose 50 percent, from 60.7 percent of the primary-school-aged population in 1960 to 91.5 percent in 1985.1 Secondary enrollments tripled from 12.6 percent of the secondary school- aged population in 1960 to 38.4 percent in 19S5.2 And enrollments in tertiary education quadrupled from 2.1 percent of 20-24-year-olds in 1960 to 8.8 percent in 1985.5 National expenditures for education in developing states showed paralleled increases during the period from 1970 to 1983, growing from 2.9 percent of the developing world's gross national product (GNP) in 1970 to 4.0 percent of its GNP in 1983.4 Despite the expansion of education in the developing world, development planners, educators, and education development researchers cite numerous problems with educational systems (including problems of access, quality, cost, and design)1 and express disappointment at the apparent failure of educational expansion to decrease dependency, reduce inequities, or to promote economic growth.6 The litany of problems characterizingeducation systems in developing states and plaguing educational planners and project implementers reveals the weakness of educational development as an engine of social, economic, and political change. When seen in this light, the question is not why educational expansion has failed to promote economic growth, to reduce social inequalities, or to establish participatory political systems. The question is, Why, in the face of large investments of human and capital resources, are education systems in such disarray— what is going wrong with the educational development process? The following pages concentrate on the question of what goes wrong in educational development. The findings reported here are based on a detailed analysis of one case, the West African country of Liberia during the period from 1972 to 1985.7 This effort to identify the impediments to educational development, focuses on a major set of actors in the development process—-international funding agencies. We outline the ways in which development projects sponsored by international funding agencies shaped and often distorted organizational aspects of the Liberian education system during the 14-year period under investigation. We believe that the Liberian case is not unique, that similar problems inevitably result from internationally funded development efforts wherever they occur

The Expansion of Mass Education in Botswana: Local and World Society Perspectives

This is the published version. Copyright 1993 University of Chicago Press.Since the end of the Second World War, the growth of education is notable for several reasons. First, the institutions of mass education have spread to virtually all countries despite vast differences in political, economic, social, and cultural organization. Second, rates of enrollment around the world are high and represent enormous financial investments by many impoverished states and economies.1 And, third, the rapidity of educational expansion across states was unanticipated, its speed catching by surprise both theorists and practitioners alike

Public Education as Nation-Building in America: Enrollments and Bureaucratization in the American States, 1870-1930

This is the published version. Copyright 1979 University of Chicago Press.Current discussions of the effects of urbanization and industrialization on the bureaucratization of American public education in the later 19th century do not offer effective explanations of the expansion of the educational system in the first place. Enrollments were high much earlier than these explanations suggest and were probably higher in rural than in urban settings. We argue that the spread of public education, especially in the North and West, took place through a series of nation-building social movements having partly religious and partly political forms. We see these movements as reflecting the involvement and success of American society in the world exchange economy and the dominance of parallel religious ideologies. State-level data are used to show both the absence of positive effects of urban industrialism on enrollments and some suggestive effects of evangelical Protestantism and 19th-century Republicanism

Sexual citizenship in Belfast, Northern Ireland

In this article we examine the contours and construction of sexual citizenship in Belfast, Northern Ireland through in-depth interviews with 30 members of the GLBT community and a discursive analysis of discourses of religion and nationalism. In the first half of the article we outline how sexual citizenship was constructed in the Irish context from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, arguing that a moral conservatism developed as a result of religious reform and the interplay between Catholic and Protestant churches, and the redefining of masculinity and femininity with the rise of nationalism. In the second half of the article, we detail how the Peace Process has offered new opportunities to challenge and destabilise hegemonic discourses of sexual citizenship by transforming legislation and policing, and encouraging inward investment and gentrification