Converging Crises and the Cost of Exclusion: Unveiling the Invisible Women of Sri Lanka's Economy

In Sri Lanka, womens labor force participation has never exceeded 35% in over three decades. As of 2022, the country was ranked 110 out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forums Gender Gap Index. The gaps in womens participation in the formal economy alongside womens limited political empowerment are two leading causes for the country to be lagging in such global gender equality indicators. At a large cost to the economy, the existence of archaic gender norms that promulgate womens unpaid care work often exclude women from the formal labor force. This paper dissects the socio-economic and socio-political factors that lead to the invisibility of women in Sri Lankas economy, while seeking to understand how such underlying causes have been aggravated within the precarity of the post-pandemic context. It is important, now more than ever, to recognize the invisibility of women in Sri Lankas formal economy, while bringing about a transformative vision with a multi-pronged approach to address existing gaps and challenges. With reference to key principles of feminist economics, including the theoretical foundations of Claudia Goldin, Nancy Folbre, and Diane Elson, among others, the paper will make a case for inclusivity and intersectionality in policy recommendations aimed at encouraging womens entry, active engagement, contribution, and retention in Sri Lankas economy. The paper reaches a conclusion that when women lead, participate, and benefit equally in all aspects of life, societies and economies will thrive, thereby contributing to sustainable development and inclusive economic growth.

Emergent time-spaces of working from home: Lessons from pandemic geographies

The COVID-19 pandemic and consequent health regulations compelled office-based knowledge workers to work from home (WFH) en masse. Government and employer directives to WFH disrupted common norms of commuting to city office spaces and reshaped the geographies of office-based knowledge work, with potentially lasting implications. Pandemic-induced cohabitation of work-space and home-space saw more workers navigating the performance of paid labour in the home to produce new relational geographies of home, work, and worker. This paper provides a window on the lived experiences of the sizeable cohort of office-based knowledge workers displaced from Sydney's CBD to undertake WFH in the Illawarra region during the pandemic. We explore the unfolding pandemic geographies of work and home by drawing together feminist economic geography and geographies of home literatures. Our analysis reveals the emergent and variegated time-spaces of WFH that emerged as the rhythms and routines of WFH shaped the home and vice versa. The analysis also reveals the differentiated agency of embodied workers to orchestrate emergent configurations of WFH, shaped by gender and by the socio-materialities of home shaped by size, tenure, and life-cycle stage. We conclude by drawing out important lines of analysis for further research as "hybrid work" evidently becomes entrenched post-COVID.

Transforming work: Feminist perspectives on the covid-19 crisis and recovery

This paper examines social and economic disparities surrounding the GOV] D-19 pandemic within the context of neoliberal capitalism. The gendered, racialized, and other social inequities that were evident during this health crisis are linked to shifting work conditions and activities of labor and capital within the workplace and at the household level. The analysis draws from feminist economic geography to examine the social dimensions, spatial dynamics, and economic processes that are highlighted by changes in work and social relations during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion demonstrates how economic upheavals such as those that occurred alongside the pandemic are embedded in social reproduction, with particular emphasis on the precarity of labor and contested household dynamics. Furthermore, ongoing crises in neoliberal capitalism provide the conditions for social movements that challenge inequities and oppressive conditions for labor. The conclusion offers strategies for future directions of work that support inclusive and transformative ideals of feminist economic geography. © 2023, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. All rights reserved.

