Help for housewives: domestic service and the reconstruction of domesticity in Britain, 1940-50

This article argues that examining the debates over domestic science that took place in the late 1940s can produce insights into the ways in which gender, class and domesticity were inextricably linked and understood. The article focuses on three specific examples: a social survey of domestic service produced privately, a government report on the domestic organization of private households, and a radio debate broadcast by the BBC Home Service     

gender,migration and the ambiguous enterprise of professionalizing domestic service: the case of vocational training for the unemployed in France

This article aims to contribute to current debates about international migration and the restructuring of the Welfare state in Europe, by highlighting the specificities of the French context. It draws on ethnographic research about the training of unemployed migrant women as domestic workers in Paris to address the ambiguities that underlie the enterprise of professionalizing domestic service. The qualitative data presented in the article show how essentialist ideologies operate within training practices of domestic workers. They reveal that the training practices challenge the association of the job with domesticity, but fail to acknowledge the racist organization of domestic service. Hence, they endorse essentialist constructions of cultural difference. Training practices are also consistent with current neoliberal policies and discourses on unemployment and ‘employability’, as they are framed by the normative reference to an entrepreneurial model of society. Finally, the data suggest that migrant women's experience of domestic service as a prospective job and their scepticism about the enterprise of professionalizing radically differ from the instructors’ views.     

At the Back of the Class. At the Front of The Class: Experiences as Aboriginal Student and Aboriginal Teacher

This is a personal account of an Aboriginal woman who went through the education system in Australia to obtain finally her law degree.Aboriginal people experience many hurdles in the education system. Many Aboriginal children feel alienated within the legal system which until recently focused on a colonial history of Australia, ignoring the experiences, indeed the presence, of indigenous people in Australia.The Australian government had a policy of not educating Aboriginal people past the age of 14. The author was one of the first generation that could go straight from high school to university. She speaks of the debt she feels towards the generations of her people that fought for her right to access to higher education.The author went on to become the first Aboriginal person to be accepted into Harvard Law School which brought different personal challenges and allowed for reflection on comparisons of the sensitivity towards race in both education systems.When the author returned to Australia, she took a position teaching at the University of New South Wales. She had to come to terms with working within a system that she had felt alienated within as a student. Her position at the front of the class has created a sense of empowerment that she can pass on to her Aboriginal and female students.     

Global mobilities,local predicaments: globalization and the critical imagination

Analysing some of the key discourses of ‘globalization’ and their relationship to global/local processes of gender, the article makes a distinction between the ‘global’ and ‘globalization’, such that the latter is seen as only one dimension of the ‘global’. Globalization is understood as comprising complex and contradictory phenomena with diverse and differential impact across distinct categories of people, localities, regions and hemispheres. Hence, the notion of being straightforwardly ‘for’ or ‘against’ globalization is problematized. The essay explores media response to a major global event – the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC on 11 September – in terms of the ‘agenda setting’ role of the US's ‘mainstream’ national television news coverage in the aftermath of the first two weeks. A subsequent peace rally, the ‘International Day Against War and Racism’, held in Washington DC, is analysed as the site for the emergence of a new oppositional political subject in the current context. The article underscores the importance of addressing ‘intersectionality’ to a critical imagination.     

发挥社区服务优势完善社区服务工作--对广州市天河区社区服务发展的调查报告

广州市天河区社区服务具有明显的社会福利属性、较高的社会化水平、较高的专业化程度等特点.完善天河区的社区服务,可以从调整社区服务发展目标、确立社区发展模式、提高社区服务整合程度等方面入手.     

