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The personal is political: Feminist geographies of/in austerity
Abstract
Geographers are beginning to more fully consider the ways in which austerity can be encountered at and across a range of social spaces, with growing interest in how austerity politics play out in everyday personal lives. With this paper I contribute to these burgeoning discussions by drawing upon, connecting and extending feminist theories of the personal and political, quiet activisms, gendered care and care work, and social infrastructures. Using findings from two years of ethnographic research with community groups and families in Greater Manchester, UK (2013–2015), I explore the significance of everyday social infrastructures, the value of quieter politics, and the role of body-work and care work in fieldwork. These findings illuminate how managing the fallout from austerity policies - whether managing budgets, performing care work, or providing emotional support - remains a largely gendered responsibility with distinctly personal and political consequences. To close, I encourage fellow geographers to further engage with feminist theories of the personal, political and relational, which remain as important as ever.
... Una de las causas de la baja presencia de ellas en cargos de mayor jerarquía es la imposición de que sean las responsables principales de los quehaceres domésticos (Hall, 2020). ...
... Al incorporarse al ámbito laboral, las mujeres deben cumplir con dos actividades: la productiva, relacionada con la creación de capital en el espacio público; y la reproductiva, vinculada con la crianza en el ámbito doméstico y sin remuneración (Monk y García Ramón, 1987). Es en la integración de las mujeres al capital del trabajo donde ellas abren las fronteras, crean nuevas territorialidades y se gestan reglas y normalidades socio laborales (Hall, 2020). Federici (2018) distingue entre el trabajo productivo, el cual se realiza en la fábrica, la oficina, el taller y otros espacios de producción, con el fin de generar bienes o servicios para su venta. ...
... 5 9 / 2 0 2 4 212 en lo laboral y; 3) home office, exponenciado por la pandemia COVID-19. Las entrevistadas afirmaron no separar claramente los espacios del hogar y del trabajo, generando un tercer espacio que integra el trabajo doméstico y de cuidados no remunerado con el trabajo remunerado (Hall, 2020). ...
Se propone el concepto de geografía vértice como el espacio en el cual las madres ejecutivas se hacen presentes simultáneamente en los ámbitos doméstico y laboral a través de la virtualidad facilitada por dispositivos tecnológicos (celular, computadora, tableta). Se entrevistaron a 16 madres regiomontanas de 36 a 45 años, con un puesto gerencial, para detectar cómo son las dinámicas dentro de la geografía vértice y cuáles son sus límites espaciales y discursivos. Los resultados se exponen a partir de narrativas de autorrepresentación en este espacio, los cuales permiten concluir que el uso de dispositivos tecnológicos perpetúa la doble jornada de las entrevistadas; pero también que su utilización desafía la regla de la cercanía física como única vía para ejercer maternidad.
... The focus here is on the gender aspects of this crisis and how it burdened the lives of my interlocutors who tried to adjust the social reproduction of life to the changing conditions of austerity. As their lives were constantly organised according to the imperatives of reforms and debt repayment, their daily practices of social reproduction intensified in order to fill the gaps created by the reforms (Feminist Fightback, 2011;Hall, 2020). ...
... This central feature of the intimacy during the 'troubles talk' generated and sustained the potential to rethink personal experience in relational and political terms (Vogler, 2000). It revealed how relationality can constitute a politically important act in itself (Ruddick, 2010), more so in austerity times (Hall, 2020), that can take the shape of a gender-based solidarity. Focusing on affect helps us to recognise this solidarity, which was not claimed nor named -a solidarity that corresponded to an affective bond built amidst resonating patterns of experiencing, thinking and feeling. ...
... But also, how it is contested and institutionalised at a personal and collective level as it acquires meaning within everyday practices and relations. It appears that experiences of austerity correspond to complex affective realities that lie beyond accepting or rejecting austerity (Hall, 2020). We see, at the same time, how the 'noikokyrio' succeeds in reproducing and maintaining itself not as rationality but as affectivity which operates 'by weaving ways of feeling and acting … into the habitual fabric of everyday life' (Massumi, 2015: 85). ...
This volume provides a novel platform to re-evaluate the notion of open-ended intimacies through the lens of affect theories. Contributors address the embodied, affective and psychic, sensorial and embodied aspects of their ongoing intimate entanglements across various timely phenomena. This fascinating collection asks how the study of affect enables us to rethink intimacies, what affect theories can do to the prevailing notion of intimacy and how they renew and enrich theories of intimacy in a manner which also considers its normative and violent forms. This collection brings together a selection of original chapters which invite readers to rethink such concepts as care, closeness and connectivity through the notion of affective intimacies. Based on rigorous research, it offers novel insights on a variety of themes from austerity culture to online discussions on regretting motherhood, from anti-ableist notions of health to teletherapies in the era of COVID-19, and from queer intimacies to critiques of empathy. Lively and thought-provoking, this collection contributes to timely topics across the social sciences, representing multiple disciplines from gender studies, sociology and cultural studies to anthropology and queer studies. By so doing, it advances the value of interdisciplinary perspectives and creative methodologies for understanding affective intimacies.
... Austerity policies and austere socio-economic conditions are known to have consequences for both everyday life and, interconnectedly, the political and structural regimes which impact upon the lives of women and marginalised groups (Craddock, 2017;Hall, 2019b;Pearson, 2019). Austerity serves to accentuate these inequalities at multiple scales, from family, household and community relations to sectors of the economy in which women are the main recipients and providers (Davies and O'Callaghan, 2014;Hall, 2020a;MacLeavy, 2011). ...
... It would, however, be a false dichotomy to separate feminist activism from feminist academia, given their sustained dialogue and interconnections (Federici, 2012;Hall, 2020a;Hanisch, 1970;Pearson and Elson, 2015). This is particularly the case for expertise within feminist economics. ...
... To push back and question these epistemological framings is to also resist austerity as a personal condition, revealing entanglements of practices, relations and interdependencies, not least with the state (Bruff and Wöhl, 2016;Harrison, 2013;Thomson et al., 2010). This confirms longheld feminist geographical arguments that the everyday is a personal-political space of resistance, activism and collectivism (Dyck, 2005;Hall, 2020a;Hanisch, 1970). This is a political challenge for feminist geographers to grasp policy-public epistemologies of austerity more firmly; to acknowledge them as epistemic challenges; and to develop stronger responses. ...
Austerity policies and austere socio-economic conditions in the UK have had acute consequences for everyday life and, interconnectedly, the political and structural regimes that impact upon the lives of women and marginalised groups. Feminist geographies have arguably been enlivened and reinvigorated by critical engagements with austerity, bringing to light everyday experiences, structural inequalities and multi-scalar socio-economic relations. With this paper I propose five areas of intervention for further research in this field: social reproduction, everyday epistemologies, intersectionality, voice and silence, and embodied fieldwork. To conclude, I argue for continuing feminist critique and analyses given the legacies and futures of austerity.
... Hardie, 2020;Williams, 2020) as well as on the uneven regional impacts: de-industrialised regions in northern England and Scotland have been affected far more than elsewhere (Beatty and Fothergill, 2018). Hall (2020) argues that the disproportionate impacts of welfare state contraction on women ensure that austerity is an intrinsically gendered ideology (see also MacLeavy, 2011). Thus research on the impact of tax and benefit changes since 2010 found that women lose more than men at all points on the income spectrum (Portes and Reed, 2017), with Patrick (2014) also noting the heavy cumulative impact of austerity cuts to both welfare and housing provision on female-headed households. ...
... The growing literature on the gendered impacts of austerity cuts to public services suggests a disproportionate burden borne by women (Hall, 2020). This is explained as being due to the greater use of public services by women and by female-headed households due to caring responsibilities and lower incomes (Bassel and Emejulu, 2017;Greer Murphy, 2017;WBG, 2018). ...
... There is a rich literature on women's activism in response to austerity (e.g. Jupp, 2014Jupp, , 2017Bassel and Emejulu, 2017;England, 2017;Hall, 2020). While it explores activisms such as resistance, advocacy and campaigning, a number of studies suggest that women's austerity activism is increasingly focused on the maintenance of home, community and neighbourhood in the face of service cutson the everyday struggles born out of poverty and precarity (Hall, 2019). ...
A decade of austerity has amplified concern about who gets what from public services. The article considers the socio-economic and gendered impacts of cuts to local environmental services which have increased the need for citizens to report service needs and effectively ‘co-produce’ services. Via a case study of a UK council’s decade of administrative data on citizen requests and service responses, the article provides one of the first detailed analyses of the unfolding impact of austerity cuts over time on public service provision. It demonstrates the impact of austerity across the social gradient, but disproportionately on the least affluent, especially women. The article argues for the importance of detailed empirical examination of administrative data for making visible, and potentially tackling, long standing inequalities in public service provision.
... These campaigns against austerity have engaged all facets of society including, for example, women (Stephenson, 2016), the disabled (Hande and Kelly, 2015) and the working classes (Hearne, 2015). Anti-austerity activism has become an area of increased interest to geographers, with a particular focus on the various strategies that individuals are employing in order to both resist and challenge austerity politics (Arampatzi, 2017;Hall, 2018;Hearne, 2015). This work on anti-austerity activism forms part of a longer history of geographic scholarship on political activism and social movements, which I will now turn to. ...
