Feminisms and critical rural development, 2003

 

Feminismos y desarrollo rural crítico, 2003

 

Janet G. Townsend¹

 

¹ Department of Geography. University of Durham. Durham DH1 3LE. U.K.(janet.townsend@durham.ac.uk)

 

Abstract

In the 21^st century, the global academic community suffers from excessive domination by english-speaking academics with excellent access to the mass of writing in english. Theory is crucial to us all, but in social science, writings in english privileges theory too much over grounded research. This is found not only in rural development, and in the author's own subject of geography, but in feminism, for all its claims to be open and inclusive. Critical rural development, which is critical of contemporary economic and political relations, can learn from the experiences of geography and feminism of the urgent need to engage in a new sustained collective endeavour involving many people working from a variety of viewpoints in different parts of the world (Stanley and Wise 2000) in confronting the world's real problems and, as a necessary part of the process, in overcoming this domination.

Key words: Feminism, geography, grounded research, rural development.

 

Resumen

En el siglo XXI la comunidad académica mundial experimenta una enorme influencia de las y los académicos anglófonos, quienes tienen un acceso privilegiado a la vasta literatura escrita en inglés. La teoría es crucial para nosotros y nosotras, pero en las ciencias sociales el predominio de escritos en inglés privilegia demasiado a la teoría, dejando en un lugar subalterno a la investigación sustentada en la realidad. Este fenómeno es algo que encontramos no sólo en los estudios sobre desarrollo rural, sino también en el área de geografía, área que concierne a la autora, y al feminismo, aunque el feminismo tiene pretensiones de apertura e inclusión. El desarrollo rural crítico, que parte de una visión amplia de las relaciones económicas y políticas actuales, puede aprender de las experiencias de la geografía y del feminismo, en relación con la necesidad apremiante de enfrentar un nuevo esfuerzo colectivo y sostenido, en el cual se debe involucrar a muchas personas que trabajen a partir de diversos puntos de vista, en distintas partes del mundo (Stanley y Wise 2000) a fin de enfrentar los problemas reales del mundo y, como parte necesaria del proceso, superar la dominación excesiva de la teoría y de la perspectiva anglófona.

Palabras clave: Feminismo, geografía, investigación sustentada en la realidad, desarrollo rural.

 

Introduction

This paper sets out to explore how we may use feminist method and theory in our search to confront the problems of the 21^st century in the rural world². Using the feminist writings of Stanley and Wise (1983, 1993, 2000), I shall argue that as scholars in rural development we need to be more inclusive, to work more as a community and to recognise the great value of grounded research. To be more inclusive we should, in my view, recognise that we are a transnational community. My concern is not to convert readers to feminism, but to argue that recent changes in feminism are paralleled in rural development as theory comes to be privileged over fieldwork and experience, and as writing in english continues to be hegemonic.

The paper will first explore the relationship between feminisms and critical rural development, and review the relevance of the views of Stanley and Wise (1983, 1993, 2000) to our everyday work and theories. The concept of the transnational community will then be developed, and I shall argue that our community of work in rural development is articulated and even governed by our use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). I shall draw in particular on writings in my own field of Geography, but the same problems may be found across rural development.

This is a new world: Paul Kennedy, chair of the political science of the future at Yale University, has argued that this century could see the same number of human deaths by violence as the last, but this time from terrorism not from war between states.

To explore these themes, it is necessary to begin with some basic definitions. Since the subject is the future, these need to be definitions that will last.

 

Feminisms

For me, feminism has an embarrassing history and present reality, as we shall see. Academic feminism grew very much out of writings in English which claimed to validate the voices of all women, yet were themselves, with honourable exceptions, highly colonial, white, bourgeois and exclusive during the 19^th and much of the 20* century. Fortunately, in the last 50 years, communities of practice and of theory which are to me feminist were built locally and then globally, many rejecting the label feminist as representing these imposed, white, bourgeois western ideas. Like many other privileged, white, english-speaking feminists, I see more hope in Southern than Northern practices and thought³.

