‘Life in Happy Land’: using virtual space and doing motherhood in Hong Kong

This paper examines how a group of Hong Kong working mothers use the internet in performing and realizing their paid work and domestic role identities. The internet is a technology-enabled space and also what Michel de Certeau calls a ‘practiced place’, where its nature and functions are necessarily determined by the actions and practices of agents. Through participant observation and the analysis of a sample of chatroom and forum messages from a user-driven Hong Kong-based parenting website called Happy Land, I examine the relationship between this virtual space and its users. I find that the website has developed beyond its technology-mediated nature into a community of face-to-face friendships and social and emotional support. In effect, this virtual space plays a role in the social reproduction of the contemporary dual-earner family by enabling working mothers who use the website to perform roles in production and reproduction respectively.     

Academic motherhood in the United Arab Emirates

Balancing the dual roles of mother and academic can be an intensive juggling act. Often, it is mothers who undertake the majority of domestic work in the household, and who tend to experience greatest consequences of this in the workplace; including stress, pressure and less likelihood of promotion. Research indicates that networks of support provided by families and friends can help alleviate these pressures. Academic parents who work outside of their home countries may not have access to these networks to share the work of raising children, but academics who work in the Arabian Gulf have inexpensive domestic help at their dispensation. The ways in which life as an expatriate affects academic mothers both professionally and personally is explored in this study set in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Interview data was gathered from ten expatriate academic mothers. It was found that, similarly to other studies in this field, mothers undertake the vast majority of coordination of domestic work and childcare in their homes, but that having domestic help enables them to enjoy more time with their families. However, there was no clear indication that having extra help at home enabled the women to partake more readily in their academic work. The majority of the women in this study considered that their lives as academic mothers are made easier by residing in the UAE, despite being far from family. This was in part due to ubiquitous domestic help, but also due to perceptions of the UAE providing a culturally family friendly working environment.     

La représentation de l’espace public par la photographie : Une étude de cas dans la région de Montréal (Québec,Canada)

Beyond the material forms that constitute public space, it is subject to representations or images that shape the types of use, forms of appropriation, and general perception that people have of it. Following a centre‐periphery gradient that allows us to compare three zones of the Montreal region (pericentral, periurban, and the northern ring), we analyzed photographs available within cyberspace (from different municipalities and boroughs, local newspapers, and social media) to draw out representations of public space. What can photographs available online tell us about how space is perceived? We have established a typology of images of public space (idyllic nature, urban scene, festive space, empty space, family portrait) that are representative of the overall corpus studied. We have compared these results with a correspondence analysis to clarify the structure of interaction between the variables. The analysis demonstrates that the representations are more differentiated between neighbourhoods than between regions, and that while newspapers and municipalities represent more themes of sociability and family life, social media shows more empty spaces, whether they be monumental spaces, or spaces of daily life.     

‘Home,and not some house’: young people's sensory construction of family relationships in domestic spaces

Drawing on recent work highlighting sensory experience of space, this paper argues that understandings of children's and young people's relationships, including difficult family circumstances, may be enriched by taking greater account of their embodied, sensory experience of the domestic spaces in which these relationships are lived. In a study of young people's family life in the context of parental substance misuse, we found that respondents often made sense of difficult family relationships, at different times and in particular spaces, through sensory experience. They also employed sensory and spatial strategies to construct safe and secure domestic places for themselves.     

Engendered/endangered: women,tuberculosis, and the project of citizenship

The anti-tuberculosis campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an unprecedented display of medical authority and public health purview. With accumulating evidence that the disease disproportionately struck the poor, tuberculosis by the early decades of the century was perceived epidemiologically as embedded in individual practices including hygiene and domestic order. Tuberculosis was in a sense a trope for national degeneration, and as such it became the vehicle for a self-conscious thrust towards national renewal and moral regeneration. This paper uses a feminist Foucauldian framework in its analysis of the anti-tuberculosis campaign. In the case of San Francisco, efforts to combat tuberculosis centred in part on women in their roles as wives and mothers. Women were the gatekeepers of health because they were responsible for keeping the home clean and bacillus free. Not only did this focus become a medical legitimization of women's domestic duties, but it also became a discourse of citizenship. Whether explicitly or implicitly, physicians concentrated their attention on white middle class women in their messages of health maintenance. Within sanatoria, a primary agenda of tuberculosis treatment was the inculcation of middle class behaviour into the working class patients. The anti-tuberculosis campaign was thus a part of the early-twentieth-century project of nationhood where citizenship was largely calculated through the lens of class and race.     

