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This article shares the rich experiences of those involved in our first virtual Tree of Life group. We hope their ideas will offer clinicians a safe place to stand amidst the Coronavirus storms.

Background: Parents of children with chronic health conditions can face many challenges. The Tree of Life narrative therapy group intervention aims to connect parents with their skills and resources before collectively exploring the ‘storms’ (challenges) they face. A narrative-informed evaluation aimed to story the parents’ experiences of attending the group. Methods: Seven parents attended a Tree of Life group intervention and then participated in a narrative-informed group interview to generate stories regarding their experience of the group. The interview was recorded with consent and later transcribed. Results: A thematic analysis was undertaken and highlighted that the group offered parents a ‘safe place to stand’ to talk about difficulties; a different perspective on their situation; connection with the skills of other parents; new ideas to introduce more independence to their child; and togetherness within the ‘storms’ (challenges). Conclusions: The narrative-informed evaluation offered opportunities to further thicken parents’ preferred identity stories whilst also contributing to the evidence base of narrative-informed group interventions for parents.

Keynote speech held by Lucy Ferguson (Yellow Window) during the 4th WiS Symposium organised by the Can Ruti Women in Science Working Group (WiS) on 11 February 2022.

This toolkit by Lucy Ferguson and Lut Mergaert is based on the collaborative efforts of a range of H2020 structural change projects – particularly SUPERA,GE Academy,Gender-SMARTandGEARING-Roles. The purpose of the document is to provide practical support for those implementing structural change in research and innovation institutions. The document is developed inthree main sections: categorising and theorising resistances, common guidelines for dealing with resistances, and the resistances toolkit. Anassociated repositorydocuments the kinds of resistances experienced in implementing structural change, as well as techniques for dealing with different kinds of resistances.

Presentation held by Lucy Ferguson (Yellow Window) during the online workshop "Resistances to gender mainstreaming" on 7 December 2021.

Systemic sclerosis, although a rare disease, has numerous direct and indirect effects on the oral cavity. This article aims to inform clinicians of the signs and symptoms they may see in patients with the disease and the impact it can have on dental management. The main effect, microstomia, is not just limited to systemic sclerosis, thus the clinical and laboratory techniques described may be helpful when managing other patients with limited mouth opening. CPD/Clinical Relevance: Clinicians should be able to recognize how systemic sclerosis will have an impact on their patient's oral health and implement management plans to prevent deterioration of their dentition. The novel techniques used will provide dentists and dental technicians with alternative techniques that can be employed in a variety of cases when considering prosthetic rehabilitation.

Drawing together a number of unaddressed concerns from a range of literatures, this article explores ways of working on privilege in gender training. It calls for feminist gender training that is reflexive, focused on process and grounded in the transformative potential of gender-training moments and encounters. Drawing on black feminist thought and privilege studies, the article engages with the challenges of working on privilege, using feminist pedagogical principles and examples from practice to guide the discussion. New and innovative ways of ‘doing’ feminist gender training are proposed in the spirit of summoning our ‘transformative courage’ to collaboratively construct a feminist gender training that explicitly engages with privilege in order to facilitate tangible, lasting transformation for gender equality.

Introduction: Empathy for pain is influenced by several factors, including observer beliefs. This study aimed to test the associations between empathy for pain, fear of pain and health anxiety. Methods: A total of 182 participants rated their levels of empathy towards 16 images (8 female and 8 male) of individuals in pain and provided measures of fear of pain, health anxiety as well as age, sex and the presence of current pain. Findings: Both fear of pain and health anxiety were positively associated with empathy for pain, but in the regression model, only fear of pain was a significant positive predictor of overall empathy for pain and its three subscales: affective distress, vicarious pain and empathic concern. The presence of pain also predicted overall empathy for pain, affective distress and vicarious pain. Observer’s sex and age were not significant. The pattern of results remained the same when we repeated the analysis separately for images with males and females. Conclusion: The results suggest that more fearful observers, and those in current pain themselves, have higher levels of empathy for pain. Future research should examine the mechanisms underlying this relationship and how fear of pain may influence empathic behaviours towards people in pain.

The first striking aspect of this refreshing and dynamic edited collection is the impressive diversity in its range of contributors. Elaborating on the Women, Culture and Development (WCD) approach...

