Work—family issues of graduate students are nearly invisible, despite record numbers of men and women in graduate school during their peak childbearing years. Furthermore, very little is known about what, if any, services are available for graduate student parents. In this article we describe the theoretical and practical tensions between society's view of idealized mothering and academia's vision of graduate students as idealized workers. We then present results of a survey about parental supports for graduate students administered to graduate directors of sociology PhD programs. The results demonstrate that few official policies exist, most situations are accommodated individually, and graduate directors are often unaware of university services for graduate student parents. The article concludes with a detailed presentation of potential departmental and university initiatives designed to support graduate student parents. These initiatives can be readily incorporated by graduate departments and universities to help curb the leaking pipeline of women in academia.
Despite the growing practice of community mapping, empirical research remains limited. Extant studies have focused primarily on “counter‐maps” and indigenous maps, leaving many locally produced maps and their authors' perspectives unexplored. This article identifies the mapping process as critical to the definition and understanding of community mapping. It links critical cartography literature to goals of community‐mapping practitioners through themes of inclusion, transparency, and empowerment. The discussion highlights the social construction and practice of “community,” the relationship between maps and power, the definitional difficulties associated with community mapping, and the figurative and literal boundaries that constrain community cartography. Finally, it points to areas for further research and exploration.
In this paper I argue that imbalances and silences persist in urban research. In particular, there is insufficient attention to anti-racist and feminist theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights. Intersectional and materialist urban analyses that take difference seriously are under-represented, while patriarchy, privilege, and positivism still linger. As a partial and aspirational remedy, I propose a "Feminist Partial Political Economy of Place" (FPEP) approach to urban research. FPEP is characterized by: (1) attention to gendered, raced, and intersectional power relations, including affinities and alliances; (2) reliance on partial, place-based, materialist research that attends to power in knowledge production; (3) emphasis on feminist concepts of relationality to examine connections among sites, scales, and subjects, and to emphasize "life" and possibility; and (4) the use of theoretical toolkits to observe, interpret and challenge materialdiscursive power relations. My own critique and research centers on North American cities, but FPEP approaches might help produce more robust, inclusive, and explanatory urban research in varied geographic contexts.
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