Gender, space and sound: Listening techniques, mobile and stationary bodies

Ethnography ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146613812199278
Author(s):  
Jennie Olofsson
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The North ◽  
Gender Space ◽  
Auditory Skills

This article draws on an ethnographic fieldwork in which I investigated, and partook in practices of recycling graveside candles in the north of Slovenia. The aim is to show that the personnel’s listening techniques helped sustain the gendered division of labour. While the listening techniques of my male informants seemed to increase their spatial mobility in that it allowed them to occupy a wider area, the auditory skills of the women who worked on sorting the incoming graveside candles seemed to largely allow them to remain in place. Listening techniques were thus used for different purposes as they directly related to the gendered division of labour. As such, they resulted in different ways of occupying space.

scholarly journals PRIVILEGED MOBILITY AND UN‑MEDIATED CHOICE? THE CASE OF YOUNG PEOPLE LIVING IN TRANSNATIONAL LONG-DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-104
Author(s):  
Antonina Stasińska
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Big Cities ◽  
Long Distance Relationships

In postmodern times of emphasized fluidification, individualism and cosmopolitanism, mobility becomes self-evident and naturalized, yet socially desirable and anticipated. Therefore it is valuable to use ethnography to look at individual experiences. They are young, educated, and mobile, pursuing their dreams and goals while living in big cities: Poles and other (not only) European citizens who maintain transnational long-distance relationships create perfectly suitable representatives of the category of ‘privileged mobility’. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2016–2018, and it employs an auto-ethnographic perspective in order to examine the notion of privilege (Amit 2007), with its borders and limitations, through the analytical lens of mobility. The article puts forward the perspective of my research participants and thus provides a detailed portrait of the researched group, in order to show how mobility is rooted in their everyday lives and how privileged they really are. I argue that mobility, defined as one of the most stratifying factors (Bourdieu 1984), can be applied as a mirror that reflects position in the social strata. In this specific ethnographic context, spatial mobility can be seen as a useful tool, which exposes social and individual dimensions of being privileged while living in transnational long-distance relationships

Renegotiating the Domestic Division of Labour? A Study of Dual Career Households in North East and South East England

1993 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicky Gregson ◽  
Michelle Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Economic Restructuring ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Full Time ◽  
Dual Career ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
South East England ◽  
Shed Light

This paper is concerned with extending debate on the renegotiation of the domestic division of labour within the context of contemporary economic restructuring. Our focus is on a form of household which is becoming increasingly common in Britain in the 1990s. This is the dual career household, in which both partners are in full time professional/managerial employment. A sample of 71 households drawn from the North east and South east, forms the basis for the study. The paper is divided into three main sections. In the first we establish a typology of forms of the domestic division of labour, as well as a means of allocating individual households to particular forms of the domestic division of labour. Then we move on to discuss the degree of variation in particular forms of the domestic division of labour found within our sample households and illustrate these with reference to five case studies. In our final section we consider the implications of our findings for the respective arguments of Lydia Morris and Jane Wheelock; point to the significance of gender identities to an understanding of between household variation in form of the domestic division of labour; and suggest how our findings shed light on the debate over women and social class.

Baby-boomers and the ‘denaturalisation’ of care-giving in Quebec

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (7) ◽  
pp. 1141-1158 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY GUBERMAN ◽  
JEAN-PIERRE LAVOIE ◽  
IGNACE OLAZABAL
Keyword(s):  
Baby Boomers ◽  
North American ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Family Responsibilities ◽  
High Expectations ◽  
The North ◽  
Care Givers ◽  
Care Giving

ABSTRACTThe North American post-war generation, known as the baby-boomers, has challenged traditional family relations and the sexual division of labour. How do these challenges play out in the face of frail, ill or disabled family members? A study undertaken in Montreal, Quebec, with baby-boomer care-givers aimed to raise understanding of the realities of this group. We met with 40 care-givers for a one and a half-hour qualitative interview to discuss their identification with their social generation, their relationship to care-giving, their values regarding care-giving, and the reality of the care-giving they offer. The findings indicate that women, in particular, no longer identify themselves mainly in terms of family. For most, care-giving is not their only or even their dominant identity. They are actively trying to maintain multiple identities: worker, wife, mother, friend and social activist, alongside that of care-giver. They are also participating in the very North American process of individualisation, leading to what we call the ‘denaturalisation’ of care-giving. Notably, the women we met with call themselves ‘care-givers’ and not simply wives, daughters or mothers, denoting that the work of care-giving no longer falls within the realm of ‘normal’ family responsibilities. These care-givers thus set limits to their caring commitments and have high expectations as to services and public support, while still adhering to norms of family responsibility for care-giving.

Militarism and Repression

1981 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Randle
Keyword(s):  
Raw Materials ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Freedom Of Information ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The North ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Military

The thesis of this essay is that militarism is related to repression, both instrumental and structural. Not only is the military directly used in many countries to keep the population under brutal subjection; the very process of raising and maintaining armed forces (through such practices as conscription, special legislation restricting freedom of information and discussion related to military preparations, and elaborate devices for maintaining discipline and administering justice within the services) threatens, and often actually curtails, people's liberties. Structural repression is brought into play by militarism influencing social, economic and political life in ways that make coercion unavoidable. In the Third World, for instance, militarism has created a cycle of impoverishment, external dependence and exploitation. Similarly, in industrialized countries hyper-militarization (more markedly of the superpowers and their major allies) helps sustain, both directly and indirectly, the unequal global division of labour, under which the major economic role of the South is that of providing raw materials (including those which are non-renewable) at cheap prices to the North.

