>From gimenez@spot.Colorado.EDU Fri Jun 17 11:34:13 1994 Return-Path: gimenez@spot.Colorado.EDU Received: from spot.Colorado.EDU (gimenez@spot.Colorado.EDU [128.138.129.2]) by csf.Colorado.EDU (8.6.9/8.6.9/CNS-3.5) with ESMTP id LAA24635 for ; Fri, 17 Jun 1994 11:34:13 -0600 Received: (from gimenez@localhost) by spot.Colorado.EDU (8.6.9/8.6.9/CNS-3.5) id LAA20637; Fri, 17 Jun 1994 11:34:11 -0600 Date: Fri, 17 Jun 1994 11:34:09 -0600 (MDT) From: Martha Gimenez Subject: INTRODUCTION/GREETINGS To: PPN@csf.colorado.edu Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: OR Dear PPNers, I am delighted to see that, with only one announcement, there are already 60 of us who have signed up to discuss population issues from a progressive perspective. I wish I could be here at the time the conversation begins, but I leave today to go to Argentina (my home country) and will return at the end of July. As you saw in the welcome message that you received when subscribing, I am one of seven persons who founded the list. The other PPN-editors are students of population in our PhD program in sociology here at Boulder. So, as I leave the country, I can assure you that PPN is in the competent hands of 6 very interesting people who I hope will shortly introduce themselves and their research interests. More on introductions below. Along with the PPN discussion list, we have accommodations for a PPN archive on CSF. The best way to access the archives is via gopher. Since most internet machines support gopher, you can come in with gopher csf.colorado.edu and you will find a modest beginning for PPN archives under /Progressive-Sociology/Archives-for-PPN I started PPN's archives by uploading a long bibliography and several manuscripts. The bibliography contains all the "progressive" population material I could find plus other readings which are excellent sources of information and theoretical insights. I have over 200 entries in the bibliography and I hope that others will add interesting entries that I have overlooked. Rather than the Gimenez-pop-bib, let's have a community PPN-pop-bib. In addition to gopher you can get a copy of the bib by email. Just send the message get ppn population.bibliography to LISTSERV@csf.colorado.edu If you have entries that you would like to add to the bibliography, please send them to Sandy Kail (Kail@spot.colorado.edu). For openers, why don't we get acquainted and, in doing so, find out our interests. If everyone would send a short biographical statement which includes some of the topics that you would like to see discussed, I suspect that that alone will get interesting discussion going. So I'll begin with a bio of myself and some of my interests: I grew up in Argentina, where I studied Law and Sociology and I now teach Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I have been here since 1973 and have seen a lot of changes, both in the institution and in the views and aspirations of students. Theory is my major area of intellectual concern. Within this broad area, I specialize in marxist theory, feminist theory, and selected aspects of population theory. In my work, I have sought to expand the theoretical and methodological contributions of Marxism into the theoretical investigation of gender inequality, domestic labor, the effects of the new reproductive technologies, U.S. racial/ethnic politics, and the determinants of population structures and process within capitalism. My current work is about the connections between class and identity politics, issues of multiculturalism and the use of culture, gender, age, race and ethnicity as metaphors or code words for class. However, because I have been able to work with interested graduate students in the area of population theory, I intend to pursue my original inclinations and will start working on population again. My interests in population are reflected in the articles that I have put in the PPN-Archives: One of them,"Marx vs Malthus" was published in Denmark in 1973, but has never been published in English. It is my first publication and, as such, it is dated. But I have been thinking of revising it and updating it and would welcome your comments and suggestions. The other article, "Fertility Control in China," is coauthored with my late colleague Betsy Moen and has never been published. We wrote it after our brief visit to China in 1978 together with H. Yuan Tien, Sylvia Fava, Paul Demeny, Judith Treas and one other demographer whose name now escapes me. I would like to use archived papers as a way to focus discussion on the PPN list. But, since I'm going to be away for 6 weeks, I can't very well recommend my archived papers as the center of discussion. If anyone on the list would like to have their paper put up for discussion, you can send an ascii-text version to Sandy Kail and she can make it available in the archives. So, I'm off to a small town in Argentina where my parents live. No internet there. I can't wait to see what has transpired on PPN when I return in August. see you then, Martha Gimenez