The concept of work can be understood as a purposeful human activity, which is focused on the processing of natural goods, items and/or information by using tools to meet tangible and intangible needs. Work is the usage of instruments to support the existence of humankind and the social world. Domestic work refers to work of domestic help, which applies to employees, usually individuals who work and often live in the house of the employer. (...) Emotional labor takes place in the public sphere as a social and economic exchange sold for wages during interactions with customers or coworkers. Emotional labor requires certain emotions to be displayed and expressed in line with organizational aims. (shrink)

Après la révolution d’Octobre 1917, la transformation des rapports sociaux entre les sexes a été placée au cœur du projet bolchevik de construction du socialisme en Russie. De nouvelles formes d’organisation de la vie domestique, du travail et de la société transformeraient les relations entre les hommes et les femmes. Afin que les femmes puissent participer à égalité avec les hommes aux activités de production et de la sphère publique, il était indispensable de libérer les femmes des tâches domestiques en (...) transférant celles-ci dans la sphère des services collectifs. Qu’en fut-il dans la réalité? Les enquêtes sur les emplois du temps des familles, appelées enquêtes de budget temps, qui ont été réalisées en URSS au début des années 1920 puis à la fin des années 1960 et au début des années 1970, permettent de juger de la réalité de l’évolution des rôles sociaux derrière les discours dans la Russie soviétique. (shrink)

In Belgium, a service voucher scheme – known as Titres Services – was launched in 2004 in order to create employment and regularize the labor conditions of domestic workers. The extent to which this scheme has represented an improvement in domestic workers’ labor conditions, however, is still a matter of debate. This article explores the workers’ experience of the changes introduced by this scheme. It focuses on Latin American migrants that are currently working under this scheme in Brussels, (...) situating them in relation to their previous experiences and the experience of other migrants who currently work in the informal market. The authors distinguish two tropes in their informants’ discourse, which describe their ambivalence regarding these changes. Using the Titres Services scheme’s rhetoric, the first one seeks to increase the social status of this occupation by presenting it as a ‘profession’. Contrarily, the second trope highlights the limits to professionalization. (shrink)

This article explores how paid domestic work is framed in state policies and discourses, drawing upon theoretical discussions on gender, welfare and global care chains. Based on a case study of the political debate on the `reconciliation of personal, family and work life' in Spain, the author argues that dominant policy frames relate gender inequality to women's unpaid domestic work and care, while domestic workers are essentially the invisible `other'. Empowering and disempowering frames are (...) discussed; domestic workers are mainly constructed as a solution to the care problem and only marginally as subjects and rights-holders. The overall aim is to examine how public policies legitimize and produce social inequalities related to gender, class and nationality. (shrink)

This article discusses three major dilemmas embedded in women's labor migration by focusing on undocumented Latina migrants in Israel. The first is that to break the cycle of blocked mobility in their homelands, migrant women must take jobs that they would have never taken in their countries of origin, despite uncertainty about possible economic outcomes. The second dilemma is that the search for economic betterment leads Latina migrants to risk living and working illegally in the host country, forcing them to (...) remain on the margins of society. The third dilemma relates to the role of mothers who, to secure a better future for their children, are forced to leave them behind, thus subverting the traditional definition of motherhood. The absence of an egalitarian notion and the practice of citizenship for non-Jews leave undocumented labor migrants in Israel without prospects for incorporation into the society. (shrink)

We analyze time use data of four East Asian societies and 12 Western countries between 1985 and 2016 to investigate the gender revolution in paid work, domestic work, and total work. The closing of gender gaps in paid work, domestic work, and total work time has stalled in the most recent decade in several countries. The magnitude of the gender gaps, cultural contexts, and welfare policies plays a key role in determining whether (...) the gender revolution in the division of labor will stall or continue. Women undertake more total work than men across all societies: The gender gap ranges from 30 minutes to 2 hours a day. Our findings suggest that cultural norms interact with institutional contexts to affect the patterns of gender convergence in time use, and gender equality might settle at differing levels of egalitarianism across countries. (shrink)

