Working from home is the new black: into the private world of remote collaboration in COVID-19 lockdowns

To mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries around the globe implemented Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs), one of which being Working From Home (WFH). In this paper we present an ethnographic investigation into the adaptations of working spaces and habits due to the adoption of WFH. We interviewed 12 participants from different industry contexts in order to cover a wide range of tools and practices used to conduct remote work. We focus on the importance and benefits of the different technologies available and how they impact collaboration. We discuss challenges experienced by participants in organizing their workspace at home, the impact of workload on practices, and the growing worries about isolation. The findings highlight the importance of understanding the changing physical, social and technological environments in designing new ways of working and collaborating remotely. From our results, we finally derive new directions for the HCI and CSCW research agenda on the topic of WFH.

“He dwells alone:” The Image of Completeness in the Self in Cowper’s “The Snail”

Following the critical lines of Psychoanalysis and Existentialism, the present study aims at conveying how William Cowper, the much acclaimed English poet of the 18th century, presents in his 1799 poem “The Snail” the image of an individual possessing completeness in the self. Not only is Cowper’s snail content with life in seclusion, but also abhors the intrusion of an outsider in its private domain. The article aims at investigating how the snail’s world of completeness bears both the somatic and the psychic dimensions and also how the creature exists in that world narcissistically. Concomitantly, the article would probe into the association between the world of the snail and the poet’s longing to attain sufficiency in the self at a time he is left alone. It would be conveyed how the snail of the poem embodies the poet’s projected self in its idealised form, something which following the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan can be called the poet’s “ideal ego,” than an insignificant creature engrossed merely in nourishment on vegetation. Keywords: Cowper, completeness, private world, self, The Snail.

Reproductive Politics and Grand Strategy

This chapter highlights the ways that transnational adoption and reproductive politics more broadly have been quite important to US foreign policy, and are, in fact part of US grand strategy. They do much more political work than is generally acknowledged, and do so in ways that merit scholarly attention. Too often, scholars of grand strategy have relied on the same gendered logic that Donald Trump has, in which reproductive politics belong to a feminized, private world of children and families rather than the robust, masculine world of politics, militaries, and foreign policy. That logic has made the signal importance of things like transnational adoption, overpopulation, and birth control invisible in studies of grand strategy. The chapter seeks to rectify that oversight, restoring reproductive politics to its rightful place as a real and important element in grand strand strategy.

Feminist Ethics

This chapter argues that feminists accuse traditional approaches to ethics of showing less concern for women's as opposed to men's issues and interests. They view as trivial the moral issues that arise in the private world, the realm in which women do housework and take care of children, the infirm, and the elderly. Traditional approaches imply that, in general, women are not as morally mature as men. The approaches overrate culturally masculine traits and underrate culturally feminine traits. They favour male ways of moral reasoning that emphasize rules, rights, universality, and impartiality over female ways of moral reasoning that emphasize relationships, responsibilities, particularity, and partiality. Care-focused and status-focused feminist approaches to ethics do not impose a single normative standard on women. Rather, they offer to women multiple ways to understand the ways in which gender, race, and class affect their moral decisions.

Public Market Players in the Private World: Implications for the Going-Public Process

We investigate the effect of pre-IPO investments by public market institutional investors (institutions) on the exit of venture capitalists (VCs). Results indicate that institutions’ pre-IPO investments reduce IPO underpricing by mitigating VCs’ reliance on all-star analysts to boost market liquidity. We conclude that institutions facilitate VC exits in the secondary market. Supporting this view, our analysis reveals that the presence of institutions allows VCs to exit with a reduced price impact in the secondary market. Consistent with the ease of exit, VCs offer fewer shares at the IPO and are more likely to invest in institutionally backed startups.

Bob Dylan in the Country

At the close of the 1960s two developments changed the shape of mainstream rock and roll music. The first was a new focus, on the part of a number of influential artists, on music about domestic life—kids, spouses, home. The second was a new interest in blending rock rhythms with instrumentation and themes taken from country music. This essay explores the ways in which these two concerns overlap in the work of Bob Dylan. I argue that Dylan’s work at the turn of the decade offers insights into our own current moment, when the relationship between the public world and the private world is being renegotiated. I show how Dylan’s “country” songs are, in fact, models of self-conscious experimentation that push against the conventions of popular song and highlight the conditions of their own production.