... Such online spaces and activities helping others navigate difficult welfare assessment processes should be recognised as being inherently political and as a form as internal activism (see Askins, 2015). Hall (2018) draws upon the scholarship of Hanisch (1970) to argue that the personal is not only political but also relational. She argues that 'togetherness and mutuality are a means of getting by within austerity, and of speaking back to it' (Hall, 2018: 250). ...
... Here, like in Hanisch's essay, individuals are involved in sharing and making visible, hidden and marginalised experiences. In doing so, connections are made between their shared personal experiences and the broader political picture of structural injustices and violence (see also Dyck, 1995;Hall, 2018). Online communities also made it easier for individuals to see that the challenges they are facing are shared and part of a wider structural problem. ...
With the onset of austerity, disabled people in the United Kingdom have faced a sustained period of financial cuts, including cuts to personal income, social care and advocacy organisations. Many individuals have found themselves in increasingly precarious situations, having to rely increasingly on non-statutory, more informal structures of care. Disabled people, however, have not accepted these changes in silence but have often been vocal in their opposition to these cuts. Opposition and resistance can be seen through increased lobbying, the establishing of disability anti-austerity protest groups and the emergence of numerous online campaigns. Austerity has been accompanied by a recent growth in disability activism, as individuals find ways of resisting and coping under increasingly difficult conditions. To date, there has been very limited documentation or analysis of the political struggles of disability activists during a time of austerity. Through adopting a qualitative approach, this study examines the lives of those involved in disability activism, and the places in which their activism is enacted. The findings are drawn from 27 biographical interviews and participant observation at 13 disability activist events. Rather than being a representative study, this research seeks to provide a deep and nuanced insight into the lives of a small number of disabled people who are engaging in activism in response to austerity. It is hoped that this thesis will serve as a form of activism in itself, as a space in which stories can be both shared and heard and used as a possible resource for future generations.
... It has been argued that 'one possible reason for the absence of the classed body is because of the personal backgrounds and characteristics of those in the academy' -that 'relative privilege' has the potential to 'distance us from the markings of class' (Dowling, 1999, p 511). Academia is predominantly white, male, middle class, heteronormative and able-bodied, which is also reflected in the topics deemed suitable and worthy of academic interest (see Binnie, 2011;Hall, 2018). ...
... While they represent different research engagement spaceswith the public, policy makers and media -and deal with class, accent and dialect in different ways, each of these examples also speaks to concerns about the ability of researchers to speak 'for' others and to represent their experiences (Hall, 2018). At times, my seeming ability to represent a particular social group and identity (working-class households), based upon my accent, made others in the meeting feel uncomfortable and seek evidence of legitimacy. ...
... It has been argued that 'one possible reason for the absence of the classed body is because of the personal backgrounds and characteristics of those in the academy' -that 'relative privilege' has the potential to 'distance us from the markings of class' (Dowling, 1999, p 511). Academia is predominantly white, male, middle class, heteronormative and able-bodied, which is also reflected in the topics deemed suitable and worthy of academic interest (see Binnie, 2011;Hall, 2018). ...
... While they represent different research engagement spaceswith the public, policy makers and media -and deal with class, accent and dialect in different ways, each of these examples also speaks to concerns about the ability of researchers to speak 'for' others and to represent their experiences (Hall, 2018). At times, my seeming ability to represent a particular social group and identity (working-class households), based upon my accent, made others in the meeting feel uncomfortable and seek evidence of legitimacy. ...
... German political polarization or the side-by-side of East German nostalgia, West German activist's frustration and immigrant aspirations, this thesis centrally set out to develop a theory of the interdependence of neoliberal urban restructuring and political subjectivation. Combining an ethnographic inquiry "on my doorstep" (Hall, 2018b) with rigorous theoretical debate, I sought a balance between doing justice to the nuanced realities of a gentrifying, working-class neighbourhood "of arrival" , and the specific, post-socialist boomtown it is embedded in, and developing abstract conceptualizations of these. ...
... The double-role of the case study as my home and subject of inquiry had considerable implications for my role as a researcher navigating the classical ethnographic inside-outside question. Therefore,Hall's (2018b) concept of the "doorstep ethnography" is helpful, because I am, and have been a tenant of Leipzig's inner East myself (on and off) for ten years at the point of writing. This meant that, first, time was required to differentiate the familiar and unfamiliar in the neighbourhood, develop an alert perspective of a researching observer and refocus my attention. ...
This thesis untangles the influence of neoliberal urban restructuring on political polarization in Leipzig, East Germany, and demonstrates how in turn the local, politicized relations of tenants marked by solidarities, fragmentation and authoritarianism, impact urban restructuring. Uncovering the interrelation of housing privatization and financialization driven urban change since the end of state socialism with tenants’ political subjectivation, it offers an interdisciplinary contribution to urban political economy and the political, sociological, and geographical study of the formation of political subjectivities. Through retroductive research based on a qualitative and ethnographic empirical case study, it proposes a relational lens to inquire the interdependence of neoliberal urban restructuring and emergent relations of, among and between tenants.
After illustrating the affectively mediated patterns of housing financialization at the base of the neoliberal restructuring of an exceptional, East German boomtown, the thesis then shows how this structural process is reproduced through the stratified effects of residential alienation. Therewith, a multi-scalar theorization of residential alienation is developed in its dialectical counterpart with appropriation. The analysis of its structural, stratified psychosocial, and meso-relational aspects reveals that neoliberal urban restructuring reproduces hierarchical class divisions among tenants. These interplay with tenants’ spatialized (dis)identification and temporalities of belonging and constitute a context favourable for the emergence of fragmentations between tenants and groups of tenants. Introducing this concept as a pivotal part of residential alienation, it is demonstrated how fragmentations (a) shape the politically polarized climate of Leipzig by limiting solidarities and nurturing authoritarian divisions, and (b) tendentially reproduce neoliberal urban restructuring.
... Relatedly, Simone's (2004Simone's ( , 2021 conception of "people as infrastructure" rests on the idea that the complex ways in which people act together to sustain social life in many places of the Global South, where formal physical infrastructure systems are lacking, can be understood as a form of social infrastructure. Lastly, feminist conceptualizations of social infrastructure focus on the taken-for-granted, often unpaid and devalued female labor that is a precondition in reproducing everyday life (for example, Hall, 2020). ...
... But in our reading, "success stories" are rare. More commonly, personalization means entangling oneself and one's kin in ever-more complex relationships with state authorities (e.g.Gilliom 2001;Hall 2020;Koch 2018;McKenzie 2015), or engaging in short-term survival strategies that render people even more vulnerable to market forces outside the state's purview(Desmond 2016;Sullivan 2018). ...
The purpose of this article is to highlight meta-ethnography – the interpretive synthesis of ethnographic studies on a given theme – as a useful tool in the study of social policy and public administration. We claim this approach can maximise the impact of rich idiographic research to enable theory-refining and evidence-building efforts in the field. We illustrate these benefits through reference to a worked example focused on public encounters with social security in advanced liberal democracies. We show how we drew together 49 ethnographic studies from a variety of disciplines to identify repertoires of response that citizens exercise in their encounters with the contemporary welfare state. Through this analysis, we demonstrate how meta-ethnography can shed new light on topical contemporary debates about administrative burden. We conclude by reflecting on the prospects and limits of this technique for broader use in the field.
... At least since Hanisch (1970) wrote the essay, "The Personal is Political," feminists have argued that there is an implicit masculine bias in privileging contentious protest events over everyday politics. Empirical work engaging this notion captures the power of social relationships for informing a foundation for social change (Hall, 2020). For example, O'Shaughnessy and Kennedy (2010) engage Mohai's paradox-an argument in environmental sociology that women's high levels of environmental concern and low levels of engagement in contentious politics constitutes a paradox. ...
Local food movements rely on engaged farmers, gardeners, and shoppers to challenge the conventional food system through consumer-based tactics by advocating food systems change to reduce social injustice and environmental harm. While much literature engages in debate over the efficacy of such “lifestyle movements” to effect change, little analysis to date considers the rationale for and contexts in which lifestyle politics are used as an approach to address the socio-ecological impacts of conventional food production and consumption. Using interview data and participant observation collected from 57 leaders in eat-local initiatives in three Canadian cities, we analyze why leaders in the movement rely on consumer-based strategies to both initiate and sustain engagement from actors that might not otherwise engage in social movement mobilizations for food system change. We found that many “eat-local” leaders are aware of the political limitations of shopping for change tactics, but withhold explicit critiques of power in the food system from public debate. They do so in order to maintain a perception of optimism that they perceive as central to maintaining and increasing engagement of consumer actors in eat-local initiatives. This study advances research on informal participation in food movements by demonstrating how convivial engagement at the everyday level can sustain political participation and simultaneously obscure critical political talk.