This article explores precarity as a conceptual framework to understand the intersection of migration and low-waged work in the global south. Using a case study of cross-border migrant domestic workers in South Africa, I discuss current debates on framing and understanding precarity, especially in the global south, and test its use as a conceptual framework to understand the everyday lived experiences and strategies of a group that face multiple forms of exclusion and vulnerability. I argue that a form (...) of negotiated precarity, defined as transactions which provide opportunities for survival but also render people vulnerable, can be a useful way to make sense of questions around legality and formality in the context of poorly protected work, insecure citizenship and social exclusion. Precarity as a negotiated strategy shows the ways in which people interact with systems and institutions and foregrounds their agency. But it also illustrates that the negative outcomes inherent in more traditional notions of precarity, expressed in physical and economic vulnerability, and discrimination in employment relations, mostly hurt the poor. This suggests the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding precarity in labour migration studies. (shrink)

Drawing on feminist labour law and political economy literature, I argue that it is crucial to interrogate the personal and territorial scope of labour. After discussing the “commodification” of care, global care chains, and body work, I claim that the territorial scope of labour law must be expanded beyond that nation state to include transnational processes. I use the idea of social reproduction both to illustrate and to examine some of the recurring regulatory dilemmas that plague labour markets. I (...) argue that unpaid care and domestic work performed in the household, typically by women, troubles the personal scope of labour law. I use the example of this specific type of personal service relation to illustrate my claim that the jurisdiction of labour law is historical and contingent, rather than conceptual and universal. I conclude by identifying some of the implications of redrawing the territorial and personal scope of labour law in light of feminist understandings of social reproduction. (shrink)

This paper examines Simone de Beauvoir's account of marriage in The Second Sex and argues that Beauvoir's dichotomy between transcendence and immanence can provide an illuminating critique of continuing gender inequities in marriage and divisions of domestic work. Beauvoir's existentialist ethics not only establishes a moral wrong in marriages in which wives perform the second shift of household labor but also supports the need to transform existing normative expectations surrounding wives and domestic work.

In light of recent developments that have occurred in the domestic sector in Europe and the debate on the externalisation of domestic and care activities, this article explores the impact of the gender regime on paid domestic work. The gender regime is defined here as the combination of two dimensions: gender equality outcomes and the ‘gender contract’. The aim is to investigate whether the gender regime can contribute to explaining cross-national similarities and differences, in terms of (...) the size of the domestic sector, its workforce composition—with a focus on the proportion of women and migrants—and its working conditions. The article shows the results of quantitative analyses conducted at the European level, which include the construction of a typology of gender regimes, based on selected indicators, and a descriptive comparative analysis of the domestic sector at national level, based on data from the 2015 European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS). The findings suggest that the use of this typology of gender regimes can be a useful tool to explain cross-European differences in the domestic sector, but only regarding the size of the sector and the feminisation of the workforce. Concerning the proportion of migrants and working conditions in the domestic sector, no clear pattern emerges that can explain cross-national differences based on this typology. (shrink)

This Article offers an integrated analysis of the combined effect of the presence of migration bans and the absence of BLAs in domestic work in the emigration regime of Nepal. It identifies, acknowledges, critiques, and contributes to the critical literature highlighting entrapment processes in labor relations and immigration regimes by demonstrating the presence of such in the emigration regime. Drawing on the empirical findings of a participatory action research project conducted in Nepal, the Article demonstrates how restrictive emigration (...) policies and practices entail entrapment processes constitutive of the existing historical, cultural, gendered, racialized, and classed constraints impacting the lives of Nepalese citizens. The Article contributes to the critical literature that seeks to advance migrants’ rights, arguing that experiencing, encountering and escaping entrapment processes in the emigration regime impacts their agency when navigating immigration regimes and labor relations. This contribution advances the existing efforts to establish oft-ignored emigration regimes as important epistemological sites of research, theorization, and intervention. (shrink)

Research on bodies and work relies on theoretical perspectives that see the working body as a resource and/or symbol. This study bridges these complementary theories, incorporating two concepts that extend and synthesize them into a more holistic model of embodied inequality. Drawing primarily on the accounts of women domestic workers in Ecuador’s largest city, I explore the embodied dimensions of domestic work and show how unequal relations between workers and employers manifest in and on bodies, specifically (...) through interactions around health, food, and appearance/clothing. I argue that paid domestic workers’ bodies are simultaneously resources that can be used for work, and symbols interpreted according to local hierarchies of gender and class. (shrink)

Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) are at last coming to be recognised as serious global public health problems. Nevertheless, many women with personal histories of DVA decline to disclose them to healthcare practitioners. In the health sciences, recent empirical work has identified many factors that impede DVA disclosure, known as barriers to disclosure. Drawing on recent work in social epistemology on testimonial silencing, we might wonder why so many people withhold their testimony and whether there is some (...) kind of epistemic injustice afoot here. In this paper, I offer some philosophical reflections on DVA disclosure in clinical contexts and the associated barriers to disclosure. I argue that women with personal histories of DVA are vulnerable to a certain form of testimonial injustice in clinical contexts, namely, testimonial smothering, and that this may help to explain why they withhold that testimony. It is my contention that this can help explain the low rates of DVA disclosure by patients to healthcare practitioners. (shrink)

In this article, I compare Kant’s and Marx’s analysis of women and domestic labour in their mature political works, and argue that Kant offers more analytic tools for understanding the social and economic role of domestic labour than does Marx. While domestic labour becomes visible to Marx only as it is outsourced, Kant develops a clear account of the specific rules governing domestic labour in the emerging bourgeois household. Because of his commitment to the domestic (...) realm as a core feature of the just state, however, much of Kant’s account of domestic labour should be challenged by contemporary Kantian feminists. (shrink)

In the early years of Mendelism, 1900-1910, William Bateson established a productive research group consisting of women and men studying biology at Cambridge. The empirical evidence they provided through investigating the patterns of hereditary in many different species helped confirm the validity of the Mendelian laws of heredity. What has not previously been well recognized is that owing to the lack of sufficient institutional support, the group primarily relied on domestic resources to carry out their work. Members of (...) the group formed a kind of extended family unit, centered on the Batesons' home in Grantchester and the grounds of Newnham College. This case illustrates the continuing role that domestic environments played in supporting scientific research in the early 20th century. (shrink)

This article examines how domestic violence impacts the lives and education of young children, children, and young people and how they can be supported within the education system. Schools are often the service in closest and longest contact with a child living with domestic violence; teachers can play a vital role in helping families access welfare services. In the wake of high profile cases of child abuse and neglect, concerns have been raised about the effectiveness of multi-agency responses (...) to children living with abuse. In the UK, the case of four-year-old Daniel Pelka who died in 2012 following abuse and starvation by his mother, who experienced domestic violence, and her partner, led to a serious case review. It found recording systems in Daniel’s school were not used consistently, and details held by different agencies were not collated to enable the formation of a coherent assessment. The lack of integrated working cited in the report echoes findings from previous serious case reviews. A strong correlation exists between domestic abuse and child abuse, with approximately half of all domestic violence situations involving direct child abuse. Children can also be affected indirectly by violence occurring in their home by seeing or hearing it taking place. This article examines the impact of domestic violence on the mental health of children, and the impact on their education. Violence in children’s lives often causes disruption to their schooling and harms the quality of their educational experiences and outcomes. The abuse children experience can result in emotional trauma, physical and psychological barriers to learning, and disruptive behavior in school, while the underlying causes of these problems remain hidden. Knowing when and how to seek advice from multi-agency professionals is an essential part of effective practice among school staff. Despite their vital role in identifying signs of abuse and signposting referral pathways, research indicates teachers often lack confidence and knowledge for such work. The article examines how the professional learning and professional confidence of teachers can be developed, and how recent policy and practice developments in the UK have the potential to influence work in this area. (shrink)