What unites feminisms, which are now so varied and among which there is so much disagreement? To me, this unity is: the project to know and therefore to change the world, (Stanley and Wise, 2000:265). For them (Ibid, p. 278), and for me: in so far as something foundational exists, this is a commitment to a feminist politics, albeit now minimally conceived, that is, the belief that something is wrong and that it can and should be changed, even though there is disagreement as to the content of the something wrong and the nature of the change required. Such a definition would also cover the diversity of views in rural development. Linda McDowell (1999) quotes Griselda Pollock (1996:xv):

Feminism here stands for a political commitment and to changes that women desire for themselves and for the world... feminism does not imply a united field of theory, political position, or perspective.

These definitions would include the gender perspective, a term widely used in the South, and womanism, preferred by Afro-Americans. Feminism, then, is a very diverse emancipatory project, and includes a great range of theories, practices and goals.

 

Critical rural development

Critical rural development is equally diverse. The term 'critical' originated with the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School, but this paper will adopt its widely used application to any critical stance vis-á-vis contemporary cultural, economic and political relations and their resulting commitment to changing such relations for the better.. .[including] diverse theoretical arguments emanating from feminist, marxist, anti-racist, postcolonial and queer theory (Matthew, 1999:44).

Collaboration across such diverse theoretical frameworks is possible, but requires high levels of awareness of difference. Rameswari Varma, a feminist economist, ran a theatre festival in Mysore, India, in 2001. This festival staged 25 plays about women, mainly in contexts of change and all performed in Kannada, the local language. This was feminist political action, bringing not merely a critical stance to human relations, but a commitment to changing such relations for the better. Rameswari and I have collaborated in research, in which I think neither was conscious of our disciplinary differences as between economist and geographer. Culture, however, is a major dimension between us. It is not by imagining essentialist sisterhood, but by recognising difference and identifying common goals that we can and do collaborate politically and in scholarship (Goetz 1991). Differences remain, they are not elided, but we can collaborate.

 

What next?

To me, it will be in the future that differences between feminism and other schools of thought will particularly matter. This thought has crystallised from reading the article by Stanley and Wise in Feminist Theory, 2000, from which they have given me permission to quote extensively.

For me, as for them, most feminist theory comes out of feminist politics, activism and experience, not out of ivory towers. I shall be arguing this, and drawing substantially on their arguments as I turn to my own discipline and consider geography and geographers. There is a tension in all critical theory summarised by Brown (1995:200):

Critical theory in all its contemporary diversity needs to engage once again in actually critically thinking about better futures, doing so as a collaborative and collective project rather than as a slavishly individualistic project.

Are we, each of us, seeking to contribute to a better future, or to build a career? It could be both, but often it is not.

 

Feminism and the universities' environment

The last 20 years have seen an institutionalisation, a mainstreaming of feminism in the state. The rise of academic feminism as part of this mainstream, say Stanley and Wise (2000), brought to academic feminism the usual hierarchical relationships of academia, already present in social theory, which they describe as malestream. These relationships had the same effect in feminist thinking as in social theory:

Not only is the changed relationship between the theorists and those who consume theory largely unquestioned, but also the abstract opaqueness of much feminist theory writing is taken as almost definitional of intellectual worth. (Stanley and Wise2000: 266).

This is not to argue against theory, without which we cannot think (Fraser, 1997). New ideas often require new words. As feminists, we know that unless we can achieve a new language, we cannot reach our goals, because all our languages are patriarchal and no worthwhile recreation of a language can be easy. As specialists in rural development, we recognise the same tension between field researchers and theoreticians today.

This is only too familiar across social science. Somehow, the first goal is no longer to be clear and comprehensible, but to defend ourselves, to show that we understand all the complexities and nuances of everything we write, which forces us into some very opaque writing, in mainstream social theory as well as in feminism, poststructuralism and anti-racism. Elitism seems to be winning against lucid communication and against grounded research. For feminism, Stanley and Wise (2000:268) argue:

Of course, we are aware that a large amount of feminist writing certainly does engage with the substantive and grounded; the point we're making is that, whereas much of this other work would once have been seen as central to feminist theory, it is no longer.

