Marja Vehviläinen
Dept. of Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland
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Published in: Proceedings of the Sustaining Everyday Life Conference
Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 38:15, p. 87-87
Published: 2010-11-05
ISBN:
ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)
The paper describes the research design of a new research Gendered agency and Technically mediated nature and presents its first preliminary results. The research aims; firstly; to analyse the shaping of gendered agency in the everyday practices and in institutional texts related to these everyday practices from the perspective of sustaining everyday life; by focusing on food and information and communication technology (ICT). In the second phase; it further aims to search for connections between the gendered agencies in the localities of selected global production chains of food and ICT.
In the research design; the practices of local people; non-governmental organisations (NGO) and local producers of food and ICT will be examined; similarly to institutional texts such as (national and trans-national) governmental policies; NGO strategies and guidelines; public newspaper and Internet discussions; and codes of conduct of the companies involved in the production of food and ICT. The research methods include theme and focus group interviews and text analysis. Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography is used in the analysis. The connection between sustainable everyday practices in the two cases are analysed through the conception of technology-mediated nature. The nature in everyday practices; present in the materiality of food and ICT; which participates in the environmental changes; is of a technologically mediated kind. The research draws on research on gendered practices; agency and citizenship; institutional textualities; including technology as a textuality; and Science and Technology Studies tracing the mutual shaping of society; technology and nature (e.g. Donna Haraway; John Law; Annemarie Mol; Ingunn Moser).
The preliminary results of the paper focus on the institutional texts related to gendered agency in everyday practices. Governmental policies (e.g. the Finnish Information Society Strategy and its section Sustainable information society); NGO strategies (e.g. WWF ICT strategy) and guidelines and texts of a daily Finnish newspaper (2008 and 2009) on food and ICT will be analysed by asking how they define gendered agency in the context of sustaining everyday life.