The erosion of traditional work roles which had been male biased has led to the increase of women in the workplace. Although a welcomed development, it has an attendant problem – a vacuum in the homestead. Consequently, families are filling this vacuum by employing various hands (houseboys and girls, maids and nannies) to handle the house chores in the absence of parents. Being part of the society and mostly affected by female personnel (as Islamic conservativeness is reducing female personnel), (...) many Christian parents are now faced with the issue of relating properly with their ‘servants’ and vice versa. In fact, there are many cases of maltreatment of these helps and pampering their own children while the helps are overstretched, on the one hand, and cases of outrageous and negative behaviours on the part of the ‘servants’. This article is aimed at giving a biblical guideline on domestic workers and masters relationship via a socio-rhetorical reading of Ephesians 6:5–9. It examines the Graeco-Roman household codes between servants and masters and provides a comparative analysis of these ethical codes with the Nigerian situation to emphasise the contemporary relevance of the passage.Contributions: The article holds that rather than being treated as domestic workers, these servants should be treated as part of the family. They should be sent to school, properly clothed, and fed and treated equally with the children of the home. They are human beings created and loved by God before whom we are all equals. (shrink)

In 2009, a small group of domestic workers joined FNV Bondgenoten, the largest Dutch trade union in the private sector and affiliated with the Dutch trade union confederation FNV. The group that joined consisted mainly of women immigrant workers, many of whom did not have a residence permit. FNV’s policy is that we organize workers and do not ask for passports. Still, a group like this brought to light several problems for FNV, both practical and fundamental. The Article identifies (...) three types of problems. The first set of problems concerns the invisibility of domestic workers. Domestic workers work in private houses and are leery of talking to strangers if they don’t have residence permits. This demanded new organizing tactics from the sector, like asking women to bring a friend to a meeting and joining churches. A cash payment of membership fees system was devised, its administration done by handwriting. At the same time, the public debate on immigration toughened; immigrants without residence permits in particular were depicted as somewhere between a profiteer and the devil. This debate also took place within FNV. The second set of problems is defined by the traditional views in Dutch society on domestic work. The group chose to become union members, since they wanted to better their position in the labor market. Dutch law on domestic work excludes them from full protection of labor and social security law. The inclusion of domestic work in labor and social security law is contrary to cultural and historical traditions and views and therefore contentious. The third set of problems is caused by the connectedness of labor and social security law and immigration law. Domestic workers in the Netherlands work in the shadows in two ways: by not having a residence permit, and by not being protected by labor and social security law. The result of our campaign is that a group of publicly financed care workers will be better protected, but the group of domestic workers that fought for ILO Convention 189 will still be excluded from our labor and social security law and not be able to qualify for a residence permit. (shrink)

In recent decades, there have been major changes in the organisation of social reproduction. As middle-class women have entered the workforce in large numbers, and state provision of childcare and other welfare services has been scaled back under neo-liberalism, there has been an unprecedented outsourcing of household labour to the market. The resulting commodification of social reproduction has not liberated women from the demands of housework but has largely shifted this work away from women in the Global North towards (...) migrant women workers from poor and heavily indebted countries of the Global South. At the same time, there has also been a huge increase in internal migration within Global South countries, as newly wealthy middle classes in the cities are being serviced by poor rural women. Commodified domestic labour relies on the existence of gendered and racialised migrant workers. This article examines the domestic workers’ strike as an effective and urgent mode of political action given the massive and growing concentration of migrant women in domestic work. This requires a reassessment of earlier feminist strategies based on a nuclear family model and current advocacy strategies that, influenced by foundations, have rejected the strike tactic in favour of limited legal strategies. This article draws on my empirical research on domestic workers’ movements in the USA and India in order to highlight emerging strategies of labour movements. (shrink)

Domestic abuse is a worldwide public health issue with long‐term health and social consequences. Nurses play a key role in recognizing and responding to domestic abuse. Yet there is considerable evidence that their responses are often inappropriate and unhelpful, such as trivializing or ignoring the abuse. Empirical studies have identified several reasons why nurses' responses are sometimes wanting. These include organizational constraints, e.g. lack of time and privacy; and interpersonal factors such as fear of offending women and lack (...) of confidence. We propose, however, that these factors present only a partial explanation. Drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva, we suggest that alternative understandings may be derived through applying the concept of abjection. Abjection is a psychological defence against any threat (the abject) to the clean and proper self that results in rejection of the abject. Using examples from our own domestic abuse research, we contend that exposure of nurses to the horror of domestic abuse evokes a state of abjection. Domestic abuse (the abject) transgresses established social boundaries of clean and proper. Thus when exposed to patients' and clients' experiences of it, some nurses subconsciously reject domestic abuse as a possibility (abjection). They do this to protect themselves from the horror of the act, but in so doing, render themselves unable to formulate appropriate responses. Rather than understanding the practice of some nurses as wilfully neglectful or ignorant, we argue that through a state of abjection, they are powerless to act. This does not refute existing evidence about nurses' responses to domestic abuse. Rather, as a relatively unknown concept in nursing, abjection provides an additional explanatory layer that accounts for why some nurses respond the way they do. Crucially, it elucidates the need for nurses to be supported emotionally when faced with the transgressive practice of abuse. (shrink)

