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- Convenors:
-
Patrícia Alves de Matos
(CRIA-ISCTE - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa)
Andreas Streinzer (University of St. Gallen)
Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki (University of Helsinki)
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- Discussant:
-
Victoria Goddard
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- Aula Magna-Bergsmannen
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel invites papers mobilizing critical feminist theory to examine the normative foundations of the politics and economics of austerity regimes.
Long Abstract:
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the political and economic project of austerity has been reinforced as the normative avenue towards fiscal consolidation and economic recovery across various national contexts and geographies. The variegated emergence of national austerity regimes has increased households' livelihood needs and material insecurity, while also intensifying patterns of social polarization and economic inequality. These phenomena entail effects of structural patterns of austerity, which mainly target the redistributive and care institutions of the state. As an effect, austerity has a larger impact on those who depend relatively more on those institutions - unsurprisingly, these effects are rather unequal along the lines of class, race and gender.
This panel aims, primarily, to bring together feminist-based analyses of the politics and economics of austerity regimes. Drawing on feminist theory, this panel's contributions will critically examine: 1) the contingent nature of economic crises and the gendered normative foundations of austerity narratives and discourses; 2) the differentiated impact of austerity regimes and the reconfiguration of hierarchies of privilege and subordination across the divides of gender, class and race; 3) the mutually constitutive relationship between processes of state restructuring and forms of gendered embodiment of austerity policies, and, 4) the gendered underpinnings of forms of collective resistance and protest to the politics of austerity.
This panel will mobilize and explore critical feminist theory to expand the theorization of the economic and political project of austerity, addressing in particular the often-concealed links between gender regimes and the contested nature of economic orthodoxies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the historical articulation and mutual constitution of austerity as an economic policy regime and austerity as a grassroots ethics of reproduction.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the historical articulation and mutual constitution of austerity as an economic policy regime and austerity as a grassroots ethics of reproduction.
I draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2016 in Setúbal, a post-industrial Portuguese city, among working-class households confronting the reconfiguration of their means of livelihood reproduction, arising from the implementation of severe austerity policies. I explore how household provisioning pursuits and individual livelihood strategies to confront mass unemployment, labour precarization and welfare retrenchment are shaped by historically embodied gendered dispositions, past experiential knowledges and moralities of hope tied to cultural patterns of obligation, dependency, mutual reciprocity and responsibility along the lines of kinship, generation and gender. I highlight in particular the re-familization of care among working-class households and the growing significance of devalued feminized skills in the private and public spheres.
Building upon critical feminist economics and anthropological substantivist approaches to the economy, I emphasize the constitutive role of past legacies of embodied and moral forms of austerity grassroots ethics of reproduction as a way of accessing the divergent temporalities and spatial variability of austerity economic regimes, its contingent national outcomes and (re)emergent forms of inequality and dispossession.
Paper short abstract:
The lives of trcuk driver's in India is governed by constant mobility through multiple social systems. The present paper analyses how shifting masculinity helps the truckers negotiate everyday life and leads to the reproduction of the Orthodoxy.
Paper long abstract:
The Indian economy is being talked of in the same breath as other more mature economies, however, the country's logistics supply chain that transports its economic produce, remains utterly unorganised and convoluted. Unlike the US and Europe where hauling a freight carrier over long distances is seen as skilled employment, India's large population, high poverty and insipid law enforcement mean driving a truck is for those who do not find employment elsewhere. This often forces the long distance truck drivers away from their homes and on to the truck for long hauls of 8-10 month periods. It also brings into its realm boys as young as the age of 13-15 and at times even younger, who join as cleaners under a driver and continue living on the truck with the driver to learn the ticks of the trade (and eventually become drivers). The master-apprentice relation is no less regimented than a prison or an army boot camp, especially in relation to power dynamics. The present research analyses the lives of truck drivers for their relational hierarchy within the transport industry, with the state, as well as back home. It situates social relations with reference to the ideas of hegemonic and protest masculinity, its reproduction and perpetuation in everyday life and looks at the idea of shifting masculinity with respect to space and time in maintaining the Orthodoxy.
Paper short abstract:
This paper summarizes recent evidence from the economic crisis that show the effect it had on women in Croatia. It identifies the impact of the economic crisis on women in comparison to men, and examines how the economic crisis affected the emancipatory potential of women in Croatia.
