Care,pay, love: commodification and the spaces of live-in care

This paper investigates uses of the concept of commodification in contemporary analyses of waged care. Drawing on theoretical work on commodification and discourse-analytical research on private live-in care in Switzerland, I explore how Swiss live-in care questions central discussions in the literature. Scholars have focused on the ways in which care is embroiled within market relations and the adverse effects of commodification on the character and quality of care. The paper outlines the two central discussions, identifies important limitations and explores the ways in which Swiss live-care contests their underlying assumptions. Swiss live-in care exhibits intricate processes of waging elder care. Live-in care services are offered and arranged on agency websites while taking place at elderly persons’ private households. Elder care thus becomes entangled in market relations both in virtual spaces and at home. Furthermore, live-in care workers do not distance themselves from their work but actively seek to improve their conditions of work. In so doing, they complicate the assumption that paying for care corrupts caregiving or turns it into a product for sale. Based on this evidence from Swiss live-in care, I propose that a careful use of commodification might best serve feminist interventions.     

Water power and the plan of St Gall

An analysis of the scale used by the designer of the Plan of St Gall allows for no other conclusion than that the mill and mortars shown on this Plan were water driven. Because of the paradigmatic nature of the Plan this means that hydraulically operated mills and mortars were by the makers of the Plan considered to be standard equipment of a Carolingian monastery — a conclusion supported by a wealth of other documentary source material available for this period.The Romans knew the water mill, but made little use of it. Its general adoption and diffusion in Merovingian and Carolingian Europe is in this study attributed to the rise and spread of Benedictine monasticism. It received its primary impetus from the need to provide milled and crushed grain in bulk for communities of considerable size, including a leisure class of men who had to be freed from the normal chores of toiling for life so that their energies could be directed to their primary task: the Work of God (Opus Dei). Water-powered trip hammers were in use in China before the birth of Christ. Their portrayal on the Plan of St Gall suggests that they were introduced in western Europe, not by Marco Polo, as some propose, but in the age of folk migrations or the early Carolingian Period.     

Rethinking the place of emotions in the field through social laboratories

The insights of feminist science and technology studies (STS) into the constructed and situated nature of knowledge have proved crucial to informing feminist geography. Since the rise of emotional geographies, feminist methodologies no longer simply reflect on questions of positionality, partiality, and power relations, but also on the role of emotions in the field. In this article, we argue that a feminist STS perspective has much to offer when thinking about the way emotions are engineered, controlled, and negotiated in research processes. Our engagement with what we call ‘social laboratories’ – i.e., spaces in everyday life where (experimental) research is conducted with human beings – advances debates in feminist geography, as these laboratories crystallize the emotional entanglements feminists encounter in the field. Looking at economic experiments in Ghana and fertility clinics in Mexico, we discuss the difficulties of doing feminist fieldwork in these experimental research spaces. We argue that the constant negotiation of emotions and ethics is crucial to access, assess, and do fieldwork in research settings that do not adhere to feminist ideals, but nevertheless have gendered effects on women's and men's lives. Rethinking ‘the place of emotions in research’ (Bondi 2005, in Emotional Geographies, edited by Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, 231–246, Aldershot: Ashgate) through social laboratories forges instructive links across feminist/emotional geographies and social studies of science.     

"That Food of the Memory which Gives the Clue to Profitable Research": Oral history as a source for local, regional, and family history in the nineteenth and early twentieth century

Numerous local, regional and family historians in the nineteenthand early twentieth century collected oral narrations and conductedinterviews as a form to document information that otherwisemight have never been preserved. Family historians, in particular,not only practiced interviewing relatives for family histories,but also encouraged the practice in how-to-do manuals amongtheir peers. While advocating the practice, family historiansalso reflected about the value of "traditionary evidence" collectedthrough interviews and other means. These reflections by familyhistorians mirrored the discussions about the value of traditionsand memories as historical sources among several professionalhistorians at the time. These reflections were shaped by a modernizedunderstanding of tradition, which combined a reverential approachto the authoritarian element of tradition with a critical approachquestioning the validity of tradition. In this context, oralhistory was both a tool to negotiate the value of traditionand a mirror to the contemporary understanding of tradition.     

Local government reforms in Georgia and their impact on state-society relations

Abstract

This paper studies how the local governance reforms carried out between 1997–2014 shape state-society relations at Georgia’s local level. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I analyze how the reforms shape practices and actors at the local level. Research interviews with state officials at the national and subnational levels and citizens of the Georgian district Marneuli highlight both government rationalities and how people react to them. I argue that the reforms, which have been declared to promote participation and accountability, hardly contribute to bridging the huge gap between state and society, particularly with respect to the case of the Azeri minority in Marneuli. Thus far, the newly introduced formal actors at the local level, the municipalities, lack power. Societal action in absence of the state and interaction with the state via informal networks remains dominant. The study contributes to literature on state-building and transformation in Georgia by shedding light on the often-neglected local level and to the debate on external democracy promotion and policy transfer by empirically studying the effect of a policy transfer.