http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/22577/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/39400/ 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z A spate of gender research in transnational migration at interdisciplinary interfaces has revealed powerful insights on how migration systems have co-evolved with geo-political dynamics of globalisation, revealing emerging forms of intersecting inequality and the need to clarifying the different epistemological positions in the debates about gender inequality. The international classification system used in the definition of rights and entitlements is now in conflict with the rapidly changing realities of migration in which local/global dynamics that have de-stabilised its established categories. Interpreting ‘gender’ in transnational migration today in defence of the human rights of migrants must go beyond ‘gender’ as a pre-given heuristic device handed down from previous theories. Aspirations for a gender equal world cannot avoid employing epistemic vigilance to discern where and which thinking about ‘gender’ is valid, and how unjustifiable biases may be corrected to ensure satisfactory treatments of the relationship between gender, belonging, rights and entitlements. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/33021/ 2011-06-01T00:00:00Z Driven by diverse forces – economic pressures and opportunities, climate change, war, conquest, and transformation of political regimes – human migration has been central to circulation of knowledge and values, goods and labour. Yet, it has been subject to mainly disciplinary inquiries and the existing body of studies has lacked a comprehensive perspective. This volume essays precisely such a more comprehensive historical and experiential perspective, and as a result leads us to reconsider the meanings of ‘human’, ‘movement’, and ‘borders’. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22353/ 2010-05-01T00:00:00Z We consider cross-border migration through the lens of the capabilities approach, with special reference to transnational migration and to implications for the approach itself. Cross-border migration has profound and diverse effects, not least because it accelerates change in the nature of political community. A capabilities approach can be helpful through its insistence on multi-dimensional, inter-personally disaggregated, reflective evaluation. At the same time, the realities of migration exercise pressure on capabilities thinking, to deepen its underlying social and political theory and nuance its efforts to counter communitarian tendencies. By extending its attention to migrants and the locality-spanning social and political spaces in which they live, the capabilities approach will be able to better concretize and situate the picture of the ‘we’ who ‘have (or seek) reason to value’ purported goods and rights. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19675/ 2010-02-01T00:00:00Z We consider cross-border migration through the lens of the capabilities approach, with special reference to transnational migration and to implications for the approach itself. Cross-border migration has profound and diverse effects, not least because it accelerates change in the nature of political community. A capabilities approach can be helpful through its insistence on multi-dimensional, inter-personally disaggregated, reflective evaluation. At the same time, the realities of migration exercise pressure on capabilities thinking, to deepen its underlying social and political theory and nuance its efforts to counter communitarian tendencies. By extending its attention to migrants and the locality-spanning social and political spaces in which they live, the capabilities approach will be able to better concretize and situate the picture of the ‘we’ who ‘have (or seek) reason to value’ purported goods and rights. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18711/ 2009-10-01T00:00:00Z Views on poverty are deeply rooted in cultural frameworks about the human condition shaped by histories. In the debate on modernity, perspectives on poverty oscillate between: a) making the poor – their ‘morals’ and ‘culture’ – responsible for their own situation and b) positioning the causes in structural shifts in regimes of accumulation and changing forms of governing the population. the hegemonic and binary treatment of the ‘production’ of things and ‘reproduction’ and nurturance of human life as different and separate social spaces, rather than as both fundamentally integral to a human society. By valuing the production of things more than the reproduction of human life, this construct has buffeted both class and masculinised power and operates as a gender-based mechanism of selection and exclusion for voice and participation. This is evident in the discourses on poverty, which surfaced in the context of capitalist industrialisation and political debates on pauperism in the 19th century. Early feminist research followed an empiricist mode in highlighting the invisibility of women and the gaps in poverty data. The findings of these studies gradually helped define the contours of a conceptual critique of the neo-liberal model of accumulation. The feminist conceptual critique of poverty knowledge formed part of a broader challenge to the androcentric and culturally specific assumptions of mainstream knowledge systems. However the contributions of feminist poverty knowledge go beyond some of these new knowledge systems through the articulation of key concepts of gender analysis such as intra-household power relations, care economy, the emphasis on subjectivity, agency and the notion of ‘trade-offs’, all of which offer an epistemological position that provides a lens on poverty that addresses a wider social domain. In the policy field there is limited incorporation of gendered poverty knowledge through 1) selective appropriation; 2) the construction of new myths; and 3) the selective articulation of gendered poverty knowledge that omits major implications for social justice and transformation. This reflects the discursive construction of a new orthodoxy in poverty knowledge systems in line with extant neo-liberal rationality. The present transnational character of poverty and its links with gender poses tremendous challenges to theories of social justice. A gendered analysis of the discourse, politics and policies for reducing poverty forms an important component of a broader social justice framework to address the intersection of emerging forms of exclusion and vulnerability marked by class, caste, ethnicity, race as well as local and transnational processes and dynamics of power. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18712/ 2009-09-01T00:00:00Z The essay proposes to re-orient feminist debates on epistemology towards the care-security nexus as a pathway that can plausibly provide an integral understanding of a human-centred and eco-minded security. Seeing ‘gender’ in binary terms tends to produce an understanding of ‘care’ as ‘female’ and ‘security’ as ‘male’. Care, when free from the constraints of gender as a binary construct, can play an important role in revealing the depth of ethical-political concerns and help expand the understanding of security. By revisiting the concept of care present in the two feminist innovations – situated knowledge and knowledge production as quilting – the essay shows that there are gains to be made in bridging existing rifts between feminist knowledge networks and beyond. The concept of situated knowledge gives significance to care as self-reflexivity – an ongoing process and a multifaceted nature of experience in the relation between the knower and the known. Knowledge production as quilting displaces the image of the solitary knowledge agent and provides a flexible approach to epistemology less constrained by teleological assumptions, appealing instead to interdisciplinary and inter-cultural cooperation. Both aspects of feminist epistemology are conducive to address the care-security nexus as an open and dynamic phenomenon, for which a successful inclusion of distinctive insights from different disciplines and cultural frameworks of knowledge would be a gain. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18731/ 2008-12-01T00:00:00Z Two authors who have been leaders of the ‘social quality approach’ that emerged in European social policy circles in the 1990s, and two authors who have worked with the ‘human development’ and ‘human security’ approaches that emerged in international development policy circles in the 1980s and 90s, collaborate in this paper in order to outline and compare the two traditions. The ‘human development’ tradition has focused on the quality of individual human lives, understood as influenced by interconnections that transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries; its ‘human security’ branch goes deeper into study of human vulnerability and the textures of daily life. The ‘social quality’ tradition tries to understand individual lives as lived within a societal fabric, to identify and measure key elements of that fabric, and to develop a correspondingly grounded public policy approach. The paper is a first step in a project to assess the possible complementarity, in theorising and practical application, of these two streams of work. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18734/ 2008-09-01T00:00:00Z Thinking about ethics of development and human development must both treat development in a global perspective and yet reflect on the content of human. This paper explores some faces of globalization by using a gender perspective, in order to consider reproduction (psychological and emotional as well as biological) and the activities and attitudes of care that give moral resources for response to systemic tragedy, not only for identifying and understanding it. There now exist globally interconnected systems of vulnerability and capability, for which matching systems of human security, care and responsibility are needed in order to protect human dignity. The discourse of human security helps here by better grounding an agenda of basic human needs, in an ethnography of ordinary lives rather than only an abstracted accounting of deficiencies or an elevated language of opportunities. It must be emotionally and existentially grounded too. The authors examine the potential contributions the tradition of Mahayana Buddhism; the work of philosopher-anthropologist Ananta Giri; and feminist care ethics. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22524/ 2006-07-01T00:00:00Z Transnational migration and its implications for human security as a policy field constitute one of the most complex issues of our time. Current experiences of displacement and security spans between a cyber world characterized by hyper mobility of finance, technology, information and the ‘cosmopolitan’ values of a ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong, 1999) to the world of human trafficking and smuggling of migrants and refugees as a mode of mobility adopted by people who cross borders on foot, by boat, trucks and planes who are often abandoned to die when arrangements break down (Eschbach/Hagan/Rodriguez, 2001; El-Cherkeh/Hella, 2004). The extant legal vacuum reflects unresolved conflicts of interest at different levels and poses a great challenge to the right to mobility as an expression of the liberal ideal of individual liberty. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19153/ 2004-04-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19122/ 2002-07-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19084/ 2001-07-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19013/ 1998-01-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/19000/ 1997-09-01T00:00:00Z http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18920/ 1996-02-01T00:00:00Z