Joni Seager

Gender and Water in Mongolia

Global institutions, academics, and practitioners have long acknowledged the need to consider gender in creating sustainable water management plans. However, for most countries a dearth of context-specific information on gender and water relations hinders gender-sensitive plan development. Mongolia is particularly poorly represented in the gender and water literature. This article presents fieldwork revealing distinctive gendered practices around water use, decision making, and management including an unusually high degree of mens participation in water collection. This research adds new context-specific data to the understanding of actual gender and water relations and underscores the need for further investigation into the Mongolian context.

“And a Charming Wife”: Gender, Marriage, and Manhood in the Job Search Process

The academic job search process, and the applications and reference letters that are constitutive elements of that process, are central to the creation and re-creation of a discipline. Disciplines and departments renew and re-create themselves — or do not, and merely replicate themselves — through hirings. A job search process can serve to hinder changes in the membership, culture, “look,” and the norms of the discipline, or it can facilitate dramatic and often rapid transformations. Job search materials thus provide an insight into the prevailing norms and conventions of a discipline. A review of a recent set of such materials reveals subtle gendered and racialized differences in the job search process. Such differences are apparent in the composition of referee committees, in the evocation of marital status both by applicants and by referees, and in the surprising persistence of themes of robust manhood. The referee pool, the applicant pool, and the search committee pool in an academic discipline are interlocked constituencies, and the job search process plays a “gatekeeping” role. The extent to which gender or racial differences are inserted into the job process thus has a bearing on the long term social construction of the discipline.

Disasters Are Gendered: What’s New?

A vast academic, policy, practitioner, and activist literature, stretching back at least two decades, documents and analyzes the gendered dimensions of “natural” disasters and, more recently, of climate change.

Focus Section: Women in Geography in the 21st Century: “And a Charming Wife”: Gender, Marriage, and Manhood in the Job Search Process

The academic job search process, and the applications and reference letters that are constitutive elements of that process, are central to the creation and re-creation of a discipline. Disciplines and departments renew and re-create themselves — or do not, and merely replicate themselves — through hirings. A job search process can serve to hinder changes in the membership, culture, “look,” and the norms of the discipline, or it can facilitate dramatic and often rapid transformations. Job search materials thus provide an insight into the prevailing norms and conventions of a discipline. A review of a recent set of such materials reveals subtle gendered and racialized differences in the job search process. Such differences are apparent in the composition of referee committees, in the evocation of marital status both by applicants and by referees, and in the surprising persistence of themes of robust manhood. The referee pool, the applicant pool, and the search committee pool in an academic discipline are in...