They claim that when feminism entered the academy, say 30 years ago, feminist theory was the theorising of the whole range of feminist practice, and the range of contending theoretical positions that existed were seen as the product of a collective endeavour symbiotically linked to feminist politics (Ibid:568).

At a time when mainstream, non-feminist theory in social science claimed to be at the apex of ideas but simply failed to see women's lives, feminists drew on women's lives for theory, in work grounded in women's experience.

Whereas social theory was presented as the fount of abstract general knowledge, the difference that feminism made was to insist that knowledge is always partial, local and grounded. (Ibid:276).

In the United Kingdom academic feminism has tended to turn into a familiar privileging of theory over grounded research, perhaps as much in the interests of individual success as in that of of the feminist project to know and therefore to change the world. Walby (2000:190) wrote:

Theory which draws only on other theory is beginning to take a disproportionate amount of the resources in the women's studies community.

None of us would argue that grounded research is possible without theory, but for us, there is now an emphasis on theory in its own right which has adverse consequences in the real world. In the UK, rural development is under attack as worthwhile academic research, because not enough highly theoretical and innovative studies are published. In the UK's latest assessment of university research, the top grade allocated to departments was five (which my own department of geography achieved), but no department of development studies in the country achieved better than a four. A large five department may now receive hundreds of thousands of pounds more in government funding than a four of the same size. Within geography in the UK, the last 15 years have also seen a great decline of teaching both in development studies and about countries outside the North. Within development studies, as in current World Bank and IMF policies, rural development is marginalised again.

For Stanley and Wise, it is not only the privileging of obscure theory which is the problem:

There is a world pecking order in academic feminism, currently dominated by English-language speakers and publications and presided over by US academic feminism reaping the products of US imperialism. (Stanley and Wise, 2000, p.282).

This has massive material outcomes. "If mass sexual terrorism, genocide, vastly increased patterns of economic, familial and other subservience, and continent wide disappropriation in the lives of missions of women worldwide are not central topics for feminist theory, then something is amiss in the state of feminism which needs to be confronted". (Ibid, p. 270).

Stanley and Wise call not for a piece of work carried out by one person or team, but for a sustained collective endeavour involving many people working from a variety of viewpoints (Ibid, p. 283).. .in different parts of the world (Ibi'd, p. 277). They want to see grounded feminist research by feminists worldwide as the foundation of feminist theory. Thus, they argue:

1. That feminist theory is best grounded in women's experiences

2. That the value of theory is coming to be measured by its difficulty

3. That grounded thinking is being marginalised

4. That what we need most are feminist contributions from all over the world, with much less English-language domination.

I sustain that these points apply to all critical thinking, but the issue of grounding is particularly feminist.

 

Geography

Where does this leave me in Geography, at a time when English-language speakers seem to have an increased hold on world agendas? This is the literature on which I can write with the most authority.

I agree with Noam Chomsky that the events of September the 11^th 2001 were and are, in their effects, an attack on the world's poor, by handing immense opportunities to the Right and, I would argue, to the macho military-industrial establishment. This is a new world, and most of all for the poor.

 

