Tamara L. Mix

Retrofitting Frontier Masculinity for Alaska's War Against Wolves

The state of Alaska has a complex historical relationship with its wild wolf packs. The authors expand Connells concept of frontier masculinity to interpret articles from the Anchorage Daily News as an alternative way to understand Alaskas shifting wolf policies. Originally, state policies were shaped by frontier masculinity and characterized by claims of sportsmens rights to kill wolves. With the reinstitution of an aggressive wolf-eradication project, Alaska policy makers retooled frontier masculinity. This altered form of masculinity, retro frontier masculinity, is constructed at the state level and deploys new strategic emphases: vilifying opponents as feminized sissies, casting wolf hunters as paternalist protectors, reifying the masculine family provider role, and framing the issue as fundamentally about competition.

Know(ing) Your Power: Risk Society, Astroturf Campaigns, and the Battle over the Red Rock Coal‐Fired Plant

Using qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles, Web site matter, and newsprint advertisements, the authors analyze the nuances of Know Your Power (KYP), a corporate Astroturf campaign created in 2007 to challenge the permitting of the Red Rock coal-fired facility in northern Oklahoma. Employing a risk society framework, the study contributes to literatures on Astroturf campaigns, the social construction and definition of risk, discourse on the contentious politics of energy, and corporate use of false grassroots coalitions in an environmental conflict. Findings indicate that KYP utilized an educational framework, neighborhood expert knowledge, themes central in the risk society, and the impression of a grassroots coalition to convince lay publics and regulatory actors that “Red Rock is wrong.”

Neighbors, nuisances and noxious releases: Community conflict and environmental hazards in the atomic city

Abstract Drawing from in-depth interviews with over 120 respondents, participant observation, and document analysis, we examine differential perceptions of environmental harms in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of a U.S. Government nuclear facility. The Oak Ridge Reservation has a 50-year history of nuclear weapons production and a poor environmental record. In the 1980s, a series of environmental revelations occurred and in 1989, the entire Oak Ridge Reservation was placed on the Environmental Protection Agencys Superfund list. This sparked heated debates within the community over environmental hazards and ultimately led to conflict and dissension. We analyze residents’ perceptions of environmental harms and highlight the salient variables contributing to community dissension, including conflicting levels of government trust, length of community residence, employment, race/ethnicity, and environmental health/illness.

“I Wanted Empowerment, Healing, and Respect”: Homebirth as Challenge to Medical Hegemony

We utilize in-depth interviews with 30 homebirth mothers and 11 midwives in Oklahoma to understand their perspectives on power, ideology, and practices in societys hegemonic birth system. Employing Foucauldian, Foucauldian feminist, and social constructivist frameworks, we illuminate issues of reality construction, knowledge, and power related to the homebirth experience. Participants expressed distinctions between a biomedical and midwifery model. They described complex power / knowledge relations in the biomedical model whereby womens bodies are made docile through disciplinary technologies, including physician control of knowledge and panopticonic domination of time, space, and movements of the body. Homebirth mothers and midwives articulated narratives of empowerment, knowledge, and control in the philosophy and practice of the midwifery model and homebirth. In pursuing “empowerment, healing, and respect,” participants engaged in alternative practices and philosophies, garnered agency and empowerment, and challenged normative medical hegemony.

Risk normalization in a nuclear reliant society: the construction of risk in French media narratives pre- and post-Fukushima

ABSTRACT The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan highlights risks associated with nuclear power. In France, a nation highly dependent upon nuclear electricity, actors create powerful official frames to shape public acceptance of nuclear risk. One component of establishing the nuclear energy infrastructure includes creation of normalizing media messages about nuclear energy, downplaying potential harms and discouraging the presence of contrasting narratives as well as social movement action. Drawing from literature on risk society, framing, and the role of media in creating and shaping discourse, we conduct a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles published in two widely disseminated French daily newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro, to understand the construction of nuclear risk in France around the time of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. We argue that mainstream media promotes narratives that support nuclear energy, normalizes risk and regulates public knowledge to the detriment of antinuclear collective action even under high-risk conditions.

“My Family Are Supportive . . . But People in My Village Mock Me”: Bonding and Bridging Capital among Women Pursuing Secondary Education in Kathmandu, Nepal

Women’s secondary schools have become an option for educational attainment in Nepal. We assess bonding and bridging social capital available to women who attend the Utprerana Women Secondary School (UWSS) in Nepal’s major city of Kathmandu. Using qualitative approaches, we consider the social capital available to women that both encourages and limits women’s educational access and address the networks women build when attending school. Bonding capital both encourages women to pursue their education and demands that women conform to traditional roles. School attendance prompts a change in bonding social capital, accumulated with family prior to school attendance. Women add to their bonding social capital by strengthening relationships with classmates and teachers. Women’s school attendance improved bridging social capital by enhancing future opportunities. Bonding social capital formed within the school provides emotional support, personal space from domestic responsibilities, and a sense of freedom, while demanding women’s conformity to expectations for student conduct.