... Gender equality is even more likely to be relegated to the margins during events that are constructed as crises, a tendency that legitimizes the use of exceptional measures regardless of their gendered effects (Griffin 2015, 109). During the deep recession following the economic crisis that began in 2008, European institutions and governments adopted austerity measures with gendered effects (Brah, Szeman, and Gedalof 2015;Hall 2020;Karamessini and Rubery 2013). Cuts in public spending affect women more than men because women have a greater care burden, they make up the majority of the public sector workforce and the users of public sector programs, and the deregulation of the labor market requires more flexibility from workers, which is particularly challenging for those with caring responsibilities (Elomäki 2012;Lombardo 2017;O'Dwyer 2018). ...
Austerity measures are commonly adopted to address economic crises. Such measures have particularly adverse effects for women, but studies have found these consequences to be strategically silenced. I explore the conditions under which the gendered effects of austerity are silenced, and by whom. Drawing on an original dataset of 9,420 newspaper articles (2010–2020) addressing austerity measures introduced in Spain, I find that politicians from left parties critique the labor reforms for negatively affecting women’s working conditions, while conservative politicians rarely address the reforms from a gender perspective. The party political difference is conditioned by government–opposition dynamics, and the salience of gender perspectives varies with election cycles. These findings suggest that a gender lens is more likely to be present in the public debate on economic policy-making when it is strategically beneficial for garnering political support.
... One scholar-activist participant observation in Leipzig-Schönefeld by Peter has accompanied the foundation of the "Schönefeld courtyard tenants' community." With a doorstep ethnography (Hall 2020), Leon has witnessed the daily life of tenants in and around Eisenbahnstraße. Peter's research was focused on the question of authoritarianism and the housing question and conducted mainly with elderly GDR-socialized tenants, whereas Leon's interviews were conducted with a large variety of tenants. ...
Authoritarianism has emerged as a prominent theme in popular and academic discussions of politics since the 2016 US presidential election and the coinciding expansion of authoritarian rhetoric and ideals across Europe, Asia, and beyond. Until recently, however, academic geographers have not focused squarely on the concept of authoritarianism. Its longstanding absence from the field is noteworthy as geographers have made extensive contributions to theorizing structural inequalities, injustice, and other expressions of oppressive or illiberal power relations and their diverse spatialities. Identifying this void, Spatializing Authoritarianism builds upon recent research to show that even when conceptualized as a set of practices rather than as a simple territorial label, authoritarianism has a spatiality: both drawing from and producing political space and scale in many often surprising ways. This volume advances the argument that authoritarianism must be investigated by accounting for the many scales at which it is produced, enacted, and imagined. Including a diverse array of theoretical perspectives and empirical cases drawn from the Global South and North, this collection illustrates the analytical power of attending to authoritarianism’s diverse scalar and spatial expressions, and how intimately connected it is with identity narratives, built landscapes, borders, legal systems, markets, and other territorial and extraterritorial expressions of power.
... One scholar-activist participant observation in Leipzig-Schönefeld by Peter has accompanied the foundation of the "Schönefeld courtyard tenants' community." With a doorstep ethnography (Hall 2020), Leon has witnessed the daily life of tenants in and around Eisenbahnstraße. Peter's research was focused on the question of authoritarianism and the housing question and conducted mainly with elderly GDR-socialized tenants, whereas Leon's interviews were conducted with a large variety of tenants. ...
Nazi Germany is often imagined as the epitome of an authoritarian
regime characterized by power and decision making concentrated in a
single charismatic leader afforded unquestioning loyalty and obedience. In reality, the practice of Nazi governance was less hierarchical than one might assume, with officials throughout the movement’s leadership cadre possessing considerable latitude to intuit, interpret, and operationalize Hitler’s policy preferences and pronouncements. As noted by historian Ian Kershaw, the obligation and mind-set of lower-ranking officials was to ensure that they were consistently “working towards the Führer” instead of waiting for detailed sets of directives from above (1993). To that end, Nazi
officials of various ranks published assorted “how-to” manuals, for lack of a better term, that attempted to articulate, instruct, and document how to translate ideology into practice.
This chapter examines three of these manuals: Erich Kulke’s The
Beautiful Village: A Guide to the Design of the German Village (1937),
Karl Sepp’s Care and Design of the Homeland: Contributions to Cultural Politics in Municipalities (1938), and Fritz Wächtler’s The New Homeland: On the Emergence of the National Socialist Cultural Landscape (1940). These manuals and other publications in this genre sought to map out spatial, aesthetic, and experiential frameworks for building cultural landscapes of National Socialism as the foundation for an authoritarian Nazi Reich. Through a brief examination of these manuals, this chapter suggests some of the main themes that animated the Nazi regime’s myriad programs to reorder Germany’s cultural landscapes and why so many within the regime regarded such undertakings as imperative to the larger project of National Socialism.
... Then as now, these measures brought little or no direct benefit to local and subnational governments, small businesses, and workers (NACO, 2020), even as record profits were recorded in the financial sector and the ultrarich saw their wealth balloon (Dayen, 2020;Fuhurmann, 2020). 1 Amid the growing divergence between the resilience of the financial sector and the shock to the everyday operations of the economy-that is, the divergence between Wall Street and Main Street-we explore the role of public finance in producing this reality and highlight geographical research on public finance that presages how these arrangements might be otherwise. We connect this project to critiques of public finance by scholars and activists calling to defund the police, fight austerity, ban evictions, end racialized surveillance and incarceration, and counter environmental racism through a "Green New Deal" (Aronoff et al., 2019;Benjamin, 2019;Bigger and Millington, 2020;Bonds, 2019;Derickson, 2016;Gilmore, 2007Gilmore, , 2021Goh, 2020;Hall, 2020;Harries et al., 2020;Hawthorne, 2019;Jenkins, 2021;Klein, 2019;Knuth, 2018;Massaro, 2020;Pulido, 2016;Ranganathan, 2016;Safransky, 2014;Shabazz, 2015;Wang, 2018). Rather than seeing these as separate struggles, we view them as linked to the circulation of private capital that is intertwined with government spending and monetary policy. ...
The study of public finance—the role of government in the economy—has faded in geography as attention to private finance has grown. Disrupting the tendency to fetishize private financial power, this article proposes an expanded conception of public finance that emphasizes its role in shaping geographies of inequality. We conceptualize the relationship between public and private finance as a dynamic interface characterized today by asymmetrical power relations, path-dependent policy solutions, the depoliticization of markets, and uneven distributional effects. A reimagined theory and praxis of public finance can contribute to building abolitionist futures, and geographers are well positioned to advance this project.
... Actions and activities that may be considered as insignificant but which can create progressive change are also viewed as quiet activism by Martin, Hanson, and Fontaine (2007). Research examining quiet activism includes care work (Hall, 2020;Horton & Kraftl, 2009), hobby crafts (Hackney, 2013), seed swapping (Pottinger, 2017) and climate change (Lobo et al., 2021). Quiet activism means 'we are not talking about picket lines or placards. ...
The aim of this paper is to fill a research gap to show how 'below the line' comments can be used for digital food activism. As the study focuses on genetically modified (GM) crops and foods, the study also reveals the narratives deployed by commenters in this particular debate. This paper attempts to provide an answer through a qualitative data analysis using a grounded theory approach and a discourse analysis. The findings reveal a lack of trust in science and political authority, and the use of alternative knowledges by digital food activists. The paper concludes by discussing how this study adds to the understanding of digital food activism. Whilst the below the line comments as a form of digital food activism may not connect to action in the non-virtual world, they do offer an opportunity for debate.
This paper is open access. It is available on Digital Geography and Society through this link https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diggeo.2021.100017
... By now, there is a rich scholarship that documents the gendered aspects of austerity policies and politics emphasising that women have been disproportionately hit by austerity measures (Daskalaki et al. 2021;Vaiou 2014). In parallel, there is literature in the fields of radical geography and feminist political economy that points out that although antiausterity initiatives have not been predominantly structured around feminist ideals and demands, they have been associated with a feminist praxis and a move into the realm of social reproduction, care ethics and "quieter" politics (Kouki and Chatzidakis 2021;Hall 2018). Building on this body of scholarship, it would be interesting to apply a feminist lens at the book's analysis to understand the gendered relations and dynamics that have been at play within the SMOs examined, and to understand how these affected the process of boundary enlargement. ...
... Here, Leon has witnessed tenants' daily lives in a "doorstep-ethnography" (Hall, 2018) in the area around Eisenbahnstraße (railway street). In the adjacent neighborhood across the train rails and a bit further from the city center, Peter has engaged in activist research in a tenants' initiative in the residential estate Schönefelder Höfe (Schönefeld courtyards). ...
Through two neighborhood case studies in the rapidly upgrading East German city of Leipzig we discuss political implications of urban restructuring. Scrutinizing tenants' rightist and racist reactions to the housing question, we argue that residential alienation affects people's sense of place in a divisive manner, which in turn impacts both their interpretations of urban change and their respective practices. Based on our analyses of scapegoating and territorial stigma, we critically discuss the potential of activist intervention, drawing from two qualitative and ethnographic research projects, as well as activist experience in neighborhood organizing.
