Hawke Research Institute
RCGS
past events 2006–2011Also see past events 2001–2005
A seminar with Prof Mary Margaret Fonow, Arizona State University, 12
July 2011,
Magill Campus. Professor Mary Margaret Fonow is Director of Women and Gender Studies at
Arizona State University. Before joining the Arizona State University
faculty she was an Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the Ohio State
University. Her co-edited book (with Judith A Cook) Feminist
methodology: feminist scholarship as lived research (Indiana University
Press, 1991) has been widely cited. Professor Fonow is a member of the
UNESCO Women and Gender Research Network and has served on the editorial
boards of Gender & Society, NWSA Journal, Frontiers: A
Journal of Women's Studies and the Australian Journal of Sociology.
Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Qld University of Technology) delivered this inaugural public lecture in conjunction with the bi-annual AWGSA conference in July 2010. The lecture was the first of what will be an annual event in the Adelaide feminist academic calendar. It was also a celebration of the tenth anniversary of her groundbreaking book Talkin' up to the white woman (2000, UQP). The title of Professor Moreton-Robinson's lecture was 'Talkin' up to the white man: white patriarchal epistemic violence and Indigenous women's knowledge within the academy'. The recording of her lecture begins with an introduction from Associate Professor Irene Watson (University of SA). It can be accessed via this link: http://podcast.unisa.edu.au/media/shane/aileenedit.mp3
Emerging Spaces: New Possibilities in Critical Times, Adelaide, 30 June –
2 July 2010. Postgraduate day on 29 June. In a time of rapid social, economic and political transition this
conference called for consideration of the meaning and possibilities of
change for gender in Australia and internationally.
A seminar presented by the Research Centre for Gender Studies and the Australian Institute for Social Research (University of Adelaide), 8 July, Adelaide. This seminar drew on research undertaken for a Development Research Award (ADRA) funded project 'Budgeting for women's empowerment: the practices and potential of gender-responsive budgeting in the Asia-Pacific Region' of which East Timor (and Indonesia) are case studies. The research team is joined by Timor Leste visiting research officer, Mr Hermino Xavier, of the Office of the Secretary of State for the Promotion of Gender Equality, Dili.
Presenters:
13 May, Magill Campus. Diane Elson is a professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Essex. For almost 40 years she has carried out research on the feminist economics of gender and development. She has been included as one of the fifty key thinkers in a book edited by David Simon, Fifty key thinkers on development, Routledge, 2005. Diane is a visiting international scholar of the Research Centre for Gender Studies and the Hawke Research Institute. She is currently collaborating with Professor Rhonda Sharp and her research team on a book on gender-responsive budgeting in the Asia-Pacific region, and will be at UniSA until mid July.
Diane was a member of the UN Millennium Project Taskforce and the Advisory Committee for UNRISD Policy Report on Gender and Development; and vice-president, International Association for Feminist Economics. From 1998 to 2000, she served as Special Advisor to the Executive Director of UNIFEM and was the lead author on the report Progress on the world's women 2000. Her recent research interests include gender and fiscal policy, and gender and international trade. Recent publications include: 'The social content of macroeconomic policies' (with N Çagatay), World Development, July 2000; Gender budgets make cents (with D Budlender, G Hewitt and T Mukhopadhyay), Commonwealth Secretariat, London, 2002; 'Engendering government budgets in the context of globalization(s)', International Feminist Journal of Politics, 6(4), 2004; Budgeting for women's rights: monitoring government budgets for compliance with CEDAW, UNIFEM, New York, 2006; 'The changing economic and political participation of women and the new challenges of globalisation', in I Lenz, C Ullrich and B Fersch (eds.) Gender orders unbound, Barbara Buderich Publishers, Opladen and Farmington Hills, 2007; 'Macroeconomic policy, employment, unemployment and gender equality' in JA Ocampo and KS Jomo (eds) Towards full and decent employment, Zed Books and Orient Longman, 2007; 'Gender issues in development' in AK Dutt and J Ros (eds) International handbook of development economics, Edward Elgar, 2008.
Xu Jie (Cindy). A seminar presented by the Research Centre for Gender Studies and the Centre for Work + Life, 23 May 2008, Magill Campus.
By analysing what is behind a Chinese popular saying 'marry well rather than work well', this presentation explored changes to the gender regime in China. Women are not benefiting from market reform as much as men and many achievements of the socialist women's movement have been lost. Women's attitudes to paid and unpaid work and their choices for marriage are not determined by their own will. Prevailing norms and values and institutions interact to affect their decisions. When more and more Chinese woman agree to marry well rather than work well, this signals an urgent issue regarding gender equality. Xu Jie (Cindy) is Associate Professor in Economics at the Northeast Forestry University (NEFU) in China and was a visiting scholar with the Research Centre for Gender Studies in 2007–08. Jie's research interests include the changes in women's status since market reforms in China.