This essay argues that Catholic (magisterial) social teaching's division of ethics into public and private creates a structural lacuna which makes it almost impossible to envision a truly just situation for migrant domestic careworkers (MDCs) within the current horizon of Catholic social thought. Drawing on a variety of sociological studies, I conclude that it is easy for MDCs to “disappear” between two countries, two families, and, finally, two sets of ethical norms. If the magisterium genuinely wishes Catholic ethicists to (...) address the plight of these migrant women, normative Catholic social teaching must pay more attention to household sociological realities and more fully absorb the feminist critique of the sharp line between the public and the private, between care and paid work. (shrink)

We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure as emerging from the process of cultural transmission. We argue that a full recognition of the importance of cultural transmission fundamentally changes the kind of questions we should be asking regarding the biological basis of language structure. If we think of language structure as reflecting an accumulated set (...) of changes in our genome, then we might ask something like, “What are the genetic bases of language structure and why were they selected?” However, if cultural evolution can account for language structure, then this question no longer applies. Instead, we face the task of accounting for the origin of the traits that enabled that process of structure-creating cultural evolution to get started in the first place. In light of work on cultural evolution, then, the new question for biological evolution becomes, “How did those precursor traits evolve?” We identify two key precursor traits: the transmission of the communication system through learning; and the ability to infer the communicative intent associated with a signal or action. We then describe two comparative case studies—the Bengalese finch and the domestic dog—in which parallel traits can be seen emerging following domestication. Finally, we turn to the role of domestication in human evolution. We argue that the cultural evolution of language structure has its origin in an earlier process of self-domestication. (shrink)

This article argues that rape myths and domestic abuse myths constitute hermeneutical injustices. Drawing on empirical research, I show that the prevalence of these myths makes victims of rape and of domestic abuse less likely to apply those terms to their experiences. Using Sally Haslanger's distinction between manifest and operative concepts, I argue that in these cases, myths mean that victims hold a problematic operative concept, or working understanding, which prevents them from identifying their experience as one of (...) rape or of domestic abuse. Since victims in this situation lack the conceptual resources needed to render their experience sufficiently intelligible, they are suffering a form of hermeneutical injustice. Attending to this distinctive case sheds new light not only on the functioning of social myths of this kind but on the nature of hermeneutical injustice itself, since the case of the victim who accepts myths is importantly different from other cases of hermeneutical injustice discussed in the literature to date. In practical terms, this analysis supports calls for juries in rape trials to be warned about rape myths at the start of the trial, and may have implications for calls for statutory Sex and Relationships Education in schools. (shrink)

Much research shows that paid work performed at home supports a gendered division of household labor, leaving women disproportionately responsible for unpaid domestic work. For contract professionals, however, the flexibility to manage working time outside the constraints of a standard job allows both men and women to meld paid employment with household responsibilities. Interspersing paid and unpaid work, home-based contractors—both women and men—accommodate family needs. They arrange daily schedules to be available parents and household managers, and (...) they develop longer-term career trajectories that allow adjustment over time. For women, however, long-standing notions of domesticity make such accommodation invisible, normative, and unremarkable. For men, in contrast, home-based contracting can create the space with which to challenge gender norms. For these home workers, therefore, the same arrangement simultaneously reinforces and resists conventional constructions of gender. (shrink)

