Women and Deliberative Water Management in Brazil

In this paper we consider some gender aspects of the evolution of water management in Brazil. In our work on women and water, we have been inspired by ecofeminist philosophy and the concept of 'feministThis research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Women, Equity and Participatory Water Management in Brazil

Public participation in resource management is regarded as a central pillar of sustain- able development. Water management is a foremost example, and women globally are prime users and protectors of water. Yet the effectiveness of participatory water man- agement practices is seldom examined from a feminist perspective. This article estab- lishes a methodological framework for such an inquiry, drawing on ecofeminist theory and the Brazilian concept of ‘feminist transformative leadership’ to consider gender, race and class aspects of participatory water management in Brazil.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Geodesics around line defects in elastic solids

Topological defects in solids, usually described by complicated boundary conditions in elastic theory, may be described more simply as sources of a gravity- like deformation field in the geometric approach of Katanaev and Volovich. This way, the deformation field is described by non-Euclidean metric that incorporates the boundary imposed by the defects. A possible way of gaining some insight into the motion of particles in a medium with topological defects (e.g., electrons in a dislocated metal) is to look at the geodesics of the medium around the defect. In this work, we find the exact solution for the geodesic equation for elastic medium with a generic line defect, the dispiration, that can either be a screw dislocation or a wedge disclination for particular choices of its parameters.Comment: 10 pages, Latex, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.

Casimir Effect for Gauge Scalars: The Kalb-Ramond Case

In this work we calculate the functional generator of the Green's functions of the Kalb-Ramond field in 3+1 dimensions. We also calculate the functional generator, and corresponding Casimir energy, of the same field when it is submitted to boundary conditions on two parallel planes. The boundary conditions we consider can be interpreted as a kind of conducting planes for the field in compearing with the Maxwell case. We compare our result with the standard ones for the scalar and Maxwell fields.Comment: 10 revtex pages, to be submitted for publication, minor change

Solid State Analog for He-McKellar-Wilkens Quantum Phase

In this letter we investigate the quantum dynamics of a quasiparticle in the presence of a charged screw dislocation submitted to a uniform magnetic field. Analysing the quantum scattering for this quasiparticle we observed the appearance of a topological quantum phase in the solution and demonstrate that this phenomenon is the solid state analog of the He-McKeller-Wilkens effect.Comment: 7 pages, epl styl

Braneworld cosmology in f(R,T)f(R,T) gravity

Braneworld scenarios consider our observable universe as a brane embedded in a 5D space, named bulk. In this work, I derive the field equations of a braneworld model in a generalized theory of gravitation, namely $f(R,T)$ gravity, with $R$ and $T$, representing the Ricci scalar and the trace of the energy-momentum tensor, respectively. The cosmological parameters obtained from this approach are in agreement with recent constraints from Supernovae Ia data combined with baryon acoustic oscillations and cosmic microwave background observations, favouring such an alternative description of the universe dynamics.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Anomalous Defects and Their Quantized Transverse Conductivities

Using a description of defects in solids in terms of three-dimensional gravity, we study the propagation of electrons in the background of disclinations and screw dislocations. We study the situations where there are bound states that are effectively localized on the defect and hence can be described in terms of an effective 1+1 dimensional field theory for the low energy excitations. In the case of screw dislocations, we find that these excitations are chiral and can be described by an effective field theory of chiral fermions. Fermions of both chirality occur even for a given direction of the magnetic field. The ``net'' chirality of the system however is not always the same for a given direction of the magnetic field, but changes from one sign of the chirality through zero to the other sign as the Fermi momentum or the magnitude of the magnetic flux is varied. On coupling to an external electromagnetic field, the latter becomes anomalous, and predicts novel conduction properties for these materials.Comment: New material added. ReVTeX , 31 pgs., 4 figs.(uses epsf