In this chapter, the possibilities and limitations of gender training for contributing to transformative change for gender equality are explored in detail. The chapter argues for a move beyond a focus on individual change—as demonstrated in current approaches to the evaluation of gender training—and rather on exploring institutional resistances and institutional change. This draws on both academic literature on feminist institutionalism and reflections from practice, with a focus on maximising the impact of gender training on institutional change. A key concern for future work in gender training is the lack of a clearly articulated theory of the relationship between gender training and transformative change. The chapter argues that even without perfect conditions gender trainers can work to maximise the spaces for feminist change within existing constraints and conditions.

The final chapter of the book sets out a number of priorities that have been identified for ‘going deeper’ with the field of gender training. First, it is argued that a more substantive approach to working with privilege in gender training needs to be developed. Second, new methodologies can be developed drawing from other fields such as applied theatre in order to encourage creativity, empathy and action among training participants. Finally, the chapter explores feminist ways of being in gender training and how techniques and ideas from meditation and mindfulness can be used to summon up the ‘transformative courage’ required to construct feminist gender training. This involves approaching gender training through honesty, compassion and a commitment to groundlessness. Taken together, these ideas help move gender training beyond its often technocratic form towards a creative, liberating process with the potential to evoke tangible, lasting transformation across individuals and institutions towards gender equality.

This chapter sets out the key critiques of gender training from the academic literature, such as the claim that gender training has become a ‘normalising technology’ (Davids and van Eerdewijk in: Bustelo et al. (Eds.) The Politics of Feminist Knowledge Transfer: Gender Training and Gender Expertise, Palgrave Macmillan, Abingdon and New York, 2016, 87) or that debates over gender inequalities are pushed from the realm of politics into the realm of expertise (Kunz in: Bustelo et al. (Eds.) The Politics of Feminist Knowledge Transfer: Gender Training and Gender Expertise, Palgrave Macmillan, Abingdon and New York, 2016). In response to these critiques, the chapter engages substantively with some of the key challenges of gender training from the perspective of reflexive practice, exploring some of the issues that stop gender training contributing to transformative change. The main point highlighted here is the need to work strategically within the constraints of gender training processes and scenarios.

This book explores how to maximise the transformative potential of gender training scenarios and processes. It does so by highlighting and interrogating innovations from practice in order to overcome some of the key challenges for gender training. The book constructs a notion of feminist gender training, which is reflexive, self-critical and focused on process. This chapter traces the historical development of the field of gender training, drawing on a range of resources and projects that have attempted to map the emergence and current state of gender training. It then goes on to map the field of gender training and explore how processes of professionalisation and developing quality criteria can contribute to a more feminist-informed theory and practice of gender training. This chapter establishes the book’s explicit focus on transformation, which sets it apart from the more technocratic aspects of gender training. Moreover, it asks how gender training can be harnessed as a catalyst for disjuncture, rupture and change.

An important aspect of maximising the transformative potential of gender training is the application of feminist pedagogical principles throughout all aspects of the training process. This is explored in detail in this chapter, which discusses not just feminist pedagogical principles, but also what makes a feminist gender trainer. This chapter also highlights a range of unresolved and unfinished issues within the field of gender training, especially when it comes to implementing feminist pedagogical principles—in particular the tensions between technocratic demands and feminist politics and practice. It is argued that feminist gender training requires individual, collective and institutional ‘transformative courage’ in the face of such challenges.

In many holiday destinations, the tourism industry exerts an enormous strain on water supplies. This generates a range of social problems, not least because local inhabitants often have to compete with the tourism sector over the access, allocation and use of water for their personal and domestic needs. Nevertheless, there has been very little academic research on the link between tourism and the impact of water scarcity on destination populations in developing countries. While there is a wealth of literature on gender and tourism development, such research has tended to focus on employment relations and tourism policy and planning, neglecting ecological issues such as water. Drawing on original ethnographic research conducted in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, in 2013, this paper makes a preliminary attempt to address this gap in the literature by developing a gendered political economy approach to water in tourism development. Three key themes are identified from this research: the salience of intersectional ine...

type="main" xml:id="dpr12128-abs-0001"> This article conducts a critical analysis of the World Bank's current infrastructure strategy from a feminist perspective, arguing that failures to define gender and set meaningful targets and indicators have meant that gender has not been integrated into the implementation of infrastructure projects. It sets out three limitations to the Bank's approach to gender and infrastructure: lack of awareness of gender in the four sectors that comprise infrastructure; the Bank's narrow approach to gender equality and women's empowerment; and the failure of the Bank to mainstream gender in its current infrastructure strategy.