Engineering care in pandemic technogovernance: The politics of care in China and South Korea's COVID-19 tracking apps

This article critically examines South Korea and China's COVID-19 tracking apps by bridging surveillance studies with feminist technoscience's understanding of the "politics of care". Conducting critical readings of the apps and textual analysis of discursive materials, we demonstrate how the ideological, relational, and material practices of the apps strategically deployed "care" to normalize a particular form of pandemic technogovernance in these two countries. In the ideological dimension, media and state discourse utilized a combination of vilifying and nationalist rhetoric that framed one's acquiescence to surveillance as a demonstration of national belonging. Meanwhile, the apps also performed ambivalent roles in facilitating essential care services and mobilizing self-tracking activities, which contributed to the manufacturing of pseudonormality in these societies. In the end, we argue that the Chinese and South Korean governments managed to frame their aggressive surveillance infrastructure during COVID-19 as a form of paternalistic care by finessing the blurred boundaries between care and control. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of New Media & Society is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Feminist Governance in the European Parliament: The Political Struggle over the Inclusion of Gender in the EU's COVID-19 Response

The research objective of this article is to analyze the European Parliament's response to the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of feminist governance. Feminist governance can either play a role in ensuring the inclusion of a gender perspective in crisis responses, or, quite the opposite, crises may weaken or sideline feminist governance. The empirical analysis focuses on two aspects of feminist governance: (1) a dedicated gender equality body and (2) gender mainstreaming. In addition to assessing the effectiveness of feminist governance, the analysis sheds light on the political struggles behind the policy positions. The article argues that feminist governance in the European Parliament was successful in inserting a gender perspective into the COVID-19 response. The article pinpoints the effects of the achievements of the European Parliament's Women's Rights and Gender Equality Committee and gender mainstreaming on gendering the pandemic crisis response.

#ButNotMaternity: Analysing Instagram posts of reproductive politics under pandemic crisis

In this article, we perform a thematic analysis of a sample of 70 #ButNotMaternity Instagram posts. #ButNotMaternity is a hashtag that emerged in the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 pandemic whereby the public, healthcare workers and campaigners shared experiences and concerns about pandemic maternity care restrictions and their disproportionate disadvantages for pregnant women. In the article, we analyse four themes that emerged from our thematic analysis – Individual experiences, loneliness and overcoming adversity, Voicing anger and absurdity, Mobilising anger and calls to action and Coordinated activism. Thinking about #ButNotMaternity in the context of ‘freelance feminism', our article has a twofold aim. First, we explore the concept of ‘freelance feminism' through #ButNotMaternity, asking to what extent this campaign draws from freelance tactics. Second, we use the hashtag to illuminate maternity inequality and modes of resistance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through our thematic analysis, we argue that while ‘freelance feminism' might be becoming hegemonic as a dominant mode of organising feminist activism and resistance, inspired by Malik et al. (2020), we also showcase how creative campaigns are potential places where collective action, structural critique and resistance may emerge. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of European Journal of Cultural Studies is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

The case for online education: success factors in an MSW program through a critical feminist lens

Social work has seen a dramatic rise in online MSW programs;however, there is a paucity of research surrounding programmatic reviews. Given the dearth of supporting evidence, data were collected from online students at the University of Tennessee, College of Social Work surrounding several noted key measures for success demonstrating the compatibility between online programming and social work education. These key measures include student demographics, knowledge, student perceptions, alumni perceptions, and faculty perceptions. Data were also collected regarding the university's COVID−19 response, perceptions surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion work, and the use of a dedicated advisor to support online students. Results were viewed through a critical feminist lens and revealed that this online MSW program either did meet or exceeded success factors described in the literature. Results also identified new success factors that include alumni outcomes and the importance of dedicated advisors for online students. Implications for online teaching, administration, and research are discussed. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Social Work Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Doing feminist longitudinal research across the COVID‐19 crisis: Unheard impacts on researchers and garment workers in Cambodia