Exploring subject positions and multiple temporalities through an Iranian migrant mother's family photograph albums

In this article, I draw on a research study of one Iranian migrant mother's generation of selves through her material configuration of her personal photograph albums and through our verbal reading of her photographs. The research engages in a visual-material feminist ethnographic approach, and is informed by the work of Gillian Rose and the understanding that family photographs are a means by which women negotiate subject positions. In this article, I discuss an unexpected finding of my research, the significance of multiple temporalities in a migrant mother's production of selves. The photo album practices of the participant mother of this study, ‘Parvin’, depart from the common social convention of mothers arranging their photograph albums to chart family growth following the model of milestones occurring over linear developmental time. Parvin does not limit herself to linear developmental time, but rather she mixes up photographs in her post-migration family albums to generate multiple temporalities woven together by an enveloping ‘mixed’ time. Drawing on both Julia Kristeva and Homi Bhaba's theories of temporality and the subject, I suggest that Parvin produces subject positions for self and family through a continual interweaving of a multitude of pasts into the present and through a subsuming of milestones within cyclical family time. Further, I suggest that through her generation of multiple temporalities, Parvin produces the subject position of ‘accommodating mother’. Finally, I highlight the potential afforded by considering the temporal and the spatial together in studies of migrant identity.     

Rethinking Law and Violence: The Domestic Violence (Prevention) Bill in India, 2002

This essay focuses on the controversy generated by recent proposed legislation on domestic violence in India. An alternative draft bill on domestic violence prepared by the feminist legal NGO, the Lawyers’ Collective, and supported by women's groups nationally, includes a demand that victims of domestic violence (usually wives) be permitted by law to continue to occupy the domestic home, a demand that the Government bill has refused to include. This demand is theoretically informed by a politics of space. Bodies and space are linked, to the extent that each is an abstraction without the concept of the other to ground it. The feminist legal proposal challenges property‐as‐absolute‐(male) ownership by conceptualising the household as, instead, shared domestic space. The proposal does not dissimulate common sense – it is conscious of being radical, in part at least because it demystifies the ‘domestic’ as an ideological construct and offers it instead realistically and minimally as simply an alternative to destitution. The recognition that there are no support structures for dependant women outside the family (such as, for example, state‐sponsored welfare institutions), so that destitution can be both sudden and real for women of any class and circumstances, has led to the conceptualisation of a law that formulates a right to shared space as one that makes no claim to shared ownership – while at the same time questioning the other's absolute property right. Despite the limited nature of the claim it makes, this proposal has been viewed as threatening by Indian law‐makers.     

The mealtimes that bind? Filipina au pairs in Danish families

Since 2000, more than 17,000 young Filipinas have received temporary residence in Denmark as au pairs. Officially, au pair placement is a cultural exchange program; however, it is also a domestic work arrangement where au pairs conduct domestic labor in return for food, lodging and allowance. The au pair is expected to live as part of a host family, who in turn should offer a protective space for the young foreigner. Nevertheless, au pairs and hosts often find this challenging. Focusing on mealtimes, this article examines how culturally diverse practices of family relations influence au pairs' participation in their host families. The study employs anthropological perspectives on kinship to explore the forms of closeness and distance that govern au pair–host relations, leading to a discussion about how au pairs and hosts approach themes such as hierarchy, independence and family inclusion in different ways. This adds to the ambiguous positions au pairs are offered as they are to involve themselves in gendered tasks that ‘makes the family’, while they also are expected to liberate themselves from the host family sociality. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among au pairs and hosts in Denmark, as well as with the au pairs' families in the Philippines, the article suggests that studies of migrant domestic workers should embrace family practices in the receiving as well as the sending society when attempting to merge the themes of family and work relations.     