Vibes are having a moment and academics seem increasingly serious about understanding whatever the vibe is. Many qualitative methodological approaches are already very vibey. This is especially true of those that engage with affects and atmospheres, social and sociotechnical imaginaries, and materialisms and the more-than-human. In this article, I reflect on these approaches and outline some vibes-based methods. I discuss how vibes-based methods help us consider and work with the generative ambiguities of social life.
The concept of social infrastructure has recently gained much traction in academic, policy, and public discourses. However, it remains unclear what constitutes a social infrastructure and how the concept is applied in academic research. This systematic scoping review therefore synthesizes the various spaces, characteristics, and social functions that define a social infrastructure. A systematic literature search was conducted to identify articles on social infrastructures. In total, 100 articles met the inclusion criteria. From the literature we create a typology of spaces of social infrastructure: public institutions, commerce, recreational facilities, places of worship, transit, digital infrastructures and (groups of) people. We also address the organizational, social, and physical characteristics that affect their functioning. Moreover, we develop an overview of the various social functions that these spaces fulfill. These functions include serving as important sites for sociality, providing essential services, serving as a platform for collective action, functioning as spaces for identification and belonging, and social control. Finally, we consider how social infrastructures function in the context of disaster response. In addressing theoretical, methodological, and empirical gaps, this study ends with a discussion on how the concept of social infrastructure can be a valuable research approach.
This chapter brings together the knowledge and experience collectively developed with young people in two action research projects conducted in Australia during 2019 and 2020, to better understand what is needed to forge solidarities in social justice research. It first recaps what previous chapters have covered in order to contextualise and synthesise key learnings across the research team’s work with young people in the Cartographies of Youth Social Justice, Voice and Action (Cartographies) and Youth Participatory Arts Action Research (YPAAR) projects. Next, instead of an authoritative presentation of learnings and recommendations, the chapter presents some pieces of the puzzle in how to effectively sustain activist efforts alongside young people, such as centring healing in collective efforts, encouraging mourning and counter-memorialising, and cultivating praxis for quiet, slow and deep activism. Recent examples of how some of these learnings have been enacted in other projects are included. This allows readers to take what is useful for their particular context, in order to act in solidarity alongside the young people they are accompanying.
‘Volume’ is increasingly mobilised as a conceptual framework through which to engage, embrace and interrogate space in three-rather than two-dimensional terms. This includes attending to heights and depths and acknowledging that social and political lives do not play out across a flat surface. Whilst ‘volume’ literature is burgeoning, we argue that there is a need to take into account the politics of gentler iterations of the three dimensional. At present, work on volume in political geography is often articulated through the lens of state and military actors, and practices of conflict, control, and violence. Inspired by recent work in geography exploring ‘gentleness’ as both analytic frameworks and methodological sensibility, this paper complicates existing understandings of volume by foregrounding the gentle. In doing so, it makes two key contributions. First, it brings the analytic and sensibility of gentleness to bear on volume, providing a means to reapproach volume through terms that exceed state-centric accounts. Second, it interrogates the geopolitics of the gentle as it is found, circulates and is comprised in heights and depths, everyday spaces and unexpected practices alike. Through the case studies of Tibetan prayer flags and a rain playground, the article reconsiders the forceful and transformative politics of gentle/gentler volumes.
This paper foregrounds the centrality of reproductive politics in constituting the spaces of migrant activism. Addressing social reproductive issues as racial issues, it exposes how “premature death” and questions of survival shape migrants’ lives throughout the uneven geographies of racial capitalism. Drawing on the political experiences of the “No Evictions Network”—a migrant and activist‐led group campaigning for asylum seekers’ rights in Glasgow (Scotland)—the paper suggests the concept of “political reproduction”, grasping the interchange between care, trust, empowerment, political subjectivation, and the overcoming of barriers towards political action that take place within spaces of migrant activism. Building upon migrant voices and Black and Brown histories of organising, the paper explores the racialised, gendered, and classed character of reproductive activist labour in these spaces, evidencing the ways the notion of “political reproduction” breaks racialised and gendered constructions of political work.
Through the lens of access to Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) support services in London, England, this paper highlights the relative legacies of state‐led austerity since 2010. Drawing on findings from a four‐month institutional ethnography with a London borough SEND support team and 43 repeat in‐depth narrative interviews with 15 parent carers with autistic children, this paper focuses in on two parents: Alice and Lucy. Comparing Alice and Lucy's experiences shows nuanced relational legacies of austerity: families with disabled and neurodiverse children have been disproportionately affected by austerity cuts. Additionally, however, their accounts show their relative experiences of accessing help: some more marginalised families with disabled children are finding it harder under these circumstances than others. Yet a neoliberal myth of meritocracy has emerged during this time which obscures the underlying structural and systemic reasons for widening relative inequality between families with disabled and neurodiverse children. This myth suggests that the parent carers who do manage to secure ever shrinking SEND resources have simply worked harder than others to get there. The result is that parent carers – including Alice and Lucy – have different experiences of trying to navigate and access the same SEND services, in the same place, at the same time. Bringing together geographical and sociological work on austerity, families, disability, and education, this paper extends understandings of how austerity is relational in its effects and shows how these legacies are still unfolding.
In this paper, we examine the role of migrant women in civil society in Wales in a triply-hostile environment created by UK government policy since 2010. Drawing on interviews carried out with EU migrants between 2016 and 2017, we outline the active support and care work provided by these women to migrants and others and the way in which they navigated austere and hostile conditions (contrasting the popular construction of migrants passively requiring support and care). Contributing to the literature on resourcefulness, we introduce the notion of tenacity to highlight the exhausting care-full labour of these migrants, who continue despite challenging circumstances and impact on their own wellbeing. We conclude that the care work provided by these women plays an important civil society role in tackling ongoing austerity and hostility but that precarious conditions bring a lack of sustainability which can heighten the socio-spatial inequalities seen across the UK.
The ‘Age of Austerity’ has ruptured the social fabric of contemporary Britain. Arising from our three-year Life on the Breadline project, this article represents the first fieldwork-led analysis of the multidimensional nature of austerity-age poverty by academic theologians in the UK. The article analyses the impact that austerity has had on Christian responses to poverty and inequality in the UK. We draw on our six ethnographic case studies and interview responses from over 120 national and regional Church leaders to exemplify the four approaches to the Christian engagement with poverty that we identified during our research: ‘caring’, ‘campaigning and advocacy’, ‘enterprise’ and ‘community building’. We argue that the Church needs to grasp the systemic, multidimensional and violent nature of poverty in order to realise the potential embedded in its extensive social capital and fulfil its goal of ‘transforming structural injustice’. The paper shows that the Church remains nervous of moving beyond welfare-based responses to poverty and suggests that none of the existing approaches can force poverty into retreat until the Church re-imagines itself as a liberative movement that embodies God’s preferential option for the poor in every aspect of its life and practice.
With the rise of austerity urbanism, contemporary urban governance has been described as “rule by accountancy.” Yet the intricacies of accounting practice have been underexplored in the austerity urbanism literature. Drawing on insights from critical accounting studies, I interrogate accounting practices as political exercises that draw people and institutions into ties of obligation (accountability), shape social relations, and structure the conditions of urban life. Through this lens, practices of accounting can be understood not just as a technocratic tool of the financialized state, but as a contested terrain of urban political struggle. Examining the case of austerity-driven water service disconnections in Detroit, this paper chronicles how accounting practices are both deployed by the state to justify water disconnection and used by activists seeking to expand water access in unprecedented ways. I find that while the austerity urbanism literature is correct to identify accounting as a tool in the advancement of the austerity agenda, accounting is also a means to organize against the diminished expectations of life under austerity.
Since austerity policies in the UK began in 2010, homelessness has risen rapidly. Drawing from feminist geographical theories and methodologies, this paper examines experiences of homelessness under austerity in Haringey, London through photo‐elicitation research with one participant, Tessa. This paper argues that home(un)making — the constantly shifting balance of homemaking and unmaking — is central to everyday experiences of, and resistance to, austerity. The paper first demonstrates how Tessa resists austerity through practices of homemaking that enable her to cope with the difficulties of homelessness at a time of austerity. Next, it explores how Tessa’s relationships with other actors in the homeless shelter — other residents and government officials — contributed to processes of home‐unmaking, exacerbating the hardships she experiences. By developing the concept of home(un)making, therefore, this paper aims to show the dynamism of home for homeless people under austerity.
Indigenous knowledge refers to the understandings, skills and philosophies developed by societies with long histories of interaction
with their natural surroundings (UNESCO, 2018; IPCC, 2019a). Local knowledge refers to the understandings and skills developed by
individuals and populations, specific to the places where they live (UNESCO, 2018; IPCC, 2019a). Indigenous knowledge and local
knowledge are inherently valuable but have only recently begun to be appreciated and in western scientific assessment processes in their
own right (Ford et al., 2016). In the past these often endangered ways of knowing have been suppressed or attacked (Mustonen, 2014).
Yet these knowledge systems represent a range of cultural practices, wisdom, traditions and ways of knowing the world that provide
accurate and useful climate change information, observations and solutions (very high confidence) (Table Cross-Chapter Box INDIG.1).