Exclusions in geography

Whose work is included as of high quality? There are exclusions among feminists in the UK which are not easy to explain. Clara Greed's work on public toilet provision for women in Britain, appeared in Environment and Planning [1996b, A.28(3):573-588] and Women's Studies International Forum [1995, 18(5-6):573-584], but is often marginalised for its lack of theory. It recounts the situation under UK law, under which any city or municipality providing public toilets is required to provide twice as many for men as for women. This is because there must be as many stalls for men as for women, and men must also have the same number of urinals. This is the law, although most public toilets are in shopping areas frequented far more by women than men, and often by women with children, and although it has been demonstrated that, for reasons of clothing or biology or culture, women take longer to use them. I can confirm that in 1998, in a conference on development funded by the British government in the National Conference Centre in Birmingham, purpose built, many sessions were delayed because so many women were still queuing for the toilets. The architects had still not noticed. In Promise or Progress: Women and Planning. Built Environment (1996a), Greed writes very critically of urban feminist theory. For her, a new group of academic urban feminists exists which is highly philosophical, abstract and, according to some thinkers, elitist, competitive and exclusive. Urban women then lack the support of the feminist academy, who read philosophy rather than Greed's findings.

Exclusion of researchers outside the Anglo-American domain is far more severe. In September 2001, I was delighted to hear a feminist geographer, Jenny Robinson, give an excellent paper on the obstacles faced by those wanting to publish in key English language journals who have less than superb access to journals in English. They have to prove they have read everything relevant published in English. Maybe academics in other rich countries will be able to do this now, by getting their universities to subscribe to the journals as e-journals, but academics in poor countries will remain excluded (Robinson, 2001). Many factors compound the dominance, in rural development as geography and in feminism, of native born English speakers with excellent access to the literature and the World Wide Web⁴. This will be discussed further below.

 

Transnational communities

Perhaps we can get a new perspective on the problem by thinking in terms of transnational communities. The members of a transnational community have more in common with each other than with others in the nation or state, even the community with which they live. This was true in the Hanseatic League, in the Jewish diaspora and the Chinese diaspora. It is true among many African tribes that were chopped in two or more by colonial boundaries. It became true of the international business community and it is true of the development industry which profits from its involvement in the transfer of aid from North to South.

Cheaper air travel, the spread of phone and fax, and the development of newer information technologies like e-mail and the web, have all facilitated a new era of interaction. We can talk about nonplace intimacies, or close relationships between people who have never met. The business community is held together by books and university courses and travel and talk. Or there is the (illegal) narcotics industry once the supreme example of trust. Capitalism runs on trust (Fukuyama, 1995), but drug dealers have no recourse to the law if a deal turns sour. Now drug traders are perhaps challenged by Al Qaeda in non-place intimacies, transnational locations, commonality of culture, and trust within their transnational community.

Durham geographers have recently been working with the transnational community of development, and nongovernment organisations (NGOs). All these communities inhabit a world that is more intimately connected than ever before. This is collaborative work which Emma Mawdsley, Gina Porter and I carried out with funding from DFID, the UK Department for International Development (Mawdsley etal., 2002). We explored the knowledge economy of development NGOs through the ways in which ideas, information and knowledge move among such NGOs in Mexico, Ghana, India and Europe⁵.

Among the formal communities business, NGOs, fashion, book retailing, many of their professionals, especially at senior level, belong to what Pijl (1998) calls a transnational class, synchronising behaviour, outlook and language along common lines all around the world until they become interchangeable. To a degree, so do many academics. I have taught in Mexico, in the Colegio de Postgraduados en Ciencias Agrícolas: our disciplines and the problems we share in conducting constructive fieldwork with poor peasants provide a common framework for discussion.

Academic geographers clearly form a transnational community. As with NGO workers in Ghana, everybody has been to the same universities, done the same courses, sat at the feet of the same academic stars. Like all academics, we have been required to prove we have read the same books to get into the profession. Throughout my working life, there has been a certain English-speaking dominance in international geography. This still used to have much stronger competition than now from French and German. I had to have French or German to get into university to read geography, and to pass an examination in the use of one of them in geography to pass my first year as an undergraduate. There used to be real competition between French, German and English geographical thinking in Mexico or Brazil, although English tended to win out in the ex-empire, in Africa and South Asia.