The gendered time politics of globalization: of shadowlands and elusive justice

This paper seeks to bring a time perspective to the discourses of globalization and development. It first connects prominent recent gender-neutral discourses of globalization with highly gendered analyses of development, bringing together institutional–structural analyses with contextual and experiential data. It places alongside each other ‘First World’ perspectives and analyses of the changing conditions of people in the ‘developing’ world who are at the receiving end of globalized markets, and the international politics of aid. To date, neither of these fields of expertise has made explicit the underpinning time politics of globalization. Naturalized as status quo and global norm these temporal relations form the deep structure of globalization and its neo-colonialist agenda. The paper uses feminist epistemology to explicate the taken-for-granted time politics of globalization and time-based ontology to render visible the gender politics of globalization. The combined conceptual force makes connections where few exist at present, maps complex processes and traces naturalized relations. It offers not a new or better theory of… but an approach to globalization that makes transparent hitherto opaque relations of power and it identifies openings for change, resistance and alternative political practice.     

关于我院科研工作的若干问题

科研工作在高等教育中具有重要地位。把教学与科研结合起来 ,以科研推动和促进教学水平的提高 ,已成为当今世界高校的共同趋势。长期以来 ,我院始终坚持和贯彻“以马克思主义、毛泽东思想和邓小平理论为指导 ,以教学为中心 ,深入调查研究 ,积极开展科研 ,为深化教学改革、提高教学质量服务 ,为工会的现实工作服务”这一科研工作的指导思想 ,在不断深化教学改革的过程中 ,坚持把加强科研工作作为重点和关键 ,深化科研体制改革 ,建立具有自身特色的科研体制和科研管理体制 ,使科研工作取得了可喜的成绩。一、我院科研开展情况(一 )取得的成绩…     

当前和谐劳动关系构建中的新视角 --《工会法》实施中若干问题的反思

劳动关系的和谐是构建社会主义和谐社会的重要内容.将劳动关系纳入法治化轨道运行是确保劳动关系和谐的关键.对于协调劳动关系重要法律的<工会法>在实施中出现的工会组建和职工入会的各种误区,以及在平等协商、签订集体合同和职工民主管理制度推行中遇到的困惑,从立法和执法的层面进行反思,提出对策,乃是当前劳动关系协调中的重要课题.     

社区服务的产业化--珠海市唐家湾社区服务初探

中国社区服务在需要中产生,在困境中发展,风风雨雨走过了10多年的历程.珠海市唐家湾社区发展的经验教训,让人看到了中国社区服务的崭新模式和希望,对于今后推动中国社区服务的发展,具有重要的理论意义和现实意义.     

Negotiating the boundaries of the domestic: British socialist women and the politics of consumption

Abstract

Historically, socialist strategy has privileged production over consumption, yet consumption was a space in which socialist women could have constructed a woman-focused politics. This article discusses the possibility of a politics of consumption where consumption provided the focus for overt political demands around which consumer-centred tactics were developed. It explores an attempt by British socialist women to create a politics of consumption around shopping for food. Although Margaretta Hicks and the National Women's Council of the British Socialist Party ultimately failed to reorder socialist priorities, they did try to build a politics of consumption in the years 1912 to 1915. Their significance was to imagine one way in which the border between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘political’ could be dissolved so that consumption and production could be recognised as complementary and equally necessary spheres of socialist politics.     

The domestic ideal and the mobilization of womanpower in world war II

This paper begins with an examination of domestic ideal in Britain at the beginning of World War II. The war saw a great increase in the number of women in the paid workforce, lead to the temporary dispersal of many families, and saw the State taking over some domestic labour, by the establishment of British Restaurants and of nurseries. Thus there was an attack on some elements of the domestic ideal, as women were encouraged to join the workforce and to cut down on housework.However, the domestic ideal was not abandoned during the war years. Rather it structured and influenced the development of labour policies to bring more women into the workforce. The way in which some women were brought into the workforce, and some were allowed to choose to remain out, and the way in which some women were designated as ‘mobile’ and others as ‘immobile’ workers, was very much mediated by domestic ideology. Through the development of and application of the womanpower policies, the state can be seen virtually prescribing what constitutes a ‘home’, and what should be the roles of people within it.The womanpower policies were also mediated by class and have been shown to have had a different impact upon women according to their economic circumstances.