Films provide many memorable scenes of care that both shape and reinforce ideas about who deserves care, how carers should behave, and what kinds of people appear ‘naturally’ suited to the labors of caring for children, the sick, the elderly and the disabled (namely women). My specific interest here is in films about migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore. from the Philippines and Indonesia, who take up live-in housekeeping positions. The films about their lives range from documentary (...) to popular, low-budget horror to independent art cinema. While surveying the strengths and limitations of a handful of these films, I offer strategies for how to frame each film in terms of its director, production methods, distribution, and target audience. How and when might different genres be best used to engage students in critical thinking about care work and migrant labor? What stereotypes exist about migrant workers and what blind spots emerge in understanding paid care work? How can we promote dialogue about the often ambivalent relationship between caregiver and cared-for? (shrink)

There is no doubt that Immanuel Kant has a woman problem. His anthropo-logical studies of women are full of cutting remarks, and despite a generation offeminist Kantian scholarship, it is an open question whether he meant to include women as full, equal agents in either his moral or political philosophy. Those who engage this question within Kant’s political philosophy ask whether or not women can “work their way up” to full, active citizenship. If women can achieve equality in this (...) way, the argument goes, then we can solve Kant’s woman problem. But this approach, I argue, asks the wrong question. It focuses on the status of wives rather than on the structure of the domestic sphere as a whole, and therefore obscures the ways in which the valuation of domestic space and reproductive labor shape access to rights and equality in Kant’s political philosophy. I will argue that this approach misses the deeper structural and gendered inequalities built into Kant’s conception of the state. Re-examining Kant’s “woman problem” points us toward a larger problem with labor and inequality in the Kantian state: Kant’s map of the rightful institutional order normatively requires that someone do the dependency work that makes independence possible. (shrink)

The publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 ignited a public storm he neither wanted nor enjoyed. Having offered his book as a contribution to science, Darwin discovered to his dismay that it was received as an affront by many scientists and as a sacrilege by clergy and Christian citizens. To answer the criticism that his theory was a theory only, and a wild one at that, he published two volumes in 1868 to demonstrate that evolution was (...) obvious to anyone who cared to look at a bull in a pasture or a dog on a hearth. In response to those who insisted that species were distinct since creation, Darwin pointed to breeders of pigs and pigeons. In reply to those who protested that human intervention is one thing and natural selection another, he argued, "If organic beings had not possessed an inherent tendency to vary, man could have done nothing." To counter those who scorned his descriptions of species in exotic places, he submitted local evidence of cabbages and cauliflower. Based on a wide array of sources, from ancient pictographs to Polish roosters, from skins and from skeletons, from scientific journals and breeding manuals, Darwin assembled a mass of proof--and a hypothesis about species reversion that risked his reputation anew. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication is a two-volume compilation of his thorough and intensive research and the revolutionary conclusions that resulted. The first portion of his work is dedicated to a meticulous analysis of various aspects of plant and animal life, including an inventory of varieties and their physical and behavioral characteristics, investigation of the impact of a species' surrounding environment and the role that both natural and forced changes in this environment have had. Darwin then turns to a richly detailed discussion of the roles of inheritance and crossing in the development of species. A wealth of illustrations further support and enhance his findings. This fascinating, invaluable, and courageous undertaking eventually formed the foundation for our current understanding of evolution. "In science as in politics the victors tend to write the history books. As a result, the record of the past is edited, intentionally or unintentionally, so that it focuses mainly on the precursors of contemporary orthodoxy. Such a focus may accurately represent the genealogy of modern ideas, but it almost inevitably misrepresents the historical experience of their progenitors... Even the powerful, persuasive, and ultimately triumphant theory of evolution by natural selection required not only defense, but repeated buttressing and revision. Variation showed Darwin hard at work on this rearguard action, using the materials he had at hand... His information was gleaned from the observations of fanciers, breeders, and amateur naturalists, as well as from the treatises of those on the cutting edge of zoology and botany. As hindsight narrows the historical spotlight, it imposes its own sense of hierarchy on the preoccupations of the past. But Darwin was interested in all of these topics, valued all of these sources, and belonged, to a greater or lesser extent, to all of these communities."--from the Introduction. (shrink)

