Flip your classroom: Reach every student in every class every day

(2003). Flexible learning in a digital world – experiences and expectations. Innovations in Education and Teaching International: Vol. 40, Book Reviews, pp. 310-314.

Flexible learning in a digital world – experiences and expectations

The dilemma of domestic work in postapartheid South Africa should not be viewed as an isolated phenomenon of marginal interest to sociologists. The globalization of paid domestic work means that hundreds of thousands of women from poor countries in the global South are living in a form of servitude, as they work for low wages, under abusive conditions in wealthier countries as part of a ‘‘global care chain.’’ In this brilliant study, Shireen Ally demonstrates how these relations of servitude have resisted change in ‘‘the national care chain’’ in contemporary South Africa. Post-apartheid South Africa is a contradictory place. On the one hand there is deepening inequality, poverty and widespread collective violence in the form of xenophobic attacks against foreigners and violent protests about the failure of the local state to deliver substantive social citizenship in the shape of access to housing, jobs, water, electricity and sanitation. On the other hand the new constitution embodies a powerful vision of participatory democracy, new institutions to protect human rights, and the redrafting of apartheid labor legislation included one of the most extensive and expansive efforts anywhere in the world to recognize paid domestic work as a form of employment. These state efforts to modernize and professionalize domestic work as a form of employment were remarkable. Existing labor legislation was extended inter alia to include a landmark national minimum wage, mandatory formal contracts of employment, extensive leave, formal registration, as well as access to unemployment insurance benefits, which Ally points out was a ‘‘world first.’’ However, a central thesis of the book is that the outcome has been disempowering for domestic workers. With analytical depth and sensitivity, Ally demonstrates the persistence of servitude. Paradoxically, the book suggests that domestic workers’ lives have not changed much under democracy and many feel that ‘‘things are worse than before.’’ While they are the beneficiaries of ‘‘an extensive democratic statecraft’’ attempting to turn ‘‘servants’’ into workers with the same rights as other workers, their social position as migrant ‘‘mother-workers,’’ often caring for their employers’ children at the expense of their own, has not been affected. Ally explains this paradox in the tension between the forms of formal power deployed by the post-apartheid state in its efforts to protect these ‘‘vulnerable’’ workers and the forms of informal power generated by the intimate nature of their work. This involves a ‘‘contradictory collision of depersonalizing rights and personalizing intimacy’’ (p. 187). In the absence of state protection under apartheid, South African domestic workers had elaborate ‘‘practices of power’’ rooted in their highly personalized relationships with employers, as a way to control their work. ‘‘In the absence of labor rights defining leave provisions, sitting down every morning with tea and talking to one’s employer about her problems became a way to ensure an extended Christmas vacation’’ (p. 13). These informal mechanisms for negotiating working conditions have continued and demonstrate these women’s creativity and assertiveness. Another paradox Ally identifies in this highly original exploration is that the political inclusion of domestic workers has ironically depoliticized them. Making domestic workers the subjects of rights through their construction as ‘‘vulnerable’’ defined their political status as incapacitated and inert. With the state positioning itself as the representative and protector of domestic workers’ interests, they were demobilized, their unions displaced and weakened and their voices muted. Thus Ally argues that ‘‘the attempt to turn ‘servants’ into workers through liberal democratic rights, rather

Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America

The implementation of physical distancing measures and lockdowns across the globe to control the spread of COVID-19 has led to the home becoming a focal point of exercise and fitness activities for...

Pandemic fitness assemblages: The sociomaterialities and affective dimensions of exercising at home during the COVID-19 crisis

This intervention advances glitches as epistemological vectors for apprehending and engaging the significance of digitally-mediated spatialities that appear nonperformative against normative scripts of urban computational paradigms. Drawing on two strands of contemporary thinking about glitches as systemic design features of digital systems and as generative fissures within them, we mobilize a queer orientation that stays with the generative tensions of urban spatialities that present as idiosyncratic and as interrupting. We mobilize this epistemological approach through illustrative U.S. based examples of seemingly abandoned shared e-bikes, performatively ‘ugly’ homes, and wilful property dilapidation wrought through the registers of desire and aesthetics. In so doing, we show how glitch empistemologies render visible how the technocapitalist manufacturing of normative spatial desires for particular kinds of urban sociospatialities and aesthetic visual signatures are both secured and interrupted on digitally-mediated and -mediatized terrains. Glitch epistemologies establish the significance of small-scale disorientations in digital urban mediations, engaging these nonperformativities and non-computes as unexceptional openings onto everyday possibilities for politics in computational cities.

https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221075714

Glitch epistemologies for computational cities

Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate o...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1329878X20961568

Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the COVID-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies

This paper adds to recent discussions of young people’s porn literacy and argues that researchers must address porn users’ engagements with, and understandings of, different porn genres and practices. As part of a larger interdisciplinary project which consisted of a series of systematic reviews of literature on the relationship between pornography use and healthy sexual development, we reviewed articles addressing the relationship between pornography use and literacy. We found few articles that present empirical data to discuss porn literacies, and those we found commonly frame young people’s porn literacy as their ability to critically read porn as negative and comprising ‘unrealistic’ portrayals of sex. This model of porn literacy tends to be heteronormative, where only conservative ideals of ‘good’, coupled, and vanilla sex are deemed ‘realistic’. Data from the literature we reviewed shows that young people make sophisticated distinctions between different kinds of pornography, some of which could be called ‘realistic’, as per do-it-yourself and amateur porn. We extend this discussion to young people’s understandings of ‘authenticity’ across their broader digital and social media practices. From this focus, we propose the need to incorporate young people’s existing porn literacies into future education and research approaches. This includes engaging with their understandings and experiences of porn genres, digital media practice, and representations of authenticity.

/pdf/reading-for-realness-porn-literacies-digital-media-and-young-mq582u3oto.pdf

Reading for Realness: Porn Literacies, Digital Media, and Young People

Major changes to home life and work practices globally have been brought about by the COVID-19 crisis. Periods of strict restrictions placed on people’s movements outside their homes, aimed at curb...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/13548565211030848

The COVID digital home assemblage: Transforming the home into a work space during the crisis

The value of fiction for public sociology and within qualitative research is well established. However, questions about process remain. Drawing from three contemporary projects – a novel, a series ...

Writing sociological fiction

The rise of crowdsourced and participatory digital platforms which aim to make visible the experiences of otherwise marginalised people are significant within the broader landscape of digitally med...

Ash Watson

Papers

Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the COVID-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies

Reading for Realness: Porn Literacies, Digital Media, and Young People

The COVID digital home assemblage: Transforming the home into a work space during the crisis

Writing sociological fiction

Queering the Map: Stories of love, loss and (be)longing within a digital cartographic archive