Hope: the utopian imagination of young people on the marginsAdelaide Festival of Arts exhibition,
Migration Museum, Adelaide,
29 February – 30 June 2008
Curators: Simon Robb and Catherine Manning
This exhibition documented responses by 'young people at risk' to ideas
about hopefulness and the future. It was part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts 2008
and an
outcome of the HRISS Linkage project
'Doing social sustainability: the
utopian imagination of youth on the margins'.
Adelaide Festival of Arts exhibition
SA School of Art Gallery
Kaurna Building, City West Campus,
28 February – 28 March
Curator: Kay Lawrence
Guest scholars: John Kean and Diana Wood-Conroy
'This everything water' explored the symbolic resonances and material qualities of pearl shell through artwork by Kay Lawrence and carved pearl shell by Aubrey Tigan.
Dr
Caroline Essers, 16 May 2007, Magill Campus
Research Centre for Gender Studies and Social Policy Research Group
Seminar
Dr Caroline Essers is from the Nijmegen Institute for Management Research in the Netherlands. She won a prize for most talented female researcher at the University of Nijmegen and is using this to fund a research trip to Australia and New Zealand.
She is conducting research on women entrepreneurs, where entrepreneurship is used as a form of resistance to dominant 'white' cultures and patriarchy. Most studies of the identity of entrepreneurs predominantly focus on either gender or ethnicity, and do not enough justice to the dynamics and complexities of the intersections of those identity markers. Dr Essers aims to fill this void in the literature by focusing on the multiple identity constructions of female ethnic minority entrepreneurs that have a Turkish or Moroccan background, a group that is increasingly appearing on the entrepreneurial scene and that has hitherto been largely neglected. To come to a better understanding of this group of entrepreneurs, she studied the lived practices of what is theoretically cast as intersectionality. In order to accomplish this goal, she uses the narrative/life-story approach in which she strongly reflects on her role as researcher.
Gemma Carey, Discipline of Public Health, Discipline of Anthropology
Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Adelaide.
This research comes at a time of serious academic questioning and debate concerning the role of community-based, or non-government, organisations. Although the third sector is now understood to be an integral part of our social and political system, how these organisations will realize their potential and overcome practical and theoretical challenges remains unclear. The research for this thesis took place at a hepatitis C-related community organisation that was in a state of flux, debating how the organisation would endeavour to work with community, and what objectives, functions and roles are fundamental to being a 'community-based' organisation in the third sector. The research comprised of a mixture of ethnographic techniques and qualitative interviewing. This paper took an actor-orientated approach to explore how the organisation's positioning between civil society and state shapes, and is shaped by, understandings of 'community' in the organisation and spatiality in the organisation.
Prof Dominique Jouve, University of New Caledonia, 21 March 2007, Magill Campus
Prof Jouve discussed her
research with children in New Caledonia on questions of belonging,
national identity and civic participation.
Dr Susan Halford, MA, PhD, University of Southampton
This paper brought together contemporary theoretical debates about space with recent research on gender identities and work organisations. The paper traced the interweaving of organisational spatalities with the negotiation of gendered identities at work. Drawing on empirical research with doctors and nurses working in two very different National Health Service hospitals in the UK, the paper revealed the embodied and agentic gendering of organisational spaces as they are used and produced in everyday negotiations of gender identities.
Robyn North, RCGS PhD student
This research used a life history approach in 35 interviews with women in three age cohorts representing different stages of the lifespan. Interview questions focused on relationships, work and health to explore the choices, challenges and complexities arising in women's lives in these social policy areas across the lifespan. The contemporary literature highlights transformations in intimate relationships such as egalitarianism and moral decline. In the last 30 years, transformations have also occurred in social policy that impact on intimate relationships such as the recognition of violence perpetrated in the home as criminal assault and equal employment legislation. Exploration of the ways in which people relate to one another in intimate heterosexual relationships is central to the research, as is the way that social policy can have a transformative impact on gendered arrangements in such relationships. An early emerging theme from the data is the primacy and centrality of intimate relationships in women's lives. Life history interviews have demonstrated how, regardless of social background, intimate relationships/coupledom dominate many women's life decision making. Despite advances for women in the public arena, the life history interviews indicate highly prescribed unequal gender roles for women partners in intimate heterosexual relationships.
