ABSTRACT
The article reflects on moving workspaces into homes during and after the Covid-19-induced lockdown. In our qualitative research in India, we investigate the processes of place-making and redrawing of boundaries between paid and unpaid care work. Through interviews and autoethnographic reflections, we analyse the process of new workspace making. We examine the erasing of the home from the workspace where historical hierarchies of gender and caste mediated the (re) organising of work boundaries between paid knowledge and unpaid care work. The study is based in a context where social and physical infrastructure for paid knowledge work could not be assumed to be available in homes. The paper contributes to the literature on place-making with stories from a new context. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Culture & Organization 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.)
ABSTRACT
To understand how COVID-19's stay-at-home orders impacted youths' sexual and social development, we conducted five virtual focus groups (n=34) with adolescent girls', trans', and non-binary youths' aged 16-19 between April-June 2021 in the GTA. We queried experiences of home, privacy, and sexual wellbeing during Canada's third wave. Auto-generated zoom transcripts were coded using an inductive framework with NVivo. Field notes and team discussions on the coded data informed the analysis. This paper explores how sexual wellbeing during the pandemic is practiced in relation to, dependent upon, and negotiated at home. Using intersectionality theory and embodiment theory, this research analyzes how youth's diverse identities shape their understandings and experiences of sexual wellbeing. We found youth needed spaces where they were not only unseen, but importantly, unheard. We argue sound as an important piece of boundary-work that reveals the way youth construct space during precarious times. Youth primarily negotiated sonic privacy through (a) sound-proofing, (b) sound warnings and (c) "silent reassurance", a term we coined to describe the precursor of silence from other household members in order for youth to feel safe enough to practice sexual wellbeing. We found that white youth cited the bedroom as the best space for sexual wellbeing practices, but BIPOC youth felt the bedroom was only their best available option and still found they had to negotiate privacy. Attending to intersectionality theory, we expand on McRobbie and Garber's (1976) bedroom culture concept and widen Hernes' (2004) concept of physical, social and mental boundary-work to include sound as a fourth type, which straddles amongst them. This research shows how privacy, gender and sexual identities were negotiated at home in times of extreme uncertainty, highlighting how implications of home as a 'place' during the pandemic, constructs sexual wellbeing. Mapping how and where youth practice embodied sexual wellbeing exposes the ways that private and public understandings of identity relate to sexuality and geographies of home. We understand the home as a complex space that can not only determine sexual wellbeing, but where health promoting boundaries can be negotiated. We conclude with suggestions for supporting adolescent sexual wellbeing, inside and outside the home, during and after COVID-19.
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The article presents the results of a qualitative study of symbolic boundaries in social work during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed and interpreted in the narrative interviews with practitioners and service users in three Russian cities. The authors consider features of symbolic boundaries in relationships developing in the everyday life of social work under the influence of the pandemic challenges, when contradictions in everyday practice become more complicated, while risks and vulnerability of communication with the clients increase. It is demonstrated that the construction of symbolic boundaries becomes a practical task that social service workers solve in their work routine. The life world of social workers is considered in the triangle of views, experience, and environmental conditions. Social workers' responses to the main challenges during the pandemic are considered: the growing barriers in contact and remote work;inconsistency of organizational innovations;new risks in the face of growing needs and vulnerability of clients;burnout risks, emotion and stress management. It is shown that changes in symbolic boundaries, leading to a violation of professional identity integrity, require special efforts in boundary work. According to the results of the interview analysis, several types of boundary work are identified: crystallization, closure, suffering, compromise, violation, creativity. © 2022, Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
With the Covid-19 outbreak the request for useful knowledge to inform policy measures rapidly escalated. On the verge of infodemics, vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy theories have been individuated as major threats to society which need rapid responses. In this context of uncertainty, literature reviews are a great way to retrieve useful knowledge from the large and dispersed amount of knowledge produced in the last two years. Nevertheless, the structural process of reviewing is not a neutral process of evidence retrieval and can lead to the deformation of initial knowledge through synthesis and simplification. Furthermore, the boundary work in the review process, if not properly critically assessed, can polarize the distinction between scientists and non-experts. Drawing from STS literature on boundary work and scientific ignorance production, this article critically analyzes 12 literature reviews regarding the nexus between conspiracy theory and vaccine hesitancy. The results highlight how the rhetorical construction of the ignorance areas leads to the neglected arguments in the form of an implicit elitist discourse which reproduce the deficit model of policy intervention through the preference for the psychological explanation. Furthermore, the uncritical assumption of the rightfulness of the evidence retrieval leads to polarization in the construction of otherness and depoliticization of agency. The implications are discussed, along with examples of more creative and emancipative reviews.
