Culinary Transitions: Understanding the Kitchen Space through Advertisements

The kitchen is a ubiquitous space in the Indian domestic life. Yet there hasn’t been a lot of academic discourses around it possibly owing to its mundane nature. In this article, I aim to look into the gendered nature of the space through advertisements. Advertisements are digital documents of everyday life This article deliberates on the notion that the kitchen space in urban India is undergoing a change in representation and participation. This change is reflected in the advertisements, created keeping in mind the perception of its viewers. The gendered segregation of work done in the home space have been deliberated by a number of scholars. This article problematises those viewpoints and challenges DeVault’s notion of “womanly conduct” through the narrative of the advertisements.

The Pedagogy of Intimacy: Mother's Contribution to Academic Parenting during Student's Learning from Home

This essay strives to articulate the pedagogy of intimacy born from mothers' engagement in academic parenting when formal learning shifts from school to home. Redefining parenting and intimacy, mothers implicitly articulated an alternative pedagogy when the space and time of learning during the Covid-19 pandemic move to home. Listening to the self-narratives of mothers who work full time at home, at least part-time, as informants in thisqualitative study, the words "parenting" and "intimacy" were prominent inthe semi-structured interviews. In the pre-pandemic seasons, these wordswere identical to activities at home and were seen as unrelated, at leastlimitedly related, to formal education. Learning from home, especially withmothers' engagement in informal learning during the Covid-19 pandemic,challenges the boundaries of maternal involvement in the formal educationspace. Mothers re-centralize home both as space and as a time for learning.Mothers reiterate their central role as informal teachers, further pedagogues,in children's education. Articulating intimacy's pedagogy, they reclaim homeboth as the steaming time and ubiquitous space for self-determined learning.

CADEAU

In this chapter, the authors introduce CADEAU, a prototype that addresses these challenges through a unique combination of autonomic mechanisms for application composition and methods for user interaction. These methods differ from each other in the degree to which the user is involved in the control of the prototype. They are offered so that users can choose the appropriate method according to their needs, the application and other context information. These methods use the mobile device as an interaction tool that connects users and resources in the ubiquitous space. The authors present the architecture, the interaction design, and the implementation of CADEAU and give the results of a user study that involved 30 participants from various backgrounds. This study explores the balance between user control and system autonomy depending on different contexts, the user’s needs, and expertise. In particular, the study analyses the circumstances under which users prefer to rely on certain interaction methods for application composition. It is argued that this study is a key step towards better user acceptance of future systems for the composition of ubiquitous applications.