During the early twentieth century, the Bermuda Biological Station for Research (BBSR) functioned as a multipurpose scientific site. Jointly founded by New York University, Harvard University, and the Bermuda Natural History Society, the BBSR created opportunities for a mostly US-based set of practitioners to study animal biology in the field. I argue that mixed gender field stations like the BBSR supported professional advancement in science, while also operating as important places for women and men to experiment with the social and (...) cultural work of identity formation, courtship and marriage, and social critique. Between 1903 and 1930, the BBSR functioned as a laboratory of domesticity, a temporary scientific household in British Bermuda where women and men interacted with established colonial ideologies about science, sex difference, and racial hierarchy in their public and private accounts of doing biology and socializing in the field. Viewing field stations as generative of multiple forms of labor offers a corrective to narratives within the history of biology, in which scientific practices are considered to be the principal forms of output produced by practitioners in the field. Understanding how women and men at the BBSR engaged with (and at times critiqued) the politics of gender and race from the periphery of U.S. networks of biology suggests that we might view field stations as shaping not only academic science but also domestic life and fields as disparate as fiction and the law. (shrink)

Domestic politics is naturally important in ethnic policies. However, in spite of their potency, domestic political factors are not always the most decisive. International organizations have influenced the Latvian and Estonian governments, and at times the Slovak and Romanian governments. However, the ability of different organizational strategies to overcome domestic opposition and thus bring about their desired policy varies widely. In most cases, actors need to use conditionality and aim it at the appropriate decision makers. In spite (...) of their widespread use, efforts that rely solely on persuasion and diplomacy tend only to work when the domestic opposition is initially quite low or when ethnic minorities themselves have some bargaining power in the government.The key policy implication is that domestic factors do not make failure, or success for that matter, a foregone conclusion. For example, ethnic minority representation within the government coalition is not in itself a guarantee of passage of the policy preferences of the minorities. Conversely, the presence of authoritarian-style leadership does not automatically mean a rejection ethnic minority accommodation either, if organizations present their suggestions so that such leaders view it as being in their greater interests to maintain power. Conditionality that targets incentives to fit goals of the leadership can work. External actors are thus not justified in backing off from action based purely on a domestic analysis. (shrink)

The inequitable distribution of domestic and caring labour in different-sex couples has been a longstanding feminist concern. Some have hoped that having both partners at home during the COVID-19 pandemic would usher in a new era of equitable work and caring distributions. Contrary to these hopes, old patterns seem to have persisted. Moreover, studies suggest this inequitable distribution often goes unnoticed by the male partner. This raises two questions. Why do women continue to shoulder a disproportionate amount of (...) housework and childcare despite economic and cultural gains? And why is there a widespread one-sided misrepresentation within different-sex couples about how domestic and caring work is distributed between the two partners? We answer these questions by appealing to affordance perception – the perception of possibilities for action in one's environment. We propose an important gender disparity in the perception of affordances for domestic tasks such as the dishwasher affording emptying, the floor affording sweeping and a mess affording tidying. We argue that this contributes not only to the inequitable distribution of domestic labour but to the frequent invisibility of that labour. We explore the consequences of this hypothesis for resistance and social change. (shrink)

This paper investigates the magnet as a classic “boundary object” of modern technoscientific culture. Equally at home in the nursery, dynamo, measuring instrument and navigational compass, its capricious performance nevertheless persistently eluded the powers of nineteenth century electromagnetic expertise in pursuit of the completely “permanent” magnet. Instead the untamed magnet’s resilient secularity required its makers to draw upon ancient techniques of chemical manipulation, heat treatment and maturation to render it eventually sufficiently stable in behaviour for orderly use in modern engineering. (...) The precise methods for accomplishing this quasi-permanence were typically protected by trade secrecy – until that is Marie Sklodowska Curie’s first research publication opened up this topic for rigorous comparative research in 1898. Nevertheless, over the next quarter century her work in this field was gradually eclipsed by heavily gendered citation practices, just as the futility of attempting to accomplish complete permanency in magnets was eventually established by Sydney Evershed in the 1920s. (shrink)