Rooted in their own contextual and relative embedded locations, some of these knowledges represent unbroken engagement with the
earth, nature and weather for many tens of thousands of years, with an understanding of the ecosystem and climatic changes over
longer-term timescales that is held both as knowledge by Indigenous Peoples and local peoples, as well as in the archaeological record
(Barnhardt and Angayuqaq, 2005; UNESCO, 2018).
This Cross-Chapter Box highlights the intersecting issues of gender, climate change adaptation, climate justice and transformative
pathways. A gender perspective does not centre only on women or men but examines structures, processes and relationships of power
between and among groups of men and women and how gender, particularly in its non-binary form, intersects with other social
categories such as race, class, socioeconomic status, nationality or education to create multi-dimensional inequalities
In liberal welfare systems, social security policy has been increasingly shifting towards conditionality and individualisation (Knotz, 2019). It is within this context that failure to meet the set conditions becomes personal rather than systemic. This has been enabled by policy discourses that construct poverty and unemployment as the result of personal failure and poor social behaviour. While this area of study over emphasises ‘the constraints imposed by discourse’ (Bacchi, 2000: 55), alternative discourses are often developed. This paper draws on ethnographic research investigating the development of self-reliant groups (SRGs) in Scotland. SRGs are small groups of women supporting each other in creating opportunities for personal development. We find that the process of involvement and sharing of experiences between women at the forefront of welfare reform led to the development of a counter public sphere. Yet, the experience doesn’t move fully towards actions for transformative social change.
Economic restructuring and welfare reform are driving new forms of urban poverty in the global north. Shadow care infrastructures is a new frame for conceptualising the complex and interconnected practices through which marginalised people seek survival in this context. It remaps welfare landscapes across a continuum that includes formal and informal, established and improvised practice, the not-for-profit sector, informal community networks and exchange and the black market. Conceptually, it centres the care practices that sustain life and the infrastructures that sustain them. Activating a ‘shadow geographies’ tradition it foregrounds care infrastructures that are necessary, but rarely visible within, welfare discourse.
Current conceptualizations of vulnerability have so far served to describe—and reproduce—social difference, setting people apart at local and global scales. Yet vulnerability is fundamental to the connectedness in social relations critical to understanding and acting on climate change. A more compassionate type of research is urgently required; that is, one that goes beyond the material and political dimensions to investigate the deeply personal. Drawing on politics of adaptation, emotional geographies, sustainability science and psychology literatures, the paper reconceptualizes vulnerability as co-suffering, linking lived experiences with a shared humanity.
en This article explores the relationships between the body, gendered dispossession and agency under conditions of austerity in Portugal. Drawing from ethnographic research undertaken in 2015 and 2016 in a Portuguese post-industrial town, this article focuses on the examination of how concrete physical experiences and social anxieties framed working-class women’s experiences and explanations of the austerity-led crisis of social reproduction and the ways through which the body was mobilised as a metaphor to make sense of forced and disruptive reconfigurations of the means of livelihood reproduction. It examines how working-class women resorted to embodied practices, knowledges and moralities as a way of fulfilling provisioning pursuits, and to assert rights, entitlements and aspirations. Throughout this article, women’s bodily experiences and embodied practices, knowledges and moralities are the main point of entry from which to reflect on the gendered, contested and negotiated nature of the austerity economic and political project. This article argues for the relevance of addressing the mobilisation of historically embodied legacies of gendered and classed dispossession in the making of ‘actually existing austerity’.
L’austérité corporeal: la dépossession, l’agencéité et les luttes genrées pour la valeur au Portugal
fr Cet article explore les relations entre le corps, la dépossession genrée et l’agence dans des conditions d’austérité au Portugal. S’appuyant sur une recherche ethnographique entreprise en 2015 et 2016 dans une ville postindustrielle portugaise, il se concentre sur l’examen de la façon dont les expériences physiques concrètes et les angoisses sociales ont encadré les expériences et les explications des femmes de la classe ouvrière sur la crise de la reproduction sociale induite par l’austérité ; et les façons par lesquelles le corps a été mobilise comme une métaphore pour donner du sens aux reconfigurations forcées et perturbatrices des moyens de reproduction des moyens de subsistance. Il examine également la manière dont les femmes de la classe ouvrière ont eu recours à des pratiques, des connaissances et des moralités incarnées pour satisfaire leurs besoins de subsistance et pour faire valoir leurs droits et leurs aspirations. Tout au long de l’essai, les expériences corporelles des femmes et les pratiques, connaissances et moralités incarnées constituent le principal point d’entrée à partir duquel réfléchir à la nature sexuée, contestée et négociée du projet économique et politique d’austérité. L’article défend donc la pertinence d’aborder la mobilisation des héritages historiquement incarnés de la dépossession de genre et de classe dans l’élaboration d’une «austérité réellement existante».
Based on qualitative interviews conducted with local guilds, charities and community groups in England, this article highlights the public service older women provide for their communities by volunteering their labour to local textile craft groups. Driven by an ethics of care, they make up for a lack of services formerly provided by the welfare state, such as public transport and mental health support. We mobilise existing literature on ‘quiet activism’ to argue that their community work constitutes a form of political activism, albeit one that stops short of overtly challenging the political system. While highlighting the ways in which older women quietly go about helping their communities, we argue that by being ‘louder’ about the public service they provide, they could help disrupt the narrative of a system that has failed their communities and exploits their free labour.
This chapter returns to questions around what it means to be an activist, or to “do activism” in the context of the climate emergency. Responding to climate change is a profound societal challenge and crisis that requires transformative change across society’s institutions and structures. Our interest is at the local scale where we argue international, national and state policies are translated into practices, and community mobilization, preparation and responses to the anticipated impacts of the climate crisis predominantly occur. Modest acts of care, connection and creativity can be collectively and politically significant. Through purposeful, collective commitment to socially innovative practices, local communities are forging new political pathways in response to the climate crisis. This we argue is the power and potential of quiet activism in climate change.
Inspired by feminist literature on the notion of ‘dwelling’, this paper asks: how does the personal dimension of dwelling relate to the political discourses of housing activism. The aim of this paper is to (re-)consider the political dimensions of housing activism and research through focussing on the intimate and private experiences of ‘being at home’, thereby extending and pluralising housing activism as ‘dwelling activism’. Methodologically, this paper ‘throws together’ two data sets. The first is an arts-based study on the intimate experiences of feeling at home that was conducted with 18 mental health service users in the UK. The second study interviewed 14 urban community land trust activists in England about community engagement and housing activism. A plural, disintegrative analysis offers a symbiotic reading of the close entanglement between the inward-facing personal practices of dwelling like building shelter and security, and the outward-facing more public practices of dwelling, like building relations and togetherness.
There is increasing concern with issues surrounding researchers’ positionalities and the politics of representation. However, narratives stemming from embodied, sexual and emotional experiences remain at the margins of geographic scholarship. For researchers who have faced different forms of violence during their fieldwork, the choices of whether or not to speak about and include those narratives in official reports or final research outputs can be difficult. Structural, systemic and institutional barriers may further complicate this decision‐making process. Moreover, researchers must carefully consider their positionalities and the ethical implications of disclosure for local communities and field sites, as well as their academic institutions, which typically continue to privilege objective discourses. In this article, I show how employing visual methods within a transformative feminist epistemology can offer possibilities for the weaving together of personal accounts of violence within a wider analyses of power and privilege across multiple sites and scales. I draw on experiences from my PhD fieldwork in Utila, Honduras, to explore how researchers who have faced different manifestations of violence may represent embodied trauma in their work, and in doing so, reclaim these experiences through their own voices.
The concept of care and its associated practices remain a key subject of debate in human geography, as they continue to evolve in response to changing norms and expections of who does and should provide care, how, and where care takes place. With the growing politics of austerity shaping welfare and support provision across the Global North, these norms and expectations are once again being reviewed and reconfigured. New spaces and relationships of care are unfolding, as austerity intensifies many debates over the role of the state vis-a-vis the private, informal and third sectors. This paper examines the changing geographies of care that are unfolding within this context of austerity and frames a collection of papers on this subject. It offers a short review of the concept of care in the discipline of geography before examining the shifting landscapes of care provision overtime. It considers where these new spaces of care are unfolding. After identifying the boundaries of this scholarship, it then outlines the key themes within and across the four papers in this special issue.
The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time: to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow- moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects. We then consider strategies for slowing scholarship with the objective of contributing to the slow scholarship movement. This slowing down represents both a commitment to good scholarship, teaching, and service and a collective feminist ethics of care that challenges the accelerated time and elitism of the neoliberal university. Above all, we argue in favor of the slow scholarship movement and contribute some resistance strategies that foreground collaborative, collective, communal ways forward.