Despite the rich and diverse tradition of research on the gender dimensions of tourism, such studies have had little impact on transforming unequal gendered power relations in the sector itself. In this paper, we are concerned with why this is the case and what steps might be taken to redress this situation. The paper argues that the challenges inherent in gender mainstreaming processes within public policies worldwide are replicated and – to some extent – exacerbated in the tourism sector. We contend that, despite its substantive insight into the sector, the impact of such literature has been minimal. We further suggest that this is, in part, due to the sustainable tourism paradigm's resistance to incorporating gender equality and gender analysis as core principles. In order to develop these arguments, we reflect on our experiences as specialist consultants in gender and sustainable tourism, drawing out some of the key tensions of integrating gender into sustainable tourism projects. In conclusion, we ar...

Despite the prevalence of gender experts in international development institutions, their impact in terms of transformative feminist politics remains questionable. Gender experts, and their profession more broadly, have been strongly criticized by a range of feminists working in academic contexts. In particular, some have argued that neoliberalism and feminism have converged, framing the role of gender experts as primarily to legitimate and embed neoliberal models of development. This article engages with these critiques from the perspective of the gender expert her/himself, drawing on first-hand experiences to tease out some of the tensions and complexities of this work. After setting out some general challenges for gender experts, I focus on one particular aspect of the current gender and development paradigm – the “business case” for gender equality – and explore how it feels to work within such a framework. In doing so, I aim to reflect on the possibilities of promoting transformative change ...

Private sector funding for gender equality initiatives is a growing phenomenon worldwide. To date, however, this issue has received relatively little attention in feminist literature. Our aim here is to map the contours of such funding and draw out the implications thereof for discussions of feminist knowledge transfer. While existing literature on the subject, as outlined below, offers a feminist critique of private sector involvement in gender equality, we suggest that our approach is original as it engages explicitly from the perspectives of those conducting feminist knowledge transfer. Drawing on the experiences of the authors and accounts from interviews, we set out the opportunities and challenges created by the increasing privatization of gender equality funding. By the “private sector”, we mean medium to large enterprises operating at national and multinational levels.

Much research in international political economy (IPE) has been criticised for focussing on large and powerful actors in post-industrial countries, to the neglect of sites, processes and actors in the global South. This article offers a corrective to this bias in two ways: by locating the analysis in two rural Central American communities; and by exploring the social relations of consumption in these communities. In doing this, I challenge assumptions about rural places being excluded from global processes and explore the complexities and contradictions of how such communities are inserted into global circuits of production and consumption. Drawing on extensive qualitative research, the article explores the ways in which capitalist development through tourism has reconstituted the political economy of consumption in terms of habits, attitudes and behaviour in these two communities. Using the community and the household as sites of analysis, I explore the complex ways in which inequalities have been reconf...

The relationship between tourism and development has been explored in tourism studies and in policy-making circles for several decades. However, very little research has been carried out into the gender dimensions of this relationship. Using the third Millennium Development Goal (MDG3) – gender equality and women's empowerment – as the focus, this paper explores this theme from a critical perspective informed by feminist approaches to development. It analyses the claim that tourism can contribute to MDG3 by reviewing the research on the impact of tourism employment on gender relations and the tensions and complexities that this presents. The main body of this paper presents a critical overview of global gender and tourism policies, focusing on the World Tourism Organisation and the World Bank. It concludes by arguing that while tourism development may, in theory, contribute to gender equality and women's empowerment, a substantive reframing of policies is required in order to be able to maximise this pote...

One of the foundational aims of this journal is to enable articulations of globalisation other than those conceived of within a narrow, economistic modality. The articles that comprise this special issue, in our view, make a timely and innovative contribution to the plurality of analytical insights that have been published in this journal since its inception. Further, this issue represents the first issue of Globalizations that, in its entirety, takes seriously the claim that gender matters to global politics and therefore to globalisation. Ideas about gender are thoroughly bound up in the processes of integration, fragmentation, economic restructuring, and im/migration that characterise the sets of practices and politics described by the short-hand of ‘globalisation’, and in various ways the articles in this collection interrogate these practices to enrich our understanding of their particular and more general effects. Uno de los objetivos fundamentales de esta revista es facilitar las articulaciones de ...