So many professors of geography today in lower-income countries did their PhDs in the West 30 years ago and continue to be committed to quantitative geography. Now, geographers are meeting each other much more, sending electronic and paper documents, talking on the phone, and reading a vast array of books, papers and web pages so that academic colonialism at least has to change. I fear that for the present, English has the global advantage, although non-imperial languages may find more space than before. You can put what you want to say on the Web in any language if you have the computers, the infrastructure and the computer programmes⁶. An NGO in India teaches local women to type farmers' queries in the local language into a computer, and send them by email to a centre where they are translated and transmitted to experts; the process is then reversed with the experts' replies.

For Tvedt (1998:75), the transnational community of NGOs working in development comprises a donor-created and donor-led system: a transmission belt of a powerful language and of Western concepts of development, carrying resources and authority from the core to the periphery, and information and legitimisation from periphery to core (see also Hudock 1999:11). I am not sure that the transnational community of geographers is doing much better, even though the NGO community is structured directly around flows of money and the geographical community is not, so we have less excuse. We are more structured around immediate access to resources.

 

Information and communication technologies (ICTs)

Thanks to the frequent breaks in service and associated problems, information technology, (IT) has been referred to as intermittent technology, also IT, even in the rich countries, while the phrase is even more apt when resources are in short supply. These technologies are very demanding of reliable electricity supplies, and of state or private telecommunications services. I have collaborated in research and publication with friends and colleagues in México and India, and know that the difficulties are dramatic. In the North, or the countries which give overseas aid, much is written about the digital divide which excludes the poor, the ethnic minorities, the old, the untrained, the scared and the illiterate from the joys of communication by computer: in other words, mainly people who are already excluded in other ways. How much more severe a problem this is in the South. Some argue that Internet access promises benefits in the fight against poverty, because this technology favours the small user. Bill Gates, on the other hand, appeared at a Digital Dividends Conference in Seattle in 2000 to say that it is wrong to expect to find markets among the world's poorest. He did question, do people have any concept of what it means to live on less than a dollar a day? There is no electricity. Do they have personal computers that do not need electricity?

A third of the world's population has no access to electricity, according to a study by the Panos Institute (1998), while 88% is waiting for a telephone, and the International Labour Organisation notes that only 5% of the world's population uses the Internet, and 88% of these live in industrialised countries (ILO, 2001). Rural development has all too much experience of people who have no electricity.

The World Bank and UNDP regard ICTs as able to widen the opportunities for business and the poor, creating new transnational communities of talk. They have sought to provide ICTs to NGOs and grass-roots groups. They are techno-optimists who see the technology as a solution. We agree with Heeks (1999:6) in that:

information is a necessary resource for poverty alleviation but it is by no means a sufficient one. There is what he calls an ICT fetish, a belief that the poor must gain eventually because the technology is development. The main development problem becomes inequality of access to ICTs (Ibid, pp. 8-9).

That certainly fits universities in the South. Techno-sceptics emphasise issues of power and domination in society, which may be enhanced, not reduced, by faster, cheaper, easier communication, as has been common in the past. Communities are not necessarily benign, caring environments. It is communities themselves which exclude people. Techno-sceptics would suggest that we first need to change more fundamental social and political inequalities first - ICTs will not do it for us. To me, this is true for global poverty, true for universities, true for feminism and feminist geography.

Emma Mawdsley, Gina Porter and I see ICTs not as favouring the poor, nor even as a neutral intervention, but as a change which neither academics nor the poor can escape, and which we need to understand in order to find new opportunities. We have always communicated through a variety of means, but the technological developments of the last decade mean that we now do so at speeds and at a frequency never previously possible. This can, and does have, many positive outcomes -individuals and universities across the world are sharing ideas and information, are forming incredible networks and links. But all this does not necessarily democratise relations between universities or academics - exclusions and inclusions can be deepened, and new forms of both may emerge. At the same time that new information and communication technologies allow a decentring or opening up of knowledge production, they also offer the forces of homogenisation and development fashions even more purchase and means of dissemination. For example, in relation to the World Bank's Global Development Network (a new initiative designed to encourage think tanks and researchers, especially from the South, to share their knowledge), Stone (2000) cautions that powerful political, managerial and professional interests need to be managed and negotiated.