This paper sets out a framework for understanding the impacts of the financial crisis and its aftermath that is based on the idea of three interacting spheres: finance, production and reproduction. All of these spheres are gendered and globalised. The gendered impact of the current crisis is discussed in terms of the impact on unemployment, employment protection and security, public sector services, social security benefits, pensions, and the real value of wages and living standards. Drawing on the analysis of the UK Women’s Budget Group, the paper demonstrates that the biggest falls in disposable income as the result of austerity policies by the Conservative-led government since 2010 have been borne by the most vulnerable women—lone mothers, single women pensioners and single women without children. Working-age couples without children have been least affected. The paper then goes on to discuss what an alternative economic strategy, based on feminist political economy, might look like. It utilises the notion of the ‘reproductive bargain’, first developed to understand the transition in Cuba in the 1990s. It sets out a possible feminist economic strategy that insists on the incorporation of reproductive and care work into the analysis of alternative economic policies and links employment, wages and social security payments to public provisioning of trans-generational reproductive services. It suggests feasible strategies to finance the proposed Plan F—a feminist economic strategy.
This article contributes to debates about the expanded, and expanding, nature of crafts by exploring the activist potential of amateur, domestic crafts and the quiet activism of everyday making. In contrast to much recent work on the resurgence of interest in DIY craft culture, it takes
a historical perspective and argues for the emergence of a new, historically conscious, socially engaged amateur practice. The recently exhibited cross-stitch embroideries of Major Alexis Casdagli and my own memories of my grandmother provide a starting point for exploring the lived experience
of home crafts in the first half of the twentieth century. Close analysis of home-craft features from 1930s women's magazines offer a framework for understanding how such marginalized spaces promote agency through new feminine imaginaries. Michel De Certeau's notion of la perruque
suggests how such devalued activities as crochet and knitting can be envisaged as strategies or tactics that afford agency and shape distinctive social relations, while interviews with two contemporary practitioners provide insight into historical continuities and current responses.
This paper draws on fieldwork with a befriending scheme that pairs refugees, asylum seekers and local residents in the north east of England. It explores the ways in which a 'quiet politics' of encounter, embedded in intimate relationships, is caught up in and productive of complex inter-scale geographies, highlighting the ebbs and flows across security and insecurity. Critically, it foregrounds the relationality of emotions in enabling and maintaining intimate-geopolitics. © 2014 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
This paper introduces the concept of ‘ordinary’ to analyze citizenship’s complexities. Ordinary is often taken to mean standard or routine, but it also invokes order and authority. Conceptualizing citizenship as ordinary trains our attention on the ways in which the spatiality of laws and social norms are entwined with daily life. The idea of ordinariness fuses legal structures, normative orders and the experiences of individuals, social groups and communities, making citizenship both a general category and a contingent resource for political life. We explore this argument using immigrants as an example, but the conceptualization of citizenship extends more broadly.
full-text available here: http://dro.dur.ac.uk/9745/1/9745.pdf
Some months ago, in preparation for compil-ing the next three geography and ethicsreports, I registered with one of the commonelectronic database services to receive thetitles of journal articles focused on ethics.There are two things that I found noteworthyabout this exercise. The first is the sheer vol-ume of contemporary work on ethics – by myrather unscientific reckoning, something ofthe order of 1500 articles dealing with ethicsare published in academic journals each year.The second is the presumed audience formuch of this work. It seems that the vastmajority of recent ethical writings are aimednot at the readers of social science journalslike this one, but rather at the mundane worldof institutions, organizations and public policy.In recent months, articles have addressed theethical dimensions of a wide range of socialand organizational practices, from auditing tozoo keeping. Ethics are being discussed bybankruptcy lawyers, money managers, judgesand dentists, and applied to our sportingevents, our militaries, and even our spaceagencies. Ethical conversations, it seems, aretaking place at a multitude of sites across thesocial domain.This state of affairs should probably beapplauded. But it does not necessarily ensurethat our social institutions function ethicallyor responsibly, or even that we can easilydetermine what that might mean. At issuehere is a common challenge of ethical think-ing: how do we bring normative demands tobear upon the social world of order, rules, andpublic policy? One well-known theorist whograppled with this challenge is EmmanuelLevinas, who often admitted that his concep-tion of ethics, based as it was on a one-to-onerelation with the singular Other, was ratherdifficult to translate into a social world ofcitizen-subjects:
Female labour force participation has been increasing in recent decades, in part encouraged by state policies to raise the employment rate to encourage economic competitiveness and combat social exclusion. Social provision for care, however, has lagged behind this increase, creating practical and moral dilemmas for individuals and for society, facing parents with complex choices about how to combine work and care. In this paper, we draw on a qualitative study in London to explore the extent to which the large-scale entry of women into waged work is altering women's understandings of their duties and responsibilities to care for others. We conclude that their decisions are influenced by class position, entrenched gender inequalities in the labour market, varying abilities to pay for care and complex gendered understandings of caring responsibilities.
This article contributes to the reflexive turn within the social sciences by arguing for enhanced recognition of the role of gender and emotions in the research process. The chief instrument of research, the ethnographer herself, may alter that which is being studied and may be changed in turn (Golde, 1970). Women may trigger off specific behaviours in male-dominated settings such as the ‘boy racer’ culture. This includes the gender-related behaviours of ‘sexual hustling’ and ‘sexist treatment’ (Gurney, 1985). Ethnographers must adopt a reflexive approach and locate themselves within the ethnography while recognizing the influence of their social position on interactions with the researched and the research itself. An awareness of these interactions does not undermine the data but instead acknowledges that the researcher and the researched are embedded within the research. Hence, they shape the ethnography while also being shaped in turn.
The paper argues for the importance of recognising carework as a form of bodywork. It discusses why this central dimension has been neglected in accounts of carework, pointing to the ways in which community care has traditionally been analysed, the resistance of social gerontology to an overly bodily emphasis, and the conceptual dominance of the debate on care. Drawing on a study of the provision of help with bathing and washing for older people at home, it explores the body dimension of the activity, looking at how careworkers negotiate nakedness and touch, manage dirt and disgust, balance intimacy and distance. Finally, the paper draws together some of the key themes of this bodywork: its designation adirty work', its hidden, silenced character, the low occupational esteem in which it is held and its gendered nature.
Feminist and poststructural challenges to objectivist social science demand greater reflection by the researcher with the aim of producing more inclusive methods sensitive to the power relations in fieldwork. Following a discussion of contrasting approaches to these power relations, I present a reflexive examination of a research project on sexual identities. My reflections highlight some of the key ethical questions that face researchers conducting fieldwork, especially with regard to the relationship between the researcher and those being researched. My discussion of these dilemmas reflect the situated and partial nature of our understanding of “others.” I argue that the researcher's positionality and biography directly affect fieldwork and that fieldwork is a dialogical process which is structured by the researcher and the participants.
This paper considers the UK coalition government's austerity drive, which attempts to garner public support for the reduction
or withdrawal of welfare entitlements through appeals to frugality, self-sufficiency and fiscal prudence. In particular, the
paper considers the recasting of the former Labour government's work incentives and welfare disincentives amidst mounting
pressures on public expenditure. The reorientation of state assistance towards work, coupled with the proposed simplification
of working-age benefits and tax credits, is argued to present a particular challenge to the financial security and autonomy
of women, signalling the end of the process of modernizing the welfare system that was forged around the single earner family
model in the period of post-war austerity.
This article draws upon two distinct UK case studies to explore how alternative modes of provisioning employ ordinary practices of sharing and circularity. Speaking to debates about alterity, diverse economies (Gibson-Graham, 2008) and emerging literature on the circular and shared economy, these two small and informal based models, one food based, the other clothing, are put forward as examples of the vast array of contemporary ‘alternative’ forms of consumption and provisioning taking place across the UK. The article illuminates how diverse economies are ‘made material’ through their materials and practices. In doing so I make three key arguments: firstly, and overall, that studying materiality is one way to illuminate these new and emerging spaces of provisioning, highlighting their practices, intimacies and ambiguities. Secondly, this material focus illustrates how the practices of provisioning – in particular, sharing and circulating - are not new, but are instead organised in original and novel ways; and this has wider implications for contemporary debates on circular and shared economy. Thirdly, that the materials of provisioning can be both beneficial and troublesome to provisioning organisations’ practices of circulating and sharing and the extent to which they tackle issues of social exclusion, financial hardship and sustainable resource use.
This article argues for the centrality of the home in understanding both the impacts of ‘austerity’ in the UK and potential activist responses. The article focuses on gendered forms of activism, particularly among low-income women. Empirical material is drawn from research with women in different contexts, a network of migrant women in London and a group of community activists in Stoke-on-Trent, in order to identify three particular registers of home-based and, by extension, community activism, including notions of ‘the everyday’, ‘the inbetween’ and experiences of trauma. There is also a brief discussion of housing activism in contemporary London in order to explore how such analysis might be applied to other forms of organising. There is a call for more sustained consideration of these often hidden forms of activism from researchers in understanding, as well as intervening in, the dynamics of contemporary social policy and governance.
The discussion which follows arises from research undertaken into the changing history of the East Midlands hosiery industry. The bulk of this work consisted of historical investigation into the period 1800–1960, using a variety of documentary sources, in particular Parliamentary Papers and also hosiery union records held in Leicester. Information of a less systematic, more impressionistic type was gained about the industry today, using both documentary and interview techniques. In trying to comprehend the changing position of women in the industry it became clear that what is referred to here as the ‘family project’, that is the combined activity of the family or household as a strategy for economic survival, had had significant effects on patterns of employment, on local labour market structures and on the changing division of labour in the workplace. In areas such as Leicester, where there is a strong tradition of women taking on paid employment as part of this family project, women’s work cannot be seen as in any sense marginal, but plays a crucial role in the adjustment of the working-class family to its particular life-chances.