Kristina Birchmore, RCGS PhD student
The influence of heteronormativity has a significant legacy in the sexual practices that are prescribed for women in the contemporary western culture. For instance, historically, in western society women's orgasm has been promoted as deviant whereas contemporary western literature centralises the capacity to achieve orgasm during coitus as an important aspect of a healthy and fulfilling life. Underscoring these shifting sexual scripts are an understanding of sexual practices that are embodied in masculine heterosexual notions. Exploration of the way in which heteronormativity assumes that there are normative sexual practices for all women is central to this analysis. As a consequence, there is a privileging of heterosexual practices and primacy of orgasm attainment. This has led to an increased interest in examining adult sexual functioning as well as factors that influence orgasmic capacity. Investigation into the potential influence of sexual abuse history to explain adverse sexual functioning has resulted in causal and binary assumptions that ignore the complexity of women's lives and their sexuality. The paper will examine these presumptions by drawing on a feminist analysis of heterosexuality that emphasises the interconnectedness of sexual practices to other aspects of women's marginalisation.
Cassandra Loeser, RCGS PhD student
Drawing on an interview with one young man with a hearing disability, this paper will theorise musical performance on bass guitar as a site of communicative engagement and masculine representation. Experiences communicating and conversing in male peer culture is problematised by difficulties 'hearing' the spoken word. By contrast, the performance of musical pieces on bass guitar is as an effective mechanism of conversational exchange and masculinity meaning making. The forging of new possibilities for 'hearing' and 'speaking' through playing the bass, and the connections of affect that the bass excites, facilitate opportunities for the (re)construction and (re)positioning of gendered subjectivity. It is proposed that the ability of scholars to hear the connections and exchanges between the identities of 'hearing', 'hearing disability' and 'masculinity' across different cultural contexts problematise the assumed 'naturalness' and fixity of bodies and identities.
Sarah Hattam, RCGS PhD student
The construction of patriarchal motherhood discourse continues to be an impediment to women's equality in Australia in the twenty-first century. The positioning of the 'good' mother in the home is high on the agenda for current government policy and reflected in populist discussions of motherhood. As representatives of the state and mediators of anti-discrimination legislation, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's mission is to support women's rights and equal opportunity in the private and public spheres through the negotiation of the Sex Discrimination Act. My proposed research questions the role the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission plays in this construction and whether their role is being realised.
Valerie Adams, RCGS PhD student, 30 June 2006
Australian residential aged care facilities provide high-end care to frail elderly people. The nurses who work there are positioned at an interface of 'home' and 'work' and daily straddle the crossover between notions of care for love and care for money. Interviews were conducted with 15 female nurses and two male nurses working in high-end residential aged care facilities in metropolitan Adelaide. One of the issues explored was whether these nurses ever thought about money 'on the job'. There are numerous difficulties inherent in dealing with 'care' as 'work', whether unpaid or paid. When dealing with marketised caring work, the complexities increase. Care has been linked with love and placed in an elite position that is deemed to be above the sordid subject of money. There is an implication that care provided by people doing the work 'for the money' will not be 'good care'. The fact that care is now provided in marketised settings does not necessarily mean that the services provided are fully commodified. Because caring services cannot operate successfully (that is, profitably) in a market scenario, care work tends to be undervalued. This undervaluing is also linked to the social training based on gender that has designated caring activities as 'women's work'. The interview responses show evidence of many aspects of commodified care discussed in the feminist economics literature on caring labour.
Reina Ichii, RCGS PhD student, 30 June 2006
Public services in many countries have been placed under increased scrutiny with the introduction of performance-based budgeting. In this new budget system performance indicators are chosen to facilitate evaluation of government service provision. In Australia, by legislation, all departments within the federal government develop these indicators using quantitative indicators related to their services; however the indicators concentrate on the number of services, while those inclusive of the 'care economy' have not yet been developed for this purpose.
This paper considered the potential of time-based indicators as a tool to measure performance on childcare policy and its funding by the Australian federal government. The national Child Care Surveys were used to measure a childcare service – Long Day Care service – and the income levels of the parents of preschool children who use it. It is assumed that household income has a significant impact on the use of childcare services, including the children's weekly attendance hours, mostly because eligibility for the government childcare subsidy, the Child Care Benefit, is income-related. In addition, the use of this childcare service was examined by the mothers' employment status, which also affects eligibility for the childcare subsidy. A major finding was that the attendance hours of childcare services by household income and mother's employment status vary; and the introduction of the childcare subsidy changed the attendance hours by each group. Time-based performance indicators can thus inform the government of differences in the use of a childcare service by household income and mothers' employment status, which are shaped by the government's policy and funding. This information could be used to evaluate performance of childcare services and funding from a gender perspective.
Dr Dominque Jouve, University of New Caledonia, 11 April 2006, Magill Campus
Assoc Prof Judy Gill, Dr Lia Bryant (RCGS), Deirdre Tedmanson (SPRG) and Dr Dominique Jouve (University of New Caledonia), 12 April 2006, Magill Campus