This rich edited collection makes a welcome contribution to the emerging literature on feminist expertise and gender knowledge. The formation of UN Women is presented as the historical context thro...

This research speaks to two themes on which little empirical work has been carried out in IPE: tourism and social reproduction. It focuses on changing relations of social reproduction in two tourism communities in Central America – Placencia in Belize and Monteverde and Costa Rica. In contrast to the majority of literature on social reproduction, the starting point for this analysis is not the reprivatisation of social reproduction but rather an exploration of how actors in tourism communities in Central America negotiate the tensions between capitalist development and social reproduction in a context of minimal state provision. Drawing on extensive field research in these communities, I identify a gap in social reproduction generated by women's intensive and anti-social working conditions in the tourism industry combined with enduring attitudes that social reproduction remains the responsibility of women. The paper explores the responses to this gap, setting out two clear trends – the ‘contracti...

International development institutions have adopted ‘gender’ as a fundamental component of any policy, programme or project. However, the meaning of this is often far from the original aims of feminists fighting for a commitment to more equal gendered power relations and social justice. This article offers a detailed study of one particular strand of development funding – tourism-based microenterprises – and outlines the ways in which ‘gender’ is constructed at three different levels: the World Bank, the Honduran government and a tourism development project in Copan. It supplements analysis of policy documents with the interpretations and perspectives of policy-makers and development workers to present a rich empirical picture of the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which gender is understood at all stages of the development process. It then uses this analysis to demonstrate how these particular interpretations of ‘gender’ influenced the outcomes of the project and why it ultimately failed in i...

According to the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), tourism is ‘number one in the international services trade’, accounting for 40 per cent of global trade in services and 6 per cent of total world trade.1 The tourism industry directly provides around 3 per cent of global employment, or 192 million jobs – the equivalent to one in every twelve jobs in the formal sector. The International Labour Organization (ILO) predicts that this share is likely to rise to 251.6 million jobs by 2010, or one in every eleven formal sector jobs.2 Tourism also has an indirect impact beyond employment through tourism-related goods and services, air travel and global consumption patterns. The relevance of tourism for global political economy can no longer be ignored by analysts wishing to account for changing global patterns in poverty and inequality. Despite this, with a handful of exceptions, tourism as a significant feature of contemporary global political economy has thus far attracted little attention in the field of int...

While institutions representing the tourism industry are keen to claim that tourism contributes to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), there is little evidence to suggest that this is the case. Indeed, in many ways tourism perpetuates underdevelopment and the violation of human rights. This article provides a detailed analysis of the relationship between tourism and the MDGs, with a focus on MDG3: promoting gender equality and empowering women. Tourism offers the potential to contribute to development goals including women's empowerment, but a significant restructuring of the sector would have to take place in order to achieve such goals.

This article shows how work is gendered, both in how it plays out in labor markets and the ways it is constructed. It first looks at how the gender dynamics of paid work have been radically restructured worldwide over the last five decades and then shows the impact of the sexual division of labor on gender and work. The next sections study the restructuring of global production, two modern trends in gendered employment—labor migration and informalization—gender segregation in employment, and the influence of women’s unpaid labor in the labor market. The article also develops the argument that gender is not always the most prominent inequality.

For several decades, the relationship between tourism and development has been explored in the discipline of tourism studies and in policy-making circles. However, very little research has been carried out into the gender dimensions of this relationship. This paper is a first attempt to unpack some of the issues involved in such an undertaking, and to provide an overview of some of the key empirical areas that need to be taken into account for further research. Using the third Millennium Development Goal – gender equality and women’s empowerment – as its focus, this paper explores this theme from a critical perspective informed by feminist approaches to development. Combining literature reviews, analysis of policy documents and primary research this paper aims to provide an overview of the potential of tourism to contribute to the gender equality and women’s empowerment, and the tensions and complexities that this presents. It concludes by offering some tentative policy recommendations and an agenda for future research.