Describe and analyse an aspect of your life which has been affected by COVID-19, using what you have learned in this unit.

Homes Week 4

Outline of today’s lectures

• Setting the political scene of the home – tracing it to the 1950s housewife

• The home – some key things to think about

• Ethnography – important for your first assignment.

Homes in Australia

Before and during 2WW

• Working class distinct to middle / upper class in regards to ‘the home’

• Working class in paid employment and undertake home duties. But home duties were unmechanised drudgery. Kitchens were primitive, food preservation difficult and laundry, oh laundry!

• No sewage in suburbs, poor sewage in city

• Middle-class and upper-class had domestic help

• However, the need for workers in factories meant that working class and middle class women faced some commonalities – they had to do the work themselves – and also severe shortage of housing

= Housewives with a common project

Women united as housewives

• As housewives, women united to mobilise.

• To protest against shortages of food and other amenities.

• They united to press claims for proper – a better – organisation of and recognition of the space of everyday life.

• Appropriate housing was a central preoccupation in this protest (shortage of 90,000 homes in Sydney alone.

• Australians were ‘home hungry’

The meaning of home

• One thing is to have a home, but the meaning of home is something different.

• ‘a home of one’s own came to mean something which is not fully achieved without ownership of dwelling’ (Alan and Crow)

• Not a flat

• Not a rental

Forces:

• The political rhetoric of the time shaped the meaning

• So did the growing significance of consumer culture

Politics

Policy makers believed in the national importance of ensuring that every family owned and lived in a home of their own. Here Chairman of Housing Commission.

‘the social value of home ownership cannot be over-emphasised: it is justly claimed that it encourages and develops initiative, self-reliance thrift,

responsible citizenship and other good qualities which strengthen the moral fibre of the nation. To a community it gives stability, and to the owner it gives

a constant sense of security, pride and wellbeing’

‘ Homes and hearts are still being broken for the lack of a place to live’

‘a home is the backbone of national stability’

Consumerism • But also part of a new, post-war society.

A modern society.

• Advertisements for commodities to fill that house and make it a home evoked the comforts and delights of a ‘home of your own’.

• So stuff that was modern!

• But also part of modern thinking – planning, designing, thinking about what kind of life one would wish to have.

Homes for men, homes for women

• Menzies set up a an opposition for between the world of work (the modern life) and the homes as a place to withdraw….. For men.

• For women: housewives in the home, not as agentic as before the war, but as solidarity in which women should withdraw to be spoken for. So the modern housewife became ‘traditional’.

• For men: men could go out in the modern world, reluctantly but necessary, to retreat to the home. Men are modern.

•Home is a complex and multilayered concept.

• “Home is a place/site, a set of feelings/cultural meanings, and the relations between the two”.

• It at once refers to a physical site or place where we live and at the same time imbued with feelings of belonging, desire, intimacy as well as fear, violence and alienation (Blunt and Dowling 2006:2-3).

Home is the archetypal (exemplary) setting for everyday life: 1. Routinized activities – cycle of repetition and ritualised 2. Habitual – follows a rhythm 3. Spatial ordering that appears ordinary but shapes our social

relationships Rita Felski (1999)

Family social relations and kinship interaction Gender relations Culture of domesticity Rationalization and the domestic world Class Race and Ethnicity

Understanding human behaviour

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Interpretivists insist that humans are different from other objects of scientific study and therefore require methodologies that are attentive to those differences

> ‘Human life is studied as it is experienced and accomplished by the very people involved in its production’ (Prus, 1996: 9)

Interpretivist emphasis

(intersubjective, interactive, active process, negotiation and change)

Key tenets of interpretivism

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• Human experience is produced by people in interaction with others

• ‘Reality and knowledge are constructed and reproduced through communication, interaction, and practice’ (Tracy, 2012: 40)

• ‘concerned with the meanings people attach to their situations and they ways they go about constructing their activities in conjunction with others’ (Prus, 1996: 9)

• Culture is symbolically constructed and reconstructed

• People studying people

Ethnography

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Key features:

•In-depth and immersive fieldwork

•Getting close to the people being studied

•Local meanings and interpretations

•Cultural context

•“Being there” quality in ethnographic writing

•Insights rather than predictions

(see Prasad, 2005: chapter 6)

The way in which sociologists and/or anthropologists explore people’s social worlds. How everyday life makes sense to people?

Two Components of Ethnographic Research

1. Participant observation

2. Recording and documenting what one sees and

hear in a particular social setting

Emerson, Fretz and Shaw (1995) Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Symbolic Interactionism

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Herbert Blumer (above), a student of the famous sociologist George Herbert Mead (below)

Three fundamental assumptions about relationship between meaning and action:

1. humans act towards objects on the basis of the meaning the object holds for them

2. the meaning of those objects arises out of social interactions

3. these meanings aren’t fixed but are constantly modified through processes of interpretation

(see Prasad, 2005: chapter 2)

See clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFQIIM8IRZU

Symbolic interactionism

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Key features:

•Micro and local worlds

•Meaning and identity produced through social interaction

•The role of the self in the construction of reality

•Multiple and changing meanings

•Participants’ standpoint/perspective

Identity and the self

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•The human capacity to ‘see’ oneself in social situations is the key to sense making and reality construction

•The “looking glass self”: people develop the capacity to see themselves as others see them

•Role-taking: humans decide how to act and behave in particular social situations based on the roles they are expected to play and that others play

•Different social situations call forth some identities over others

(Prasad, 2005: 20)

George Mead by ludilozezanje

George Mead by Andjelka Djukic