Paper long abstract:
The disastrous financial crisis, which swept a big portion of the globe from 2008 to 2015, had a multidimensional impact. The frequently addressed consequences are the economic ones, while not much attention was given to its social aspect, namely the effect the crisis had on women. This article summarizes recent evidence from the economic crisis that show the effect it had on women in Croatia. Ten years on, the impact of the global crisis is still being felt in this newest member-state of the EU in terms of gender issues. The ratification of the Istanbul Convention - an upgraded, more detailed successor of CEDAW - caused a major social and political upheaval. This research has two main aims. The first is to identify the impact of the global economic crisis on women in comparison to men, especially its effects on unemployment, poverty, and political representation from 2008 until 2015. The second is to examine how the economic crisis affected the emancipatory potential of women in Croatia.
Paper short abstract:
Through the life history of a housewife, this paper focuses on depoliticization of feminist claims, which are relevant to everyday lives of women living in the context of state-sponsored empowerment in Southeast Turkey.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I look at the ways in which women in Turkey make sense of and utilize the opportunities and narratives offered to them by state-sponsored development. More specifically, I aim to contextualize depoliticization of the empowerment rhetoric that contains transnational feminist claims of participatory democracy, equality, and justice, which are highly relevant to everyday lives of women in the locality of the Southeast Anatolia. For this aim, I rely on narratives of one particular housewife, which I derived from the interviews I conducted during a one-year ethnographic research in the region. The condensed biography and multiple belongings of the chosen research partner enable me to depart from one person's perspective to engage with and connect to broader political questions including 1) the unequal citizenship in relation to diverse ethnic belongings, 2) the centrality of waged work for gender equality for the women's movement on the national level, 3) the social policies of the central government that heavily rely on women's (un)paid domestic labour, and 4) the intimate politics of the ruling party that falls back upon an existing state repertoire and defines the ideal Kurdish woman as a housewife, who can spend her time to improve her feminine skills to serve her family in the best way possible without developing sympathy to the Kurdish movement dominant in the region.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographical case, I uphold the value of feminist theory not only for apprehending the unequal consequences of the present crisis of social reproduction for women, but for analyzing its global nature, as well as the embodied human agencies which are its product and challenge it.
Paper long abstract:
This paper challenges dominant narrations of "the Crisis" in terms of lack of investments and unemployment. Drawing upon the embodied experiences of austerity and the reflections of dispossessed women from Vélez-Málaga (SE Spain), it argues that we are in front of a further readjustment of capital/labour relations which has crystallized in a crisis of social reproduction and has overburdened particularly working-class women. Cut-backs, over-taxation and increasing male unemployment have intensified their (paid and non-paid) work-day; while stressing their responsibility of housework and care work, in a context of increasing charges because of the shirking of responsibility by the state (e.g. dismantling of public services as Health System). This process of privatization, feminization and re-housification of social reproduction (Ezquerra, 2012) is embodied in the exhausted and struggling bodies and spirits of middle age women "working death tired" in order to provide a worth living for their families and maintaining the hope of a better future. Likewise re-socializing and des-alienating social reproduction is at the core of young adult women's (uncommon) vindicated forms of social struggle.
Drawing on my ethnography, I uphold the value of feminist theory not only for apprehending the unequal consequences of the present crisis of social reproduction for women, but for analyzing its global nature, as well as the embodied experiences and human agencies which are both its product and put it into question.
Paper short abstract:
In research about emergent adulthood of young women and men, one main finding is that the opportunities on the way to autonomy differ according to social origin, gender and education. I discuss the intersection and salience of these categories for women in relevant studies in Switzerland.
Paper long abstract:
How young women and men (15-24 years) manage emerging adulthood socially and economically in times of global capitalism is of worldwide concern. Global capitalism simultaneously and in very specific ways facilitates and limits (international) mobility, sharpens or reduces precarious economic situations and social inequality. The opportunities of young women and men on their way to autonomy differ individually according to social and regional origin; gender and education. They also depend on the education and social security systems of a state, its labor market and its capacity to regulate it. How are these general statements, found in many studies on transition, represented in social science studies on youth in Switzerland? This question needs elucidation before I can conduct an ethnographic study in a transnational, urban neighborhood. How do social and regional origin, gender and education on the one hand; education and social security system or labor market on the other hand condition the trajectories of youth? What chances and challenges do youth with different positionality meet? In Switzerland, social science research (education sociology, migration studies, social work studies or sociological studies) on the transition to adulthood sets the focus mainly on the economic transitions of disadvantaged young women and men with a migration background, the integration of unemployed young women and men or economic socialization of youth. For this presentation, I will use an intersectional approach and put women center stage. With this perspective, I analyze some salient research results in Switzerland on resources and dependencies in emerging female adulthood.