This book analyzes the folk songs from the Bhojpuri-speaking regions of North India to explore how ideas of gender, caste, and class are socially constructed, transmitted, questioned, and reaffirmed through their performance.

Shaped by cartoons and museum dioramas, our vision of Paleolithic times tends to feature fur-clad male hunters fearlessly attacking mammoths while timid women hover fearfully behind a boulder. Recent archaeological research has shown that this vision bears little relation to reality. J. M. Adovasio and Olga Soffer, two of the world's leading experts on perishable artifacts such as basketry, cordage, and weaving, present an exciting new look at prehistory. With science writer Jake Page, they argue that women invented all kinds of critical materials, including the clothing necessary for life in colder climates, the ropes used to make rafts that enabled long-distance travel by water, and nets used for communal hunting. Even more important, women played a central role in the development of language and social life—in short, in our becoming human. In this eye-opening book, a new story about women in prehistory emerges with provocative implications for our assumptions about gender today.

This is the first book to survey the ‘hidden half’ of prehistoric societies as revealed by archaeology – from Australopithecines to advanced Stone Age foragers, from farming villages to the beginnings of civilisation. Prehistoric children can be seen in footprints and finger daubs, in images painted on rocks and pots, in the signs of play and the evidence of first attempts to learn practical crafts. The burials of those who did not reach adulthood reveal clothing, personal adornment, possession and status in society, while the bodies themselves provide information on diet, health and sometimes violent death. This book demonstrates the extraordinary potential for the study of childhood within the prehistoric record, and will suggest to those interested in childhood what can be learnt from the study of the deep past.

Based on case studies, the book creates a multidisciplinary conversation on the gendered vulnerabilities resulting from extractive industries and toxic pollution, and also charts the resilience and courage of women as they resist polluting industries, fight for clean water and seek to protect the land. While ecumenical in scope, the book takes its departure from the concept of integral ecology introduced in Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si'. The first three sections of the book focus on the social and ecological challenges facing minoritized women and their communities that are related to mining, pollutants and biodiversity loss, and toxicity. The final section of the book focuses on the possibilities and obstacles to global solidarity. All chapters offer a cross disciplinary response to a particular local situation, tracing the ways ecological destruction, resulting from extraction and toxic contamination, affects the lives of women and their communities. The book pays careful attention to the political, economic, and legal structures facilitating these life-threatening challenges. Each section concludes with a response from a 'practitioner' in the field, representing an ecclesial organization or NGO focused on eco-justice advocacy in the global South, or minority communities in the global North.

In the past century, South Asia underwent fundamental cultural, social, and political changes as many countries progressed from colonial dominations through nationalist movements to independence. These transformations have been intricately bound up with the spatiality of social life in the region, drawing further attention to the significance of social spaces within transformative politics and identity formations. Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women studies contemporary literature of South Asian women with a focus on gender, place, and identity. It contributes to the debate on gender identity and equality, spatial and social justice, women empowerment, marginalization, and anti-discrimination measures. Covering topics such as partition memory narrative, spatial mobility, and diasporic women’s lives, this book is an essential resource for students and educators of higher education, researchers, activists, government officials, business leaders, academicians, feminist organizations, sociologists, and researchers.

Provides a hands-on approach to learning feminist research methods. This book provides examples of the range of research questions feminists engage with issues of gender inequality, violence against women, body image issues, as well as issues of discrimination of "other/ed" marginalized groups.

Women filing gender-based asylum claims long faced skepticism and outright rejection within the United States immigration system. Despite erratic progress, the United States still fails to recognize gender as an established category for experiencing persecution. Gender exists in a sort of limbo segregated from other aspects of identity and experience. Sara L. McKinnon exposes racialized rhetorics of violence in politics and charts the development of gender as a category in American asylum law. Starting with the late 1980s, when gender-based requests first emerged in case law, McKinnon analyzes gender- and sexuality-related cases against the backdrop of national and transnational politics. Her focus falls on cases as diverse as Guatemalan and Salvadoran women sexually abused during the Dirty Wars and transgender asylum seekers from around the world fleeing brutally violent situations. She reviews the claims, evidence, testimony, and message strategies that unfolded in these legal arguments and decisions, and illuminates how legal decisions turned gender into a political construct vulnerable to American national and global interests. She also explores myriad related aspects of the process, including how subjects are racialized and the effects of that racialization, and the consequences of policies that position gender as a signifier for women via normative assumptions about sex and heterosexuality. Wide-ranging and rich with human detail, Gendered Asylum uses feminist, immigration, and legal studies to engage one of the hotly debated issues of our time.

Caste and gender are complex markers of difference that have traditionally been addressed in isolation from each other, with a presumptive maleness present in most studies of Dalits (“untouchables”) and a presumptive upper-casteness in many feminist studies. In this study of the representations of Dalits in the print culture of colonial north India, Charu Gupta enters new territory by looking at images of Dalit women as both victims and vamps, the construction of Dalit masculinities, religious conversion as an alternative to entrapment in the Hindu caste system, and the plight of indentured labor. The Gender of Caste uses print as a critical tool to examine the depictions of Dalits by colonizers, nationalists, reformers, and Dalits themselves and shows how differentials of gender were critical in structuring patterns of domination and subordination.

This Palgrave Handbook provides a definitive account of women’s political rights across all major regions of the world, focusing both on women’s right to vote and women’s right to run for political office. This dual focus makes this the first book to combine historical overviews of debates about enfranchising women alongside analyses of more contemporary efforts to increase women’s political representation around the globe. Chapter authors map and assess the impact of these groundbreaking reforms, providing insight into these dynamics in a wide array of countries where women’s suffrage and representation have taken different paths and led to varying degrees of transformation. On the eve of many countries celebrating a century of women’s suffrage, as well as record numbers of women elected and appointed to political office, this timely volume offers an important introduction to ongoing developments related to women’s political empowerment worldwide. It will be of interest to students and scholars across the fields of gender and politics, women’s studies, history and sociology.

How we understand and define qualitative data is changing, with implications not only for the techniques of data analysis, but also how data are collected. New devices, technologies and online spaces open up new ways for researchers to approach and collect images, moving images, text and talk. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection systematically explores the approaches, techniques, debates and new frontiers for creating, collecting and producing qualitative data. Bringing together contributions from internationally leading scholars in the field, the handbook offers a state-of-the-art look at key themes across six thematic parts: Part I Charting the Routes Part II Concepts, Contexts, Basics Part III Types of Data and How to Collect Them Part IV Digital and Internet Data Part V Triangulation and Mixed Methods Part VI Collecting Data in Specific Populations