As academics we live by communication, and our lives have only begun to be revolutionised by ICTs. We must face this in seeking to overcome the world pecking order in the study of rural development.

Morshed Ahmad, who did his PhD with me at Durham in geography and rural development, has published a book which demonstates how underused such fieldworkers are as a resource (Ahmad, 2002). The book is not feminist, but still illustrates my points. Morshed lectures at the University of Dhaka, but e-mail is really difficult there and he has no worthwhile access to the web: these are serious exclusions. Also, as Morshed wrote in his thesis, the English one learns in state schools in Bangladesh is not very good: another exclusion. To overcome the exclusions, Morshed posted the book to me on disc. I corrected his improvements, a colleague from the Linguistics Department at Durham corrected the English, and a Geography secretary turned the whole thing into camera-ready copy. Secretaries in Durham may be much more expensive than in Dhaka, but they have not only the experience of preparing camera-ready copy, but the latest Microsoft Word which makes it easier to do. It is a remarkable list of exclusions. Publishers in English are finding that at present books based on a single country sell few copies, so none wanted to take his thesis and turn his really important text into a saleable paperback. The publication is of a few hundred copies in expensive hardback for libraries. Students will not be able to buy it ¿Can you think of a larger list of exclusions?.

 

Conclusion

We have to put more and more into overcoming these exclusions. The changes in ICTs which are giving us the opportunities have also given us other kinds of global networks, such as Al-Qaeda. And it is argued, and arguable, that the new scale and intensity of anti western feeling have been created by the global diffusion of television, another ICT, by exposure to Northern wealth through soap operas and the rest.

Specialists in rural development have a new world to build through our own relationships worldwide. To repeat the words of Stanley and Wise (2000:282): "There is a world pecking order in academic feminism, currently dominated by English language speakers and publications and presided over by US academic feminism reaping the products of US imperialism. Rural development shares the problem. Feminists, and other critical theorists with more limited projects, have new responsibilities this century. If mass sexual terrorism, genocide, vastly increased patterns of economic, familial and other subservience, and the disappropriation in the lives of millions of women worldwide are not central topics for feminist theory, then something is amiss in the state of feminism and needs to be confronted.. .[by a] sustained collective endeavour involving many people working from a variety of viewpoints (Ibid:283).in different parts of the world (Ibid:277)".

Such a sustained collective endeavour, which will imply much conflict of opinion across oceans and languages, is also needed in rural development.

 

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Liz Stanley and Sue Wise for permission to cite their work, to Maria Dolors García Ramón for permission to use arguments published in Documents d'Análisi Geográfica and to Emma Mawdsley and Gina Porter for their work, thought and ideas.

The research with the transnational community of NGOs was funded by ESCOR/DFID, Project R7301. The British Department For Overseas Development, DFID, supports policies and projects which promote international development. DFID supplied the funding for this study as part of this objective, but the viewpoints and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the author.

 

References

Ahmad, M. M. 2000. Bearers of Change: The Field Workers ofNGOs in Bangladesh. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Durham, UK.         [ Links ]

Ahmad, M. M. 2002 NGO Fieldworkers in Bangladesh, London: Ashgate.         [ Links ]

Brown, W. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.         [ Links ]

Chomsky, N. 2001.www.zmag.org/terrorframe.htm, also La Jornada.