The colonial encapsulation of the north-western Namibian pastoral economy

Africa ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 506-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bollig
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
South African Government ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
The South ◽  
Buffer Zones ◽  
African Government ◽  
Interregional Trade ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
The North ◽  
North Western

The inhabitants of Kaokoland, Himba and Herero, have recently gained prominence in the discussions concerning a controversial hydro-electric power scheme in their region. They are depicted as southern Africa's ‘most traditional pastoralists’ by groups opposing the dam and those demanding it. The article describes how Kaokoland's pastoralists suffered tremendously from the politics of encapsulation the South African government adopted against them. Having been enmeshed in interregional trade networks, commodity production and wage labour around 1900, they were isolated by the South African government within a period of twenty years. Buffer zones for the commercial ranching area and prohibitions on movement across other newly invented boundaries limited their spatial mobility. Trade across borders was inhibited altogether. Pastoralists who had diversified their assets during the previous fifty years and had taken the chance of a first wave of commercial penetration were forced back on to subsistence herding.

Gender and Recruitment: People and Places in the Labour Market

1988 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret M. Curran
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
Indirect Effects ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Sexual Division ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Divisions

This paper provides an account of the processes by which people were recruited to particular places in the labour market, and explores the implications of this account for conceptualisations of recruitment and of gender divisions in employment. On the basis of a survey of recruitment to 101 retail and clerical job vacancies in the North East of England, it is argued that the social and `tacit' skills required in the performance of such jobs are so inextricably linked with, and embedded in, gender that the jobs themselves may be seen as gendered. Gender itself thus has a direct influence on the separation of `men's jobs' and `women's jobs', which is distinct from the indirect effects of domestic responsibilities and the sexual division of labour in households.

Networking and division of labour – The case of industrial districts in the North–East of Italy*

1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-115
Author(s):  
Sergio Albertini
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Support ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Industrial Districts ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
Interactive Communication ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Coordination Process ◽  
Actor Networks

Networking can be considered the organizational support to the learning process. The paper defines a new coordination process of the division of labour between autonomous actors and organizations, beyond the market and the hierarchical processes. Networking by means of “interactive communication” is becoming increasingly the typical organizational process in post-fordism which allows new, far-reaching, opportunities in the division of cognitive labour. The discussion of the process of exploration and exploitation of knowledge is based on two analytical dimensions: (a) the types of knowledge shared by organizations and (b) the types of roles played by different actor networks. The analytical framework shows how different specialized actors and organizations, with different tasks, are complementary as regards the effectiveness of the networking (specialists, systemists, connectors and meta-organizers). The empirical evidence – concerning the evolution of the industrial districts of the North–East of Italy towards the network form – seems to support the conceptual approach adopted.

scholarly journals Recording Permanence and Ephemerality in the North Quarter of Brussels: Drawing at the Intersection of Time, Space, and People

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-261
Author(s):  
Claire Bosmans ◽  
Racha Daher ◽  
Viviana D’Auria
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Transportation Systems ◽  
Spatial Transformations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The North ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Dimensions Of Space

Lying in the Senne River Valley, the North Quarter of Brussels is a physical record of spatial transformations unevenly distributed over time. Waves of developments and unfinished plans colonized its original landscape structure, erasing, writing, and re-writing it with large-scale metropolitan projects and transportation systems, around which an industrial and urban fabric developed. Accumulated expansions left an assemblage of incomplete infrastructures in which a multi-faceted and highly identifiable quarter lies punctuated by weakly defined morphological mismatches. At the center of this diverse and mutilated fabric, Maximilien Park stands as pars pro toto. From a combination of research methods that includes ethnographic fieldwork and interpretative mapping, three drawings are overlaid with the moving dimensions of space, time, and people, and assembled in a reinterpreted triptych to investigate the production of that public space. The first panel “Traces” overlaps lost urban logics and remaining traces on the urban tissue. The second panel “Cycles” traces the uneven deconstruction of the North Quarter during the last century, identifying scars of its past. The third panel “Resignifications” focuses on recent events in the area, examining how people have appropriated and transformed the park since 2015. With this triptych, the article aims to re-interpret the palimpsest of the North Quarter, represent the area’s transforming character, and unravel a spatial reading of the lived experiences of the place through time.

scholarly journals Job-Related Circular Mobility and the Quality of Intimate Relationships

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Feldhaus ◽  
Monika Schlegel
Keyword(s):  
Relationship Quality ◽  
Indirect Effects ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Perceived Fairness ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Positive Effects ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Relationship

This paper addresses the influence of different types of spatial mobility on relationship quality. Although some studies have been carried out on this question, the existing empirical results remain contradictory. The paper tries to overcome some of these limitations by analysing to what extent mobility demands show direct as well as indirect effects. Spatial mobility could have impacts on crucial aspects of relationship dynamics, which are theoretically and empirically identified as significant for relationship satisfaction. The mediating variables used therefore include relatedness, autonomy, conflict and the perceived fairness with regard to the division of labour. The data support the stress hypothesis which assumes that job-related mobility has a negative effect on the relationship quality, but only for women and mothers. There are actually positive effects for men. In terms of indirect effects, the results show that spatial mobility does neither reduce relatedness in relationships nor increase conflict behaviour significantly. In fact, the opposite effect seems to come to play: There is empirical evidence, especially for women, that more demanding mobility increases the feeling of autonomy within a relationship. It also increases relatedness and reduces perceived conflicts, this in turn having a positive effect on relationship quality.

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