This is a past event
Sandwiches 12:30 for 12:45 workshop start - please register your place with Andrea Fraser (andrea.fraser@abdn.ac.uk)
Work, family and wellbeing in a digital age: Experimenting with visual methods
HSRU Methodology Workshop, Wednesday 20th January 2016, Room 115 HSB
Natasha Mauthner and Karolina Kazimierczak, Business School, University of Aberdeen
Our presentation draws on a project funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council that explores technology use in work and family practices in the home environment. Our study seeks to address a number of theoretical, methodological and substantive aims: (1) To develop a conceptual (theoretical-methodological) framework for studying work/family/technology practices in the home drawing on performative approaches to social science; (2) To explore how work/family/technology are being (re)made through everyday social and technological practices; (3) To experiment with visual, participatory and ethnographic methods as means of investigating everyday work/family/technology practices. Families (with at least one child under the age of 18 and living in North-East Scotland) were invited to take part in the project as collaborators in the research by involving them in the selection of methods and production of artefacts. These methods include: a video tour of the home; using spaces, objects, photographs, and other artefacts to talk about work, family and technology; researcher- and respondent-regenerated photographs, films, scrap/smash books and diaries; individual and family interviews and conversations; and walk- or go-alongs as ways of participating in ‘A day in the life of …’ our participants. Our discussion will address challenges of working with visual methods including how we can use visual methods in participatory, collaborative and cooperative ways with our families.
About Natasha: I joined the Business School as a Senior Lecturer in 2003 having previously held research posts at the University of Aberdeen’s Arkleton Centre for Rural Development Research (1998-2003) and Health Services Research Unit (1995-1996), and the University of Edinburgh’s Research Unit in Health and Behavioural Change (1996-1998). I was promoted to Reader in 2007, and a Personal Chair in 2013. In 2013 I became an Associate Director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, a consortium centre based at the University of Edinburgh.
I hold an undergraduate degree in the natural sciences from the University of Cambridge (awarded 1989), in which I studied biology, history and philosophy of science, and experimental psychology. I moved into the Social and Political Sciences Faculty at the University of Cambridge for my PhD (awarded 1994), funded by a Medical Research Council studentship. My thesis explored women's experiences of motherhood and was published as The Darkest Days of my Life: Stories of Postpartum Depression (Harvard University Press, 2002). In 1994 I took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education funded by scholarships from the Fulbright Commission, the Wingate Foundation, and the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation.
About Karolina: I have joined the University of Aberdeen Business School in March 2013 as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow, and in February 2014 I have been appointed Lecturer in Management Studies. I have previously held a post of Research Fellow in the School of Medicine and Dentistry, also at the University of Aberdeen. I completed a MA degree in sociology in the Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Warsaw, and undertook a PHD work in the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University.