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This article introduces and critically reflects upon the development of CiviAct – a multi-agency project that partners six anti-racist activist organisations and two universities in the North of England. CiviAct seeks to support and realise the benefits of youth and community-led civic action. It does this by: (i) financially resourcing the work of six anti-racist activist organisations;(ii) connecting those organisations with each other to create new opportunities for co-learning;and (iii) exploring new models of community-led university partnership. Based on insights derived from a 12-month development period (conducted throughout the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic) we examine points of tension, manifested at the intersections between community partners, universities and project funders. Extending Strier’s discussion of university-community partnerships (UCP) as ‘fields of paradox’, we outline the complexities of collaborative working within a UCP that seeks to adhere to the priorities of anti-racism and an ethic of love. In doing so this article surfaces the burden of boundary work undertaken by both academic partners seeking to prioritise knowledge and anti-racist practices beyond the academy, and community activists, who are expected to conform with institutional standards that may have little relevance to their practice. The article contributes a series of reflections that may be of use to other activist researchers engaged in UCP. © The Author(s) 2022.
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The lockdowns due to Covid-19 led to a sharp increase in hospitalizations of adolescents for severe anorexia. Though the clinical profile was typical, the investment of hospitalization and treatment was quite unusual. The investment of a space of one's own enabled a resumption of boundary-work, restoring the differentiation between fantasy and reality, allowing a process of subjectal appropriation to resume, and putting at a distance the traumatic invasion and the oral regression provoked by the pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (French) Les confinements lies au Covid-19 ont entraine une forte augmentation des hospitalisations pour anorexie severe chez des adolescents. Si le tableau clinique etait typique, l'investissement de l'hospitalisation et des soins etait tres inhabituel. L'investissement d'un espace a soi, a permis la reprise d'un travail de frontiere entrainant la restauration de la differenciation realite/fantasme, la reprise d'un processus d'appropriation subjectale et la mise a distance de l'effraction traumatique et la regression orale induites par la pandemie. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (Spanish) Los confinamientos vinculados al covid-19 han ocasionado una fuerte aumentacion de hospitalizaciones por anorexia severa de adolescentes. Si el cuadro clinico era tipico, el manejo de la hospitalizacion y de la cura resulto muy inhabitual. La ocupacion de un espacio para si mismo, ha permitido de retomar un trabajo de frontera permitiendo asi, la restauracion de la diferenciacion realidad/fantasia pero tambien de relanzar el proceso de apropiacion subjetiva y la distanciacion de la efraccion traumatica y la regresion oral que fue inducida por la pandemia. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
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Purpose>This paper investigates the role of boundary objects and boundary work in the integration of risk management (RM) and performance management (PM) systems. In particular, the paper combines theoretical insights with an empirical focus to examine how shared contexts are created through the boundary work performed by key actors across knowledge boundaries.Design/methodology/approach>The paper develops an exploratory qualitative case study from a local government context. The methodology is based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews.Findings>Boundary objects can act as knowledge integration mechanisms, allowing key actors to understand the meanings and uses of RM and PM practices. The paper shows how collaborative versus competitive boundary work exerted by key actors can explain the creation of shared contexts leading to integration between RM and PM.Originality/value>The results contribute to the debate about the integration of RM with other managerial systems. Differently from previous research, the integration theme is addressed in the present work by looking specifically to the integration between RM and PM. In doing so, the role of both boundary objects and the boundary work performed by relevant actors to demarcate their legitimacy and autonomy over preferred practices is portrayed.