Fraser, N. 1997. Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the 'postsocialist' condition. London: Routledge.         [ Links ]

Fukuyama, F. 1995. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, London: Hamish Hamilton.         [ Links ]

García Ramón, M. D. and M. Baylina Ferré (eds). 2000. El Nuevo Papel de las Mujeres en el Desarrollo Rural, Barcelona: oikostau.         [ Links ]

Goetz, A.M. 1991. Feminism and the claim to know: contradictions in feminist approaches to women in development. In: Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland (eds). Gender and international relations, Milton Keynes: Open University Press: pages 133-157.         [ Links ]

Greed, C.H. 1995. Public toilet provision for women in Britain -An investigation of discrimination against urination, Women's Studies International Forum 18 (5-6): 573-584.         [ Links ]

Greed, C. H. 1996a. Promise or progress: Women and Planning. Built Environment 22(1)9-17.         [ Links ]

Greed, C.H. 1996b. Planning for women and other disenabled groups, with reference to the provision of public toilets in Britain, Environment & Planning A. 28 (3): 573-588.         [ Links ]

Heeks, R. 1999. Development informatics: Information and communication technologies, poverty and development, IDPM Development Informatics Working Paper 5. Also at http://www.seed.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/idpm/        [ Links ]

Hudock, A.C. 1999. NGOs and Civil Society: Development by Proxy? Cambridge: Polity Press.         [ Links ]

ILO (2001) http://www.ilo.org/public/english/, consulted 15th October 2001.

Kennedy, P. 2001. Interview with Jonathan Dimblebey, BBC 1, 9^th December.

Mcdowell, L. 1999. Feminism, p.88-9 in McDowell and Sharp.

Mcdowell, L. and J. Sharp (eds). 1999. A feminist glossary of human geography, London: Arnold.         [ Links ]

Matthew, S. 1999. Critical theory?, In: Linda MacDowell and Joanne P. Sharp (eds) A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography, pp.44-5. London: Edward Arnold.         [ Links ]

Mawdsley, E., Townsend, J.G., Porter, R.E., Oakley, P. 2002. Power, Knowledge and Development Agendas: NGOs North and South, Oxford: INTRAC.         [ Links ]

PANOS Institute, 1998. The Internet and Poverty.http:www.oneworld.org/panos/briefing/interpov.htm or www.panos.org.uk/"         [ Links ]

Pijl, K. van der. 1998. Transnational Classes and International Relations. London: Routledge.         [ Links ]

Pollock, G. (ed) 1996. Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist readings, London: Routledge.         [ Links ]

Robinson, J. 2001. Excluding the periphery, paper presented at conference Beyond the academy at the University ofNorthumbria.         [ Links ]

Stanley, L. and Wise, S. 1983. Breaking out: Feminist Consciousness and Reminist Research. London: Routledge.         [ Links ]

Stanley, L., and Wise, S. 1993. Breaking out again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology, London: Routledge.         [ Links ]

Stanley, L., and Wise, S. 2000. But the empress has no clothes! Some awkward questions about the 'missing revolution' in feminist theory, Feminist Theory 1(3):261-288.         [ Links ]

Stone, D. (ed) 2000. Banking on Knowledge: the genesis of the Global Development Network. London: Routledge.         [ Links ]

Townsend, J.G. 2002. Feminismo, geógrafos y geógrafos feministas y el resurgimiento de la geografía crítica, Documents d'Análisi Geográfica, 40:175-187.         [ Links ]

Tvedt, T. 1998. Angels of mercy or development diplomats? NGOs and foreign aid. Oxford: James Currey.         [ Links ]

Walby, S. 2000. Beyond the politics of location power of argument in a global era. Feminist theory 1(2): 189-206.         [ Links ]

 

Notes

² Many of these arguments were presented at the conference Geografies Dissidents, in Girona, November 2001, and have been published in Spanish (Townsend 2002) in the Catalan journal Documents d'Análisi Geográfica. They appear here with the kind permission of the editor, Maria Dolors García Ramón.

³ The North is here used to denote countries which disburse overseas aid, the South to countries which receive it.

⁴ Even Spanish geographers are highly critical of this [García Ramón and Baylina Ferré (eds) 2000].

⁵ A booklet was published in Spanish for Mexican NGOs (Townsend 2000) but is out of print. The English version is available from janet.townsend@durham.ac.uk. Our website is "http://www.geography.dur.ac.uk/grassroots/"

⁶ http://www.geography.dur.ac.uk/grassroots/, English and some Spanish.