For their deployment in human societies to be safe, AI agents need to be aligned with value-laden cooperative human life. One way of solving this “problem of value alignment” is to build moral machines. I argue that the goal of building moral machines aims at the wrong kind of ideal, and that instead, we need an approach to value alignment that takes seriously the categorically different cognitive and moral capabilities between human and AI agents, a condition I call deep agential (...) diversity. Domestication is the answer to a similarly structured problem: namely, how to integrate nonhuman animals that lack moral agency safely into human society and align their behavior with human values. Just like nonhuman animals, AI agents lack a genuinely moral agency; and just like nonhuman animals, we might find ways to train them to nevertheless assist us, and live and work among us – to “domesticate” them, in other words. I claim that the domestication approach does well in explaining many of our intuitions and worries about deploying AI agents in our social practices. (shrink)

Some recent works have suggested that the relationship between human beings and domesticated animals might be described as contractual. This paper explores how the idea of such an animal contract might relate to key characteristics of social contract theory, in particular to issues of the change in state from 'nature' to 'culture'; to free consent and irrevocability; and to the benefits and losses to animals which might follow from such a contract. The paper concludes that there are important dissimilarities between (...) a domesticated animal contract and other theories of social contract; and that contract language may be used to legitimate relationships of domination over domesticated animals. (shrink)

Though Foucault was intrigued by the possibilities of radical social transformation, he resolutely resisted the idea that such transformation could escape the effects of power and expressed caution when it came to the question of revolution. In this article we argue that in one particularly influential line of development of Foucault’s work his exemplary caution has been exaggerated in a way that weakens the political aspirations of post-Foucaldian scholarship. The site of this reduction is a complex debate over the (...) role of normativity in Foucaldian research, where it has been claimed that Foucault’s genealogical approach is unable to answer the question ‘ Why fight?’ The terms of this debate (on the neo-Foucaldian side) are limited by a dominant though selective interpretation of Foucault’s analytics of power, where power is understood primarily in terms of government, rather than struggle. In response we suggest that if we reconfigure power-as-government to power-as-war, this adjusts the central concern. ‘ Why fight?’ becomes replaced by the more immediate question, ‘ How fight?’ Without denying the obvious benefits of cautious scholarly work, we argue that a reconfiguration of Foucault’s analytics of power might help Foucaldian research to transcend the self-imposed ethic of political quietism that currently dominates the field. (shrink)

The au pair program in general is still known as a form of cultural exchange program and a good possibility for young women to spend a year abroad, although it has undergone great changes during the last 10 years. This article argues that due to different socio-economic and cultural processes in Western postindustrial societies as well as in the eastern and southern parts of the world the au pair program is becoming a form of domestic work with quite (...) similar working and living conditions to that of live-in migrant domestic workers. This article which is based on two empirical studies on the globalizing au pair business in Eastern and Western Europe as well in the United States looks into the motivations and expectations, the living conditions and interactions between the au pairs and the employer families and contrasts these findings with the discourse of the au pair agencies still advertising au pair as a form of cultural exchange. In doing so the paper can show that it is the still dominant image of au-pair as a cultural exchange program (disarticulating the work aspect) that leaves the young au pair women even more vulnerable to exploitation: ‘big sisters’ are the best domestic servants. This article draws attention to the racialized economization of the private sphere and care work, the inherent traps and exploitative features of this very specific work place. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss two related ideas and cross-reference them, as it were, on the common ground of the Spinozistic text. First, I want to construct a Spinozistic account of domestic violence and a Spinozistic response to such violence. This will involve attempting to explicate the phenomenon (or at least one aspect of it, to be defined) through the terms and conceptual structure of Spinoza's Ethics. Second, I want to discuss a feminist reading (interpretation) of Spinoza, that of (...) Luce Irigaray. The projects work together, as a better Spinozistic account requires a charitable reading of Spinoza to which Irigaray points the way. Irigaray will turn out to be more Spinozistic that Spinoza himself. In addition, the construction of a Spinozistic response to domestic violence will highlight the textual basis of Irigaray’s reading. It is hoped that this will contribute to making Irigaray’s reading accessible to philosophers trained in the analytic tradition. The undercurrent of both discussions will be an attempt to explicate and further what I take to be a shared moral insight in the late twentieth century, namely, that domestic violence, and particularly violence against women as wives and partners, is morally wrong. (shrink)