Training of Army Reserves in the Educational Structures of Military Settlements in the First Half of the 19th Century

Introduction. The article considers the development of military educational structures of the Russian military settlement organization at various stages of their activity. In the 1810s and 1850s, training battalions, squadrons, batteries, and combat reserve units trained children of Cantonese military settlers to serve in the army as Junior and non-commissioned officers. Specialized educational institutions taught topographers, builders, doctors, veterinarians, agronomists and other training specialists to serve in the settlement districts. Methods and materials. The author explores models of developing military educational institutions on the basis of materials of complexes of legislative, statistical and reporting documents applying methods of quantitative analysis (trend models, grouping method), comparative analysis using source-oriented, problem-oriented, and system-structural approaches. Analysis. All this made it possible to trace the evolution of government policy aimed at training army personnel and noncommissioned officers based on changing historical realities (the army’s needs for trained personnel, the reform of the military settlement organization), and the results of its implementation, as well as to show the numerical corps of graduates of training units of military settlements and its growth in time and space. Results. The main stages of the development of military educational structures of settlements and periods of their quantitative growth are also defined, which resulted in the multiplication of the number of graduates for the army service. The formation and expansion of the entire educational system of settlements was carried out as the need for special-profile personnel arose in the settled regiments. In the 1820s – 1850s, new special educational institutions were integrated into it, and primary education developed along a transformed vector.

The gendered politics of researching military policy in the age of the ‘knowledge economy’

This article explores our experiences of conducting feminist interpretive research on the British Army Reserves. The project, which examined the everyday work-Army-life balance challenges that reservists face, and the roles of their partners/spouses in enabling them to fulfil their military commitments, is an example of a potential contribution to the so-called ‘knowledge economy’, where publicly funded research has come to be seen as ‘functional’ for political, military, economic, and social advancement. As feminist interpretive researchers examining an institution that prizes masculinist and functionalist methodologies, instrumentalised knowledge production, and highly formalised ethics approval processes, we faced multiple challenges to how we were able to conduct our research, who we were able to access, and what we were able to say. We show how military assumptions about what constitutes proper ‘research’, bolstered by knowledge economy logics, reinforces gendered power relationships that keep hidden the significant roles women (in our case, the partners/spouses of reservists) play in state security. Accordingly, we argue that the functionalist and masculinist logics interpretive researchers face in the age of the knowledge economy help more in sustaining orthodox modes of knowledge production about militaries and security, and in reinforcing gendered power relations, than they do in advancing knowledge.

The Professor Goes to War

This chapter describes the experiences of a military social worker deployed to Iraq with a combat stress unit, as well as her predeployment and postdeployment experiences. As a civilian, the author is a professor. She explores how deployment affected her academic career and her own overall process of readjustment to civilian life. She describes her main duties and activities as the only professional mental health provider and combat stress team prevention leader at the camp in southern Iraq where she was assigned. The author reflects on early life experiences that motivated her to choose social work as a profession. In terms of joining the military, the author considers how her personal travels as well as employment with U.S. Army Intelligence in Europe, during the Cold War era, contributed to her motivation to join the Army Reserves.