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Rebecca Bowers

Bio: Rebecca Bowers is an academic researcher from London School of Economics and Political Science. The author has contributed to research in topics: Intersectionality & Public policy. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 8 publications receiving 50 citations.

Papers
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Dissertation
01 Sep 2019
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the lives and labour of women and their families working in construction, focusing on a frequently overlooked demographic of co-contributors to Bengaluru's growth.
Abstract: Bengaluru, the capital of Karnataka state in southern India, has undergone rapid transformation in recent decades, from ‘Pensioner’s paradise’ to ‘The city of the future’. At present, its kinetic landscape reflects the competing aspirations of an array of global investors, entrepreneurs, local politicians and would-be real estate moguls. But what of those who lay the foundations for this possibility? By focusing on the lives and labour of women and their families working in construction, this thesis sheds light on a frequently overlooked demographic of co-contributors to Bengaluru’s growth. Attending to the precarity experienced by interlocutors, this thesis situates women’s endeavours to establish familial forms of permanence through an ethic of pragmatism. Illustrating how such projects are strived towards, it examines the cultivation of pragmatism to navigate various aspects of the city, and beyond. By acknowledging the resources long-term resident communities may acquire in the city, this thesis also examines the contrasting liminality experienced by migrant workers, who have scant access to these. In doing so, it attends to the ways in which urban precarity is shaped and harnessed by real estate developers seeking to maximise profit and devolve the financial risks of industry speculation. Illuminating how hegemonic masculinity informs these actions and subsequently, who is able to speculate, this thesis attends to the gendered relations that belie economies of extraction. Making visible employer strategies to maintain flexible labour, it also explores workers’ efforts to counter precarity via the state and their own forms of collective organisation. Utilising ethnographic data collected during fieldwork between October 2014-May 2016 and August 2016-February 2017, this thesis provides a nuanced perspective of the gendered relations of production and social reproduction; and the political life that unfolds between them. Attending to the intersectionality of precarious labour conditions, it contributes to the overlapping fields of the anthropology of work, gender, and economics.

26 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the main concerns of faith and non-faith communities across the UK in relation to death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic were examined, which revealed that communities were experiencing collective loss, were making necessary adaptations to rituals that surrounded death, dying and mourning and would benefit from clear and compassionate communication and consultation with authorities.
Abstract: Dealing with excess death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the question of a 'good or bad death' into sharp relief as countries across the globe have grappled with multiple peaks of cases and mortality; and communities mourn those lost. In the UK, these challenges have included the fact that mortality has adversely affected minority communities. Corpse disposal and social distancing guidelines do not allow a process of mourning in which families and communities can be involved in the dying process. This study aimed to examine the main concerns of faith and non-faith communities across the UK in relation to death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research team used rapid ethnographic methods to examine the adaptations to the dying process prior to hospital admission, during admission, during the disposal and release of the body, during funerals and mourning. The study revealed that communities were experiencing collective loss, were making necessary adaptations to rituals that surrounded death, dying and mourning and would benefit from clear and compassionate communication and consultation with authorities.

18 citations

10 Apr 2020
TL;DR: This report presents a summary of findings and key recommendations by a team of anthropologists from the London School of Economics who conducted a public survey and 58 cross-community interviews on what a good death looks like for people across all faiths and for vulnerable groups.
Abstract: Dealing with death and bereavement in the context of the Covid-19 Pandemic will present significant challenges for at least the next three months. The current situation does not allow for families andbcommunities to be involved in the process of death in ways in which they would normally hope or expect to be. In addition, mortality rates will disproportionately affect vulnerable households. The government has identified the following communities as being at increased risk: single parent households; multi-generational Black and Minority Ethnic groups; men without degrees in lone households and/or in precarious work; small family business owners in their 50s; and elderlyhouseholds. Our study focused on these groups. This report presents a summary of findings and key recommendations by a team of anthropologists from the London School of Economics who conducted a public survey and 58 cross-community interviews between 3 and 9 April 2020. It explores ways to prepare these communities and households for impending deaths with communications and policy support. More information on the research methodology, data protection and ethical procedures is available in Appendix 1. A summary of relevant existing research can be found in Appendix 2. A list of key contacts across communities for consultation is available on request. Research was focused on “what a good death looks like” for people across all faiths and for vulnerable groups. It examined how communities were already adapting how they dealt with processes of dying, burials, funerals and bereavement during the pandemic, and responding to new government regulations. It specifically focused on five transitions in the process of death, and what consultation processes, policies and communications strategies could be mobilised to support communities through these phases.

