Category / Sociology & Social Policy

Paper by BU academics used as example in Dutch university newsletter

The March 2015 newsletter of the Dutch University of Groningen’s School for Behavioural & Cognitive Neurosciences dedicated two pages to the question: ‘How to pick the right journal?’    The author of the English-language newsletter contribution, Liwen Zhang, offer its readers a brief introduction on journal selection for a scientific manuscript.  The newsletter piece is based on two papers which both share their submission stories and suggestions of journal selection.  We were pleased to see that one of these two papers is by two Bournemouth University professors: Hundley and van Teijlingen.  Their paper which gives advice on one specific aspect of academic publishing is called ‘Getting your paper to the right journal: a case study of an academic paper’ [1].  It was published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing in 2002.

 

 

Reference:

  1.  vanTeijlingen, E., Hundley, V. (2002) Getting your paper to the right journal: a case study of an academic paper, Journal of Advanced Nursing 37(6): 506-511.

Research on Memory and Reconciliation after War

 Is memory of war and violence in divided societies an obstacle to, or a pre-requisite for, peace-making? What are the commonalities and differences in the ways in which such memory is socially constructed and culturally expressed? What are its psycho-social functions and political transformations? What messages are communicated, and how?

Dr. Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, social anthropologist in the department of Sociology and Social Work (HSS), recently presented her research findings on these questions, based on fieldwork in Kosovo, at an international conference on Narrative, Power and Commemoration in Conflicted Societies in Belfast. Hosted by the Transitional Justice Institute of Ulster University (which, incidentally, had the highest score for impact in the Law UoA in the last REF exercise), this conference assembled and compared international case studies with the case immediately at our doorsteps, Northern Ireland.
For the full conference programme, click here!  Her presentation, titled Statues and  statutes – nationalist versus multi-ethnic enshrinements in Kosovo after the 1999 war – juxtaposed local identifications with ideas of ethno-national, militant resistance as embodied in the material culture of commemorative sites in contemporary Kosovo (the ‘statues’) to the constitutionally enshrined paradigm of multi-ethnicity (the ‘statutes’) integral to the internationally-driven, peace- and state-building process in Kosovo after the war.  However, rather than constructing a simple dichotomy of parallel discourses, her presentation traced the question of ambiguities and potentials within either type of discursive ‘enshrinement’, with a particular emphasis on stories bridging the ethnic divides and individualising responsibility in the site literature emanating from the nationalist shrines and their statues.
Stephanie will ALSO present her on-going BU research collaborations, which expand on the topic of memories and commemoration, at BU’s Interdisciplinary Week (Tuesday, 12 May, 4:30 pm KG01). Together with Avital Biran (an expert in ‘dark’ tourism); Melanie Klinkner (transitional justice); and Feng Tian (‘serious gaming’ technology) she will explore ways in which memorials may be helpful in Transforming conflict after war: memory, heritage and digital media.
 Places can be booked at https://research.bournemouth.ac.uk/interdisciplinary-research-week-2015/tuesday-12-may/.

Congratulations on both accounts,

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

 

Seeing through the Confucian ceiling: Chinese and Korean mothers in England

Dr Hyun-Joo Lim

This year’s British Sociological Association annual conference was held at Glasgow Caledonian University on the theme of ‘Societies in Transition: Progression or Regression?’ Taking place in April each year, it is the biggest Sociology conference in the UK. With so many great opportunities to meet new and old academics, I always find this event utterly exciting and inspiring. 

At this conference I presented a paper examining the experiences of Chinese and Korean mothers in England – titled ‘Seeing through the Confucian Ceiling’. This paper is drawn from life history interviews with ten Korean and eight Chinese mothers living in England. I analysed my data using six analytical categories, which are: motherhood and gender ideology; educational level; reasons for migration; the length of stay in England; economic circumstances of the family; and the local communities in which they reside. The paper has been submitted to Families, Relationships and Societies and is currently under review. It aims to address the following questions:

1. In what ways does the motherhood ideology of Chinese and Korean mothers in England differ, and what impact does this have on their decision towards childcare and employment?

2. What are the major factors affecting such attitudes and behaviours in a diasporic setting?

3. What implications does this have on gender relations at home for these women?

I focus on the different motherhood ideologies of Chinese and Korean women and how this impacts on their employment and childcare.

Historically both China and South Korea have been heavily influenced by Confucianism, an ancient Chinese tradition that is refined by Confucius, which supports patriarchal gender relations. The key principles of Confucianism include: hierarchical human relationships, fulfilment of individual duties, communitarian values over individual ones, filial piety, and importance of seniority. Yet, simultaneously China and Korea have undergone divergent socio, political and economic development. For instance, China has only opened up the economy to market competition since 1978, much later than Korea, whilst maintaining its socialist political system. On the other hand, Korea has followed the capitalist market economy and the democratic political system since the establishment of the Republic of Korea in 1948. As a consequence of this, China and Korea have developed different ‘national cultures’, founded on the distinctive socio, economic and political characteristics of the individual countries. In line with this, existing studies conducted in these countries have indicated that despite the impact of Confucian patriarchal ideals on both societies, women in China and Korea have heterogeneous understandings of what constitutes ‘good’ mothering (e.g. Cho, 2002; Rofel, 1999). Thus, there are notable differences in the employment patterns of women with dependent children between China and Korea (see Brinton, et al. 1995; Cook and Dong, 2011).

My findings suggest that Korean mothers retained their traditional values and gendered roles, having chosen not to get involved in paid employment in order to undertake childcare responsibilities. They strongly supported intensive mothering, in which the mother takes the major responsibility for her children. Often the women described mother’s employment as having a detrimental impact on their children’s emotional wellbeing. Even those who were in employment did not show much difference in terms of their support for intensive motherhood.

By contrast, Chinese mothers did not endorse intensive mothering and showed their strong inclination to work even after moving to England, similar to their middle-class counterparts living in urban China. They constructed this as an effect of Mao’s socialist work ethic, under which they were brought up, irrespective of their economic circumstances and educational levels. In this sense, their paid work was not a mere means to provide financial support for the family, unlike existing literature has suggested, but also a crucial part of their identity.

However, despite seemingly stark differences between the two groups, gender relations at home appear to be similar. Although the accounts of Chinese mothers seem to indicate gender equality on the surface, their interview data suggest continuing gender inequality for the majority of these women, taking the double burden of childcare and paid work. Although Chinese and Korean mothers showed very different beliefs and attitudes towards employment, all the women took the primary responsibility for household labour, regardless of their educational level and employment status.

In terms of intersecting analytical components, Chinese and Korean women’s motherhood and gender ideology as obtained in their country of origin, along with their settlement into respective ethnic communities, continued to have a dominant impact on their lives in England. As for the other four analytical categories, they seem to have had less obvious impact on Chinese and Korean women’