John Dewey envisioned creative democracy as a process of agonistic engagement, and Bob Lake shares Dewey’s optimism for the possibilities of creative democracy. In this response, I suggest that scholars should look beyond the obvious moments of democratic political engagement, whether activism in the public square or in the occupied park, to pay attention to the quiet politics of the everyday, where everyday decisionmaking by individuals and communities can gradually, episodically, change dominant hegemonic norms and understandings, proviing new understandings for social change. I highlight several examples, including the Settlement house movement from the late 19th century and intentional neighboring from the twenty-first century, that illustrate the kind of daily work that brings together different social classes and ethnicities in a situation of sharing and working toward conditions of equality and new ways of living in the world.
While traditional academic accounts of activism emphasise vocal, antagonistic and demonstrative forms of protest, geographers have begun to expand the category of activism to include modest, quotidian acts of kindness, connection and creativity. This paper outlines ‘quiet activism’ as small, everyday, embodied acts, often of making and creating, that can be either implicitly or explicitly political in nature. This concept is explored with seed savers, gardeners who cultivate fruits and vegetables and then select and save seed to provide future generations of plants for themselves and others. It draws on ethnographic research with individuals involved in a national seed conservation network (The Heritage Seed Library) and a local seed swap event (Seedy Sunday, Brighton) in the UK. These organisations connect individual seed savers and frame their quiet acts of growing and sharing as part of a broad movement to conserve biodiversity and challenge the corporate control of food and seed systems. The paper unpicks the implications of embodied activisms performed at varying volumes, and it highlights the need for scholars to attend to the differing embodiments called for by various modes of activism in order to trace their particular impacts, emotions and affects. The experiences of seed savers elucidate the particular power of small and quiet acts of making and doing to critique, subvert and rework dominant modes of production and consumption.
This paper considers some key impacts of public sector neoliberalisation and austerity measures for everyday geographies of childhood and youth in England. The paper develops three claims, with reference to qualitative research conducted at a youth group in 2007, 2009 and 2013. First, I outline a range of ways in which long-run processes of public sector neoliberalisation, and more abrupt cuts to public sector expenditure ‘in the current climate’ of austerity politics, have substantially transformed geographies of childhood and youth in many minority world contexts. However, I argue that extant research on these transformations has tended to reproduce some rather partial understandings of impacts of service withdrawal, which I critique via a reading of recent geographical work on anticipatory politics. Second, I evidence how political-economic contexts of neoliberalisation and austerity have constituted a particular atmosphere and sense of the future, tangibly affecting everyday relationships, spaces and the efficacy of service provision at the case study youth group. In particular, I emphasise the significance of anticipated futures, noting that the anticipation of funding cuts is having manifold everyday, lived consequences that are arguably more wide-ranging, intractable and troubling than the impacts of funding cuts themselves. Third, in particular, I argue that spaces of anticipated funding cuts and service withdrawal are frequently characterised by an intensification of anxieties about, and hopes for, young people's futures. I note that young people are diversely affected by, and engaged in, the circulation of these anxieties and hopes – but also recognise that young people's geographies go on, and sometimes offer hopeful ways on, ‘in the current climate’.
This commentary examines gendered and spatial inequalities that are increasing under a regime of austerity in the United Kingdom. It is concerned with how inequalities intersect and interact across space and populations. A sense of urgency is vital when discussing the effects of austerity on regions and local communities; five years of cuts have had devastating effects on many deprived areas. An examination of the specific risks to women under austerity is essential. The commentary will be of interest to geographers concerned with the intersections of gender, economy and place. This paper proposes a feminist political economy perspective for the analysis of austerity and place, to acknowledge the centrality of gendered political economy, absent from many geographical studies of austerity.
In this end piece, I comment on and connect the six preceding substantive articles about inequality in the years of austerity following the financial crisis and link their arguments to my own work on youth. I argue that the long decades of deindustrialisation and the more recent post-crisis austerity climate may be reshaping the old sexual/gender contract that defined the Fordist era.
The impacts of austerity have permeated many aspects of everyday life in the UK, making this an important context in which to carry out social research. In this paper I consider some of the challenges that austerity poses to how we carry out research into everyday austerities and the ethical implications of researching in austere conditions. Drawing on debates from feminist and moral geographies on ethics, care and responsibility, and on first-hand experiences of researching families in the current economic climate, I argue that the everyday mechanics of research - such as recompensing participants, and the place of the researcher - acquire particular resonance in austerity. In doing so, I also reflect on the significance of social proximity and personal biography, and the ways in which researchers may become enveloped in participants' personal narratives in addition to providing support and care. In the conclusion I identify contributions made to understandings of care and responsibility in fieldwork, the ethics of researching in and about austerity, and the relational space of the field. © 2015 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
This paper contributes to debates on geographies of family and intimate relations, and research ethics in ethnographic research by addressing the ethics of doing ethnography with families. Drawing on debates in human geography, anthropology, and sociology, I argue that the intimate nature of both ethnography and familial relations presents particular challenges to using an ethnographic approach to studying families. Using experiences from two years of ethnographic research with six families in the UK, the ethics of confidentiality (within and between families, and in published materials), and disengagement (following long-term involvement, transforming relationships, and staying in contact with participants) are explored. In addition, the paper sheds light on the geographical and ethical complexities of doing 'ethnography on your doorstep'. The conclusions outline the contributions of the paper to discussions within and beyond geography, family studies, and ethnography.
Literature within economic geography on the financialisation of everyday life has so far overlooked the role of family. Using
data collected from ethnographic research with six families in the UK before and during the recent financial crisis, this
article argues the case for using family as a lens through which to conceptualise everyday experiences of recession and finance.
The findings highlight interpersonal family relationships, inter- and intra-generationality, gender responsibilities, reciprocity,
shared experiences and memories as essential to conceptualising how people get by in times of financial crisis and relate
to finance in everyday life. The conclusions outline the key contributions of the article to literatures on geographies of
finance and family.
Dressmaking is a practice infused with historical significance which in the contemporary context of austerity has renewed social, cultural, economic, political and moral importance. Drawing on writing from across the social sciences we advance a geographical understanding of dressmaking by focusing on the themes of feminism and crafting practices, austerity, fashion and consumption, and friendship and encounters in order to theorise the everyday spatialities of contemporary crafting cultures. In doing so we argue that the recent return to dressmaking cannot be understood as an extension or repetition of historic practices but that contemporary dressmakers are claiming a history and geography of their own. To conclude, we argue that dressmaking and other related fabricultures have much to offer our understanding of austerity, feminism and friendship and thus merit further theoretical and empirical investigation.
Whimsy describes the capricious, playful and fanciful, and designates something irrational or without an immediately obvious reason to exist. I argue that this frivolity and illogicality are precisely what can make whimsy a significant, if fleeting, ground for micro-political change. To demonstrate this claim I use the example of yarn bombing – a contemporary form of street art in which knitted and crocheted items are attached to parts of the urban landscape. Yarn bombing, I argue, does more than feminise the city, for the whimsy with which it is imbued has the capacity to increase our attentiveness to habitual worlds in a series of micro-political gestures. Yet it is impossible to fully recognise and harness a politics of whimsy, for doing so defies its character as frivolous and without motive, and supersedes these traits with intentionality and utility. As a result, a politics born of whimsy is always-already a paradoxical politics. The broader question thus becomes one of how to dwell in whimsy's ungraspable moment in order that we might remain open to new political and ethical potentialities. To explore these issues, this paper draws on performative ethnographic fieldwork, wherein 30 yarn bombs were made and displayed in the city of Bristol during 2011.
Issues of space, place and politics run deep. There is a long history of the entanglement of the conceptualisation of space and place with the framing of political positions. The injunction to think space relationally is a very general one and, as this collection indicates, can lead in many directions. The particular avenue to be explored in this paper concerns the relationship between identity and responsibility, and the potential geographies of both.
This article addresses the discussion, particularly prominent among feminist geographers, of reflexivity as a strategy for marking geographical knowledges as situated. It argues that, if the aim of feminist and other critical geographies is to acknowledge their partiality, then the particular form of reflexivity advocated needs careful consideration. Feminist geographers most often recommend a kind of reflexivity that aims, even if only ideally, at a full understanding of the researcher, the researched and the research context. The article begins with the author's failure at that kind of reflexivity, and that particular reflexivity is then discussed and described as ‘transparent’ in its ambitious claims to comprehensive knowledge. The article then goes on to explore critiques of transparent reflexivity, many of which have been made by feminist geographers themselves. The article concludes by suggesting that some recent discussions of the uncertainties of research practice offer another model of feminist reflexivity that may succeed more effectively in questioning the researcher's practice of knowledge production.