Domesticfication of urban space? Mothering and fathering while on family leave in the inner city of Helsinki

Cities have been described as masculine, but simultaneously emancipatory for women giving them the possibility to experiment with new identities. Women have gained access to the masculine sphere through working-life and financial independence. The new interest among families to live in inner cities has been interpreted as a way particularly for mothers to combine work with family life. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study, this paper investigates mothering and fathering practices on family leave in Helsinki, Finland. It explores how parenting is incorporated into the mothers’ and fathers’ urban self-identity, and argues that while parenting in the city traditional gender roles are blurred. The paper proposes the term domesticfication to describe how urban middle class mothering and fathering is being inscribed in Nordic contemporary urban space.     

Space and Hegemony at La Scala, 1776–1850s

This article focuses on the significance of space in the display of hegemonic power in the La Scala opera house in the years 1776–1850s. More specifically, it traces the changes in the use of space from Napoleon’s attempt to “democratise” La Scala by attacking the display of hegemonic hierarchy and subverting the status quo, to the Habsburgs’ attempt to “restore” a display of hegemonic rule. The analysis of primary findings demonstrates that the space of the opera house was reshaped not only physically through renovation but also by imposing rules and structuring attendance during performances. The social significance of La Scala’s theatrical space is also explored by identifying the means the Habsburg authorities used to control it as part of their response to the rise of the Risorgimento. The article thus traces the historical shifts in the political functions of space in La Scala from its early role of displaying aristocratic authority through the period of Napoleonic democratisation and finally the Hapsburgs’ restoration politics of surveillance.     

Domestic destinies: colonial spatialities,Australian film and feminist cultural memory work

Elsa and Charles Chauvel's 1955 film Jedda was the first Australian feature film to cast Aboriginal actors in lead roles. The film was also unusual in the context of Australian film of the time for its rural domestic setting. Because the film explored the experiences of its lead character – Jedda – as an Aboriginal child adopted by a white woman, it is also one of the few films of the period to deal with colonial legacies in its attention to policies and practices of assimilation. The twin processes of racialisation and gendering of space in Jedda have been responded to by Tracey Moffatt in her surrealist short film Night Cries. This article uses the notion of intimate geographies to examine the production of relationships of power within domestic space that both films explore. The temporal and spatial practices deployed by the female figures within each film make visible a set of possible transformations of, as well as continuities within, enduring colonial power relations. Moffatt's retelling and respatialising of the Jedda narrative, however, is ultimately understood as a specifically feminist practice of cultural memory work, suggesting that struggles over memory are also struggles over place.     

Crowded kitchens: the ‘democratisation’ of domesticity?

Building on previous work concerning the gendered nature of domestic space, this article focuses on the kitchen as a key site in which gendered roles and responsibilities are experienced and contested. As men have begun to engage more frequently in cooking and other domestic practices (albeit selectively and often on their own terms), this article argues that kitchens have become ‘crowded’ spaces for women. Drawing on evidence from focus groups, interviews and ethnographic observation of kitchen practices in South Yorkshire (UK), we suggest that men's entry into the kitchen has facilitated the expression of a more diverse range of masculine subjectivities, while also creating new anxieties for women. Specifically, our evidence suggests that family meals may be experienced as a site of domestic conflict as well as a celebration of family life; that convenience and shortcuts can be embraced by women without incurring feelings of guilt and imperfection; that cooking is being embraced as a lifestyle choice by an increasing numbers of men who use it as an opportunity to demonstrate competence and skill, while women are more pragmatic; and that kitchens may be experienced as ‘uncanny’ spaces by women as men increasingly assert their presence in this domain. Our analysis confirms that while the relationship between domestic practices and gendered subjectivities is changing, this does not amount to a fundamental ‘democratisation’ of domesticity with significantly greater equality between men and women.     