17 citations

01 Jan 2020
TL;DR: This article conducted a 6-month ethnographic study on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on disadvantaged households and communities across the UK conducted by anthropologists from the London School of Economics, and associates.
Abstract: This report presents key findings from a 6-month ethnographic study on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on disadvantaged households and communities across the UK conducted by anthropologists from the London School of Economics, and associates. This research involved in-depth interviews and multiple surveys with people across communities in the UK, with particular focus on a number of case studies of intersecting disadvantage. Crucially, our research has found that Government policy can improve adherence to restrictions and reduce the negative impacts of the pandemic on disadvantaged communities by placing central importance on communities, social networks and households to the economy and social life. This would be the most effective way to increase public trust and adherence to Covid-19 measures, because it would recognise the suffering that communities have experienced and would build policy on the basis of what is most important to people - the thriving of their families and communities.

9 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, women working in construction in Bengaluru, India, both experience and strive for mobility, and a multi-sited analysis is provided to establish the ways in which intersectionality between employment conditions, the urban environment and gender norms may inhibit or facilitate urban mobility for migrant female workers.
Abstract: While their labour shapes the growing cityscape, migrant construction workers often remain invisible – not only to property developers and consumers but also to the state. For female workers, this is compounded by gender-based discrimination within the industry. Utilising ethnographic data, this article explores how women working in construction in Bengaluru, India, both experience and strive for mobility. It provides a multi-sited analysis to establish the ways in which intersectionality between employment conditions, the urban environment and gender norms may inhibit or facilitate urban mobility for migrant female workers. Few ethnographic studies have attended to women’s experiences of intermingled work/accommodation sites within the industry, although the practices and outcomes produced by the blurring of such boundaries provides fertile ground for analysis. While the article confirms the enduring nature of discrimination experienced by women in the construction industry, it also attends to the ways in which female workers were able to utilise spaces of exploitation. I conclude that precarious livelihoods may not at first glance yield enduring or substantive beneficial outcomes for those compelled to undertake them, but they are nevertheless productive – allowing for the maintenance and fulfilment of aspirations which may not reside within the urban domain. KEYWORDS circular migration; labour; gender; women; construction work

9 citations


Cited by
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Journal Article
TL;DR: Mahmood as discussed by the authors explores the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in the Islamist movement poses to feminist theory in particular and to secular-liberal thought in general through an ethnographic account of the urban women's mosque movement that is part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt.
Abstract: WOMEN Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, by Saba Mahmood Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2004 xvi + 199 pages Gloss, to p 203 Refs to p 223 Index to p 233 $55 cloth; $1795 paper This book explores "the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in the Islamist movement poses to feminist theory in particular and to secular-liberal thought in general through an ethnographic account of the urban women's mosque movement that is part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt" (p 2) However, Saba Mahmood promises more than an ethnography based on two years of fieldwork (1995-1997) She embarks on an intellectual journey of selfreflection in which she has come "to believe that a certain amount of self-scrutiny and skepticism is essential regarding the certainty of my own political commitments, when trying to understand the lives of others who do not necessarily share these commitments" (p xi) By refusing to take her own political stance as the necessary lens through which the analysis proceeds, the author opens up the possibility that "my analysis may come to complicate the vision of human flourishing that I hold most dear and which has provided the bedrock of my personal existence" (p xii) It is necessary, the author cautions as she embarks upon her inquiry, not to assume that the political position we uphold will necessarily be vindicated or provide the ground for our theoretical analysis As readers, we are invited to join her in "parochializing our assumptions, about the constitutive relationship between action and embodiment, resistance and agency, self and authority - that inform most feminist judgments from across a broad range of the political spectrum about non-liberal movements such as the women's mosque movement" (p 38) It is within that spirit that I have critiqued this book The five chapters are a running argument with and against key analytic concepts in liberal thought as these concepts have come to inform various strands of feminist theory through which non-liberal movements, such as the women's mosque movement, are analyzed Through each chapter Mahmood makes her ethnographic talk back to the normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable "The Subject of Freedom" illustrates the different ways in which the activism of the mosque movement challenges the liberal conception of politics Mahmood analyzes the conception of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird the practices of this non-liberal movement in order to come to an understanding of the historical projects that animate it The pious subjects of the mosque movement occupy an uncomfortable place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals embedded in a tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status "Topography of the Piety Movement" provides a brief sketch of the historical development against which the contemporary mosque movement has emerged and critically engages with themes within scholarship of Islamic modernism regarding such movements We sense the broad-based character of the women's mosque movement through the author's description and analysis of three of six mosques where she concentrated her fieldwork Despite the differences among the mosque groups - ranging from the poorest to the upper-middle income neighborhoods of Cairo - they all shared a concern for the increased secularization of Egyptian society and illustrate the increasing respect accorded to the da 'iya preacher/religious teacher (who undertakes da'waliterally call, summons or appeal that in the 20th century came to be associated with proselytization activity) "Women and the Da'wa" (pp 64-72) is particularly insightful, as the author juxtaposes the emergence of secular liberalism with the da'wa movement and concludes that "the modernist project of the regulation of religious sensibilities, undertaken by a range of postcolonial states (and not simply Muslim states), has elicited in its wake a variety of resistances, responses and challenges …