This paper is based on the ReFashion study which used mixed‐method longitudinal research to track and amplify the experiences and coping mechanisms of 200 women garment workers in Cambodia as they navigated the financial repercussions of the COVID‐19 pandemic. It develops the idea and practice of ‘feminist longitudinal research' (FLR) through re‐centring the too often marginalised knowledges and ways of knowing of Cambodian researchers and research participants. Hearing and learning from their experiences reveal the labours and care‐work involved in the ‘doing' of longitudinal research during a time of extraordinary crisis, and the potential for feminist consciousness raising and solidarity that can arise both within and beyond the confines of an academic study. The paper advocates for geographers and other social scientists to go beyond technically‐framed issues of participant ‘attrition' and ‘retention' in longitudinal studies to think more creatively and critically about the process of longitudinal research and what it means for those taking part in it. FLR not only evidences the temporally contingent gendered impacts of a phenomenon, but can be distinguished by its intentionality and/or potential to challenge the patriarchal status quo, both in the lives of researchers and participants. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Area is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Notes from the portal: Feminist educational practices in/post- pandemic art and design classrooms

This chapter addresses post-secondary arts educators' need to apply intersectional feminist educational pedagogies and methodologies while navigating during and post-COVID-19. By deconstructing oppressive pre-pandemic educational ideologies within the liminal portal of COVID-19, students and faculty can embrace this new state of change. Feminist educational practices can steady educators in this transitory time as it historically values and utilizes unease, flexibility, multiplicity, and self-reflection. Specific classroom approaches and examples highlight how and why feminist practices can create inner awareness, community, and transformational change. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021. All rights reserved.

Reimagining care discourses through a feminist ethics of care: analysing Ireland?s Citizens? Assembly on Gender Equality

The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore stark gendered care inequalities and the inadequacy of care provision across states. This article presents a feminist-ethics-of-care-informed discourse analysis of the representation of care that emerged at the Irish Citizens' Assembly on Gender Equality - an innovative government-created citizen deliberation process. It identifies how care was represented as a 'problem' of both gender inequality and the market, and uncovers key silences, which ignored care as a universal need of all citizens and the significance of care networks to sustaining caring. We propose the necessity of ethics-of-care-based understandings to address post-pandemic care challenges.

My PhD Saved My Sanity and My Life

In this chapter, I explore my experience with psychological stress during the first year of my doctoral candidature that resulted from the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and global Black Lives Matter protests. As a qualitative researcher, I draw on my own autoethnographic vignettes (Ellis. The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. AltaMira Press, 2004) to provide an account of the personal challenges which may be generalizable to minoritised doctoral students during crisis situations. I use the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping (Lazarus and Folkman. Stress, appraisal and coping. Springer, 1984) to identify with and understand the stressors I faced as an insider—a Black, female doctoral student—and share the adaptive coping strategies that I used to be able to focus on my PhD. As a result, I prove the claim that the PhD became my saviour. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.

Navigating livelihoods in the midst of COVID-19: experiences of women in informal cross-border trading in Accra, Ghana

Studies have indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on businesses, and that female-led businesses have been more negatively affected than male-led ones because of their fragility, unpredictability, and lack of state support. One such group that has suffered because of the official closing of borders during the pandemic is informal cross-border traders. Using the empowerment framework and semi-structured interview guide, this study highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the livelihoods of Ghanaian women in informal cross-border trading. The findings show that the pandemic affected participants' livelihoods as well as their sociocultural and psychological lives creating a sense of dis-empowerment. Women in informal cross-border trading had however, used a variety of strategies to get themselves through those difficult times, including switching suppliers, using illegal routes to get their products into the country, and utilizing various social networks created to facilitate their businesses. The authors recommend that women in informal cross-border trading are provided with financial and institutional support as well as bettering their access to communication tools to streamline their commercial dealings. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of South African Geographical Journal is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Imagining Feminist Academic Collaborations Beyond Exceptionalized Crises

In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, universities and colleges across the United States began to unroll plans to shift residential teaching to remote or virtual learning environments. As feminist scholars primarily located in the US academy, we are invested in mapping longer genealogies of crises in the settler-colonial US academy, delineating how racist, imperial, and hierarchical structures that are replicated and reinstated by the academy formulate continuous and ongoing discursive and material violence towards racialized, classed, and gendered minorities. By centering what we refer to as feminist modalities of care tthat center collective, communal, and transnational feminist interventions, this article challenges the imperatives of academic success and survival beyond the logics of emergency and crisis. We explore the interlinked transnational discourses of emergency and crisis, mapping their travels and circulations in local and global academic networks in ways that reproduce systemic inequalities and the politics of value that inform power hierarchies within the academy. Energized by a refusal to normalize crises, this essay is invested in showing how feminist interventions, here explored under three modalities, including research and teaching collaborations and coalitions that take place inside and beyond the academy and against its competitive logics, can challenge the imperatives of academic survival premised on notions of individualistic care, productivity, and worth.

Decolonizing Time, Knowledge, and Disability on the Tenure Clock

We consider the tenure clock's enmeshment in the neoliberal academy's settler colonial and ableist modes of organizing labor and valuing knowledge, modes in turn informed by heteropatriarchal spatiotemporal logics. The tenure clock in the settler academy relies on labor performed by those positioned outside of its time—such as those in temporary or semi-temporary positions, staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Our motivation in tracing these logics and formulating feminist strategies to undo them stems directly from observing "faculty with disabilities" at our university struggling against the tenure clock;as well as seemingly abled women faculty, faculty of color, and contingent faculty, who have strained against the academic clock and ended up debilitated in the process. We articulate ways in which more collaborative understandings of university culture and knowledge production might serve to challenge the peculiar temporalities produced by the tenure clock. Listening and learning at the intersections of feminist, Indigenous, and disability studies scholarship teaches us to work toward imagining a different approach to tenure, and from there, the way to a different academy.

How to Deal with a Bully: Debility, Non-Production, and Radical Care

This article examines how resistance toward capitalism's temporal bullying is performed in contemporary art and activism. It addresses the relationship between creativity, institutions, and empowerment. Building on the conceptual work of Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović (1947–2016), the article explores several aesthetic presentations of resistive temporalities we identify as non-production. The case studies of non-production herein marshaled affirm a performance of resistance that centers discussion of radicality in self-consciously interdependent care networks, ostensibly available to all disabled and nondisabled individuals. This care ethic claps back at the idea of self-optimization and fiduciary endurance amidst economic regimes of exploitation as virtuous. In the place of 'wellness,' this article affirms new directions in care and mutual aid, as premised on queer, crip, and feminist portrayals of disability praxis and pedagogy.

The place of care in a large Belgian modernist complex

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of care, as well as the extent to which it is undervalued in Western societies, emphasising the instrumentalization and neoliberal logic that care is subject to. Since the 1970s, various feminist theorists have developed ethics of care. This evolving and controversial ethic has become a critical tool in sociology, philosophy, economics, and public policy analysis but is still underdeveloped in architecture and urban planning. This paper adopts the feminist ethic of care to analyse and criticise the evolution of a modernist social housing complex. The Cité de Droixhe was built in the 1950s to offer various facilities, 2000 rental social housing units, and vast green areas in Liège (Belgium). However, since its creation, it has undergone major transformations including the demolition of nearly 1000 units. In this qualitative inductive research, an interdisciplinary approach between architecture and social sciences was proposed, combining archival research, semi-structured interviews, and participatory observations. The ethic of care is mobilised both as a research and methodological posture and as an object of analysis. The data collected led to questioning the place of care in the evolution of the large complex under different themes: the facilitation of reproductive work, the valorisation of care professions, and the attention paid to proximity and the daily life of the neighbourhood inhabitants. By highlighting the integration and loss of care within the different transformations of the housing estate, this study shows the importance of reasserting the value of care and making it a collective responsibility, contributing to drawing perspectives for a more feminist, equal, and caring city.

Gender Equality and Inclusive Growth

This chapter examines growth as a gendered process, distinguishing the spheres of production, social reproduction and finance. It discusses how inclusion in growth can be harmful rather than enhancing well-being, and notes that economic growth frequently has adverse side effects, such as depletion of human and natural resources. It considers what a gender-equitable inclusive growth process would look like and discusses gender-equitable strategies for recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. It concludes by highlighting the need for new forms of economic growth, focusing on public investment in social as well as physical infrastructure, and on enjoyment of decent work not mere participation in the labour force. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

COVID-19 and the Urgency of the Interdisciplines in the Corporate University

As US universities and colleges increasingly identify with neoliberal discourses of students as human capital and higher education as a direct investment in earning potential, the liberal arts and humanistic fields of study are valued only for their capacity to train students in "multicultural communication." The minimization of their intellectual project marks these fields as susceptible to terminal budget cuts, a long-standing trend intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some humanists have responded to this devaluation by defending the humanities as sites that produce knowledge for knowledge's sake. Such reflections defend the older venerable humanistic traditions often at the expense of newer and lesser humanities, namely, Black studies and feminist studies. In a recent Forbes article, the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni argues that core language and humanities courses (e.g. writing, US history) should be protected, but "expensive fluff" courses should be eliminated as a cost-cutting measure. This "fluff" in fact represents the only significant epistemic challenge to the unreflective valuation of the Enlightenment project that birthed both scientific and humanistic traditions of study. This article analyzes recent COVID-related medical research to demonstrate how Black and feminist studies reject the assumptions of the Western canon in both humanities and STEM courses. Investing in these fields does not merely invest in students' communication skills, but in their ability to critically engage their home disciplines, fields of work, and political systems. Rather than defunding the interdisciplines, we urge institutions to model undergraduate studies more broadly in line with these fields.

Narratives of Gendered and Racialized Carework: Feminist Faculty of Color Organizing During the Pandemic

Inspired by feminist narrative and the Latin American tradition of testimonio, this paper is grounded in the lived experiences of the four authors as academics, mothers, and organizers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on women of color feminisms and theorizing anti-racist feminist understandings of motherhood as a political identity, we examine how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated challenges faced by parenting and caregiving faculty, especially those positioned at the intersection of multiple structural vulnerabilities. The COVID-19 tipping point presented both unsustainable challenges for parenting and caregiving faculty and opportunities for collective support and organizing as parents and caregivers. We participated in collective organizing with other academic parents and caregivers, most of whom are mothers, as we shared our struggles and organized to respond to changing conditions. We examine the ways in which undervalued, gendered, and racialized labor in the workplace merged with unpaid gendered labor in the home, highlighting how the pandemic brought caregivers-those providing care through their undervalued paid labor and unpaid household labor-to a crisis point. We also highlight the ways in which the organizing that began around parenting and caregiving faculty, who have been disproportionately overburdened during the pandemic, was in addition to and in the context of ongoing activism around other forms of structural violence. Finally, we conclude with a call for structural change at the institutional level to address the exacerbated racialized and gendered equity gap caused by the pandemic.

COVID as Glitch: (Re)Visioning and (Re)Crafting a Feminist Future

Many scholars and commentators argue that the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the ways in which feminism has failed women. While women, particularly in marginalized communities, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, I contend that we should approach it as an opportunity to reenvision, and even shape, what feminist futures can look like. The pandemic provoked an increased interest in crafting, both because of quarantine conditions and the need for many requiring masks to slow viral transmission. The COVID-19 pandemic, then, serves as the tipping point by which craft can and does function as resistive and transformative feminist work with the potential to "glitch" oppressive systems. Building on the research of Shira Chess, Tricia Hersey, and especially Legacy Russell's vision of "Glitch Feminism," I argue that craft is a vital way to reconfigure our theory and practice about what constitutes appropriate work, play, and rest. Reenvisioned, craft and other forms of making are embodied, resistive actions anchored in an ethic of care for self and others, thereby offering us practical examples of "glitch feminism" at a key point in time. The pandemic is not only a tipping point, but also a springboard for glitching the system in an effort to create more just and equitable futures for all.