Class,Place, and Gender: Contested Industrial and Domestic Space in Kohler,Wisconsin, USA, 1920–1960

The Kohler company, a family‐owned plumbing manufactory in Wisconsin, USA, known for the ‘garden industrial village’ erected for its workers during the 1910s, managed class relations through a gendered spatial arrangement of its model town. In the 1930s and 1950s, unionists striking at the plant responded by articulating their class alliances within and outside the town in spatial terms that revised the meaning of the place. In the process, the Kohler unions also necessarily refigured domestic space in ways that challenged the company's mapping of domesticity in the 1930s, but they drew back from such challenges in the 1950s.     

Living above the shop: home, business, and family in the English "Industrial Revolution"

This article explores the living arrangements and familial relations of small business households in northwest English towns between 1760 and 1820. Focusing on evidence from inventories and personal writing, it examines the homes that such households lived and worked in and the ways in which space was ordered and used: indicating that access to particular spaces was determined by status. This study suggests both the continuance of the "household family" into the nineteenth century (rather than its more modern, "nuclear" variant) and the existence of keenly felt gradations of status within households making it likely that the constitution of "the family" differed according to one's place in the domestic hierarchy.     

Children's Understanding of Aerial Photographs

As aerial photographs are widely used in geography education, it is important to know how children's understanding of these representations develops through the school years. We review research that has addressed children's understanding of the content of aerial photographs, and we describe a series of studies in which children used information from aerial photographs to carry out spatial tasks in a large space. We demonstrate that using an aerial photograph can be an aid to subsequently using a map, and we discuss the educational applications of the research with aerial photographs.     

Missing the point: globalization, deterritorialization and the space of the world

This article provides a critique of a dominant strand of the literature on globalization – that which suggests it can be understood as deterritorialization. It argues that suggestions that we have moved away from territorial understandings of politics fail to conceptually elaborate the notion of territory itself. Drawing parallels between mathematics and politics in the seventeenth century, the paper claims that the notion of territory is dependent on a particular way of grasping space as calculable. This way of understanding space makes bounded territories possible, but also underlies new global configurations. In other words globalization is a reconfiguration of existing understandings rather than the radical break some suggest. The article concludes by making some comments on this reconfiguration, and suggesting that further historical and conceptual work on territory is necessary before it can be thought to be superseded.     

Mother Knows Best? Intergenerational Notions of Fashion and Identity

This paper presents research into intergenerational notions of fashion and identity. It uses examples drawn from the case study interviews with mother–daughter family groups and the participatory method of draw and write with the daughters to illustrate the influences on young girls' fashion choices in the key spaces of childhood: the home, school and community. The findings reveal that young girls both identify and disidentify with fashions and identities available to them. Their mothers play a key role in allowing and restricting certain outfits in certain spaces, with particular distinction being drawn between public and private space. This paper contributes to children's geographies by focusing on intergenerational relationships between mothers and their daughters in relation to theories of identity formation. In doing so this paper highlights how both intergenerational relationships and the girls' identities are mediated through fashion, consumption, peers and the home, school and community spaces.     

Mothers,communities and the scale of difference

Only recently did geographic concern turn to why and how, and when and where political identities are reproduced but, as yet, our understanding of the political relations between families and communities remains understudied. This lack of attention is attributable, in part, to the complexities of families and communities but, this aside, all societies regulate reproduction and there are always claims for legitimization of particular views of family values and community relations. With this paper, I argue that highlighting the social construction of scale suggests ways that the social imaginary of a domestic myth is spatially embedded within a nurturing local community. I outline some recent feminist discussion of local childcare cultures and critique of 'the public sphere' prior to raising scale as a way to open up static versions of justice and difference. Arguments in the paper that relate to the social construction of scale are illustrated by examples from a study of the impact of a new child and a residential move on mothers in San Diego. I argue that although the birth of a child highlights important questions that relate to responsibility, self-identity and notions of family, community and society, it is from within a politically structured notion of scale that many of the constraints and contexts of childcare arise. This paper focuses specifically on negotiating childcare as a basis of resistance through day-to-day contestations at multiple scales.