1,398 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: The All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community by C. B. Stack as discussed by the authors was one of the most influential books of the last half century about African American families, focusing on the stories and lives of persons who were struggling to manage with limited resources and who had evolved seamless methods of survival and coping strategies.
Abstract: All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. C. B. Stack. New York: Harper & Row. 1974. Carol Stack wrote one of the most powerful books of the last half century about African American families. The book's power derived from its focus on the stories and the lives of persons who were struggling to manage with limited resources and who had evolved seamless methods of survival and coping strategies. Stack was not content to view the problems of impoverished African American families from an outside perspective, as had been done in the past, but chose instead to present her work from the view of the participants. She presented a sensitive view of families that has not been duplicated to this day. Stack put specific emphasis on being accepted by the families before she began interviewing them. She and her son took a long time to be accepted by the families as they gradually became participants in the day-to-day lives of the "Flats." She was sensitive to the patterns of interactions among the networks of family and friends that would have been overlooked by almost any other researcher or method of observation. The book showed how a person from another racial and economic group was able, with skill, to become an intimate part of the experience and the lives of very poor families. Her anthropological approach stands in sharp contrast to the countless attempts of others to quickly go in and pull out slices of families' lives with a preexisting conceptual framework. The African American families of the Flats were presented as they were, not from a White academic theoretical perspective that was not based on reality. Stack made many observations that allowed one to see the intricate workings of the families that "outsiders" had not been documented before. Participants were allowed to make observations about their own families' patterns of interaction and to uncover truths of family functioning based on the reality of their lives. Important data on these second-generation urban dwellers are presented in such a calm manner that one could overlook their significance to the field. The impact of the economic pressures on the men and women in the African American community show how persons can have mainstream values but are prevented from achieving them because of the lack of employment and economic security within the community. In response to the reality, Stack found that African Americans have cooperated to produce an adaptive strategy of exchanging goods and trading resources, as well as offering child care or temporary fosterage. Kinship boundaries were more elastic than they were in more affluent families because these individuals immersed themselves in a domestic network of kinfolk and fictive kin, or those who became as kin. The participants in Stack's study moved around and had loyalties to more than one household grouping at a time, making their family networks unlike the "household" structures of most American families. These networks were diffused over several kin-based households that changed frequently. The usual method of arbitrarily specifying widely accepted definitions of the family as nuclear or matrilocal may block one from seeing the world as it exists in very poor communities. Stack's observations refuted the "culture of poverty" position that had seen African Americans as having no culture or totally negative qualities of family disorganization, personal disorganization, and fatalism. Unfortunately, too many current writings on African Americans still take these same positions. The views may be the result of ignorance, naivete, or complex levels of racism that insidiously make their way into present family literature. Stack continued to reflect on the poverty of the participants' situations. By doing so, she avoided another position that is all too common-assumption that all African American families are the same, regardless of their levels of poverty or affluence. …

1,050 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
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699 citations