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The rapid transition to online teaching in response to Covid-19 presented unprecedented challenges for academic communities. Staff had vastly different experiences of engaging with technology, and these experiences are shaped by factors including gender, (dis)ability, socio-economic resources and caring responsibilities. We report findings from an intersectional interview examination of how 412 staff in a large London-based university adapted to teaching and researching from home at the beginning of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we construct grounded theory around the divisibility of the body, and the conflicts arising from the need to span home and work-life, our findings illustrate how patterns of inequity for women academics converge to construct ways of managing the boundary work of home and work with different degrees of successes. We document how management support and/ or existing expertise were vital to enable women academics to overcome obstacles to equitable work.)
ABSTRACT
In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak and governmental lockdowns changed the everyday lives of families with children worldwide. Due to remote work recommendations and the closing of school premises and childcare centers, work-family boundaries became blurred in many families. In this study, we examine the possibly gendered boundary work practices among Finnish parents during the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020 by asking, how do parents perceive the blurring of work-family boundaries? What kind of boundary work practices did families develop to manage their work and family roles, and were these practices gendered and how? Boundary practices are analyzed by combining theories of doing boundaries and gender theories in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and applying them to survey data. The results revealed that during lockdown, both spatial and temporal boundaries blurred or partly disappeared, and boundary practices developed by families were highly gendered. Especially in families where childcare practices had been gendered already before the lockdown, it was predominantly mothers, who shouldered the main responsibility of increased childcare and struggled to manage their work duties. Hence, families had varying means to cope with blurring boundaries based on their ability to switch to remote work, but also on their work-family practices before the pandemic.
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During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe and North America, news outlets ran a series of stories reporting on "do-it-yourself" (DIY) coronavirus responses that were created and implemented by citizens. This news discourse exemplifies and can illuminate wider shifts in the roles of citizens in science, as individuals outside professional science institutions are becoming more actively involved in scientific knowledge production than before, while the epistemic authority of professional "expert" scientists has been increasingly contested. This paper focuses on DIY citizenship, taking news discourses on citizens' DIY coronavirus responses as a lens to explore wider questions around the changing ways in which the roles of different public health actors are delineated and represented under conditions of significant social and epistemic uncertainty. We aim to shed new light on the nature of-and the role of the news media in mediating-the credibility contests and boundary work that is currently at play around DIY citizenship. We do so by focusing on four discourses: polarized discourses around DIY face masks and hand sanitisers; delineation of credible from incredible interventions and actors around DIY coronavirus treatments and tests; delineation of professional science from "fringe" citizen science; and discourses declaring that "we're all in this together." We conclude that making sense of these discourses requires a thorough appreciation of the context in which they emerged. Our analysis reveals how emancipatory accounts of DIY citizenship can mask structural inequalities underlying who can and is expected to "do-it-themselves," and how.
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This paper re-examines relations between proximity, distance and care, focusing on practices of 'distancing' in the cystic fibrosis (CF) clinic. While care is often thought of in terms of proximity, literature on 'landscapes of care' highlights the potential for 'care at a distance'. We extend this literature to examine practices of social distancing, specifically the act of maintaining a 'space between' bodies in communal areas - a practice currently brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the CF clinic as a case study, we examine how distancing can be understood as an emplaced practice of care, shaped by - and shaping - architectures and materialities in particular contexts. We explore these issues drawing on data from Pathways, practices and architectures: containing antimicrobial resistance in the cystic fibrosis clinic, a UK AHRC funded study (AH/R002037/1) examining practices in three cystic fibrosis clinics using visual and ethnographic methods. Clinical staff practices of maintaining distancing were often regarded by patients as 'care-ful', part of personalised 'care in place', embroiling a wider care assemblage including ancillary staff, materialities and architectures. Patients also actively participate in distancing as an 'ethic of care', using strategies of 'holding back' and 'looking out' in confined spaces. Yet our findings also highlight tensions between care, proximity and distance in circulation spaces and communal areas, including transient spaces where the assemblage of care breaks down. The article concludes by considering wider implications for healthcare design and for the COVID-19 pandemic.