Feminist theory and methodology have much to offer in understanding how disability research has been experienced as alienated research by disabled people. However, feminist research has failed to apply its principles to disability and disabled women's subjective reality has found no place in mainstream feminist work. The paper identifies the challenges for feminism in addressing the interests and reality of disabled women, asserting that it is not helpful to focus on ‘double disadvantage’. Disability research itself has much to learn from feminist methodology, in particular the principle of making the personal political. The role of non-disabled researchers as allies of disabled people is discussed, and the importance of research which turns the spotlight on the way in which non-disabled society oppresses disabled people. Finally, it is asserted that disability research and politics are of general relevance because the experience of disability is an integral part of a society characterised by fundamental inequalities and ideologies which divide people against each other.
Questions of care appear to be catching the imagination of researchers across several areas of human geography at present (see Parr 2003).We can note, for instance, the growing body of work that explores the significance of care in particular settings. Milligan (2000) has written of the home-space in this regard, while Twigg's (2000) work on bathing and intimate care is similarly attentive to domestic spatiality. The complex material and psycho-social dimensions of care in the home emerge clearly in these accounts; we see that despite benevolent intentions, the quality and consistency of such care is variable and its delivery often emotionally demanding (see Allan and Crow 1989). Other research has focused on mental health care environments (Kearns and Joseph 2000; Parr 2000; Philo 1997; Pinfold 2000), hospices (Brown 2003; Brown and Colton 2001), hospitals (Allen 2001) and alternative medicine centres (Wiles and Rosenberg 2001; Williams 2000). Within these studies we see how relations and practices of care—things such as listening, feeding, changing clothes and administering medication—are implicated in the production of particular social spaces. The care-taking tasks which bring people together in these settings involve both physical and emotional labour, and often depend disproportionately upon the commitment of women (Daly and Lewis 1998; Finch and Groves 1983; Ungerson 1990).
In this review I explore the connections between debates about the transformation of work in a service-dominated economy and those about classed and gendered identities. I suggest they might usefully be connected in analyses of disadvantage and exclusion among working-class young people. Youth involvement in protest and unrest in English cities, as well as rising rates of unemployment, raise questions about the connections between labour market exclusion and young men's and women's construction and performance of acceptable versions of gendered identities. Performative identities are crucial in gaining employment, especially in the forms of low-waged interactive employment open to young people with few skills or little educational capital.
This paper addresses the difficulties and dilemmas that may occur when friendships are formed with participants during an ethnographic research project. The ongoing, reciprocal relationships developed with participants are considered essential in the data collection of ethnography, as an avenue through which research can be carried out. However, while friendships in the field may open new doors to research, they can also create new (ethical) challenges. This paper revisits these issues, alongside research ethics guidelines, using three different scenarios: the negotiation of methods of contact, the maintenance of contact with participants and the sharing of research diaries with participants. From these discussions, two issues arise that may have implications for future ethnographic research: the obstacle of social networking websites and the negotiation of appropriate research ethics when participants become our friends.
The last decade in human geography has been marked by the emergence and development of significant bodies of work on: geographies of sexuality; children; and youth/young people's geographies. Taken together, this work might be characterised as being about intimate relations. In this article, I briefly review the differential contributions to, and place in, the discipline of these sub-disciplinary areas as well as identifying ‘family’ studies as an absent presence within geography. I then go on to explore what might bind these disparate areas of research together, and to argue that by developing their connections, through the concept of intimacy, the contributions of these sub-disciplinary areas might be scaled up to have a more fundamental impact on the discipline of geography.
Often researchers position themselves in relation to race, age and gender, but the body is less often discussed as an actual ‘instrument of research’. We aim to extend thinking on this point by reflecting on a project we conducted on migrant women and food in New Zealand. We present a vignette as an example of how we used our bodies as ‘instruments of research’ at a ‘shared lunch’ attended by new migrants from a range of different countries. At the lunch some combined on their plates spicy dishes such as kimch’i (fermented vegetables) and sweet dishes such as pavlova (a meringue dessert). For others this combination prompted feelings of disgust. We conclude that the body is a primary tool through which all interactions and emotions filter in accessing research subjects and their geographies.
Over recent months I have received silent phone calls and malicious homophobic mail that has referred to my sexual identity, my research, my teaching, and my position within the discipline of Geography, and I have been “outed” as a lesbian to my parents. This paper attempts to unpack these experiences: first, by examining the different processes (all of which play upon the mutual constitution of my academic self and sexual self) through which my harasser has sought to exclude me from the discipline of Geography; second, by exploring the geography of this harassment—focusing on how malicious letters/calls can disrupt meanings of place, particularly the way that personal geographies can be taken for granted until they are transgressed; third, by considering geographies of the law. Finally, the paper reflects onthe mutual constitution of my sexual identity, geographical research and writing, academic identity as a geographer, and the discipline of Geography itself.
In this paper I suggest ways in which a geographical approach to grandparent identities could successfully build upon social geography's understandings of relational geographies of age. In intergenerational geographies, the compartmentalised nature of age studies means that transitions in later stages of the lifecourse, particularly in family life, remain substantially under-researched. The paper draws together established geographical literatures of age, family and lifecourse, and evidence from qualitative interviews conducted over the past 12 months in the UK for ongoing research with grandfathers, to suggest ways in which the discipline might engage with and critique intergenerational geographies to move it forward. In particular there is a focus on spatialities of body space, embodiment and intimacy, activity spaces, and distance and locality.
Across the decades geographers have been concerned with questions of our ethical responsibilities to care. It would seem that care is nothing new in geography. I argue however, that contemporary societal shifts are extending market relations into caring realms of our lives and that we are witnessing reductions in public provision of social supports. These twin trends have made care a more pressing concern and have simultaneously marginalized care from view. Geographers are well positioned to draw attention to these trends and I urge us to think about our responsibility to care about these issues, and the geographies that they make. I ask us all to think about our responsibilities as geographers to pose questions in the face of (i) market extensions, (ii) currently pervasive discourses of personal responsibility (for poverty, inner city decline, unemployment, etc.), and (iii) the withdrawal of public support from many crucial arenas. Care ethics focuses our attention on the social and how it is constructed through unequal power relationships, but it also moves us beyond critique and toward the construction of new forms of relationships, institutions, and action that enhance mutuality and well-being. I consider how our research, teaching, and professional practices might shift in conversation with care ethics. Care ethics suggests that we build spatially extensive connections of interdependence and mutuality, that we attend to the ways in which historical and institutional relationships produce the need for care (extension of market relations; famine, unnatural disasters, environmental and cultural destruction), and that we take up social responsibility in our professional practices.
An interest in the taken-for-granted, mundane routine activities of women's lives has long been central to the production of knowledge in feminist geography. Here, I revisit the 'everyday' in relation to changing lines of inquiry as geographers work to capture the complexity of local-global relations in conceptualising an accelerated pace of the stretching of social relations over space. Through a primary focus on feminist work on care in the home, I explore the various ways in which the meanings and organisation of caregiving activity are intricately connected with the intertwining of globalisation, neoliberalism, social conservatism and a 'greying' population in the West. Foregrounding gender in my discussion, I review literature and draw on research examples to illustrate ways in which various types of 'hidden' caregiving contribute to contemporary placemaking, and open up our understanding of the 'local'.
In this paper, we suggest that social scientists' accounts of ‘activism’ have too often tended to foreground and romanticise the grandiose, the iconic, and the unquestionably meaning-ful, to the exclusion of different kinds of ‘activism’. Thus, while there is a rich social-scientific literature chronicling a social history of insurrectionary protests and key figures/thinkers, we suggest that there is more to ‘activism’ (and there are more kinds of ‘activism’) than this. In short, we argue that much can be learnt from what we term implicit activisms which – being small-scale, personal, quotidian and proceeding with little fanfare – have typically gone uncharted in social-scientific understanding of ‘activism’. This paper will reflect upon one example of this kind of ‘implicit’ activism, by re-presenting findings from interviews undertaken with 150 parents/carers, during an evaluation of a ‘Sure Start’ Centre in the East Midlands, UK. From these interviews emerged a sense of how the Centre (and the parents/carers, staff and material facilities therein) had come to matter profoundly to these parents/carers. We suggest that these interviews extend and unsettle many social-scientific accounts of ‘activism’ in three key senses. First: in evoking the specific kinds of everyday, personal, affective bonds which lead people to care. Second: in evoking the kinds of small acts, words and gestures which can instigate and reciprocate/reproduce such care. And third: in suggesting how such everyday, affective bonds and acts can ultimately constitute political activism and commitment, albeit of a kind which seeks to proceed with ‘not too much fuss’.
This paper is about a single event: a conference (A.K.A. ‘the health event’) held in the English East Midlands in July 2005, at which findings from a policy-led research project regarding young people’s health needs were fed back to research participants. The paper foregrounds some of the everyday work, happenings, emotions, conversations and materialities which were fundamentally constitutive of ‘the health event’ and, thus fundamentally constituted the moments of affirmative, politically-charged participation which could and did happen therein. Thus the paper bears witness to the sorts of practices, minutiae and highs and lows which are surely fundamentally constitutive of participation, policy and politics per se, but which (despite the growing visibility of nonrepresentational theories) are typically absent from salient accounts of participation, Children’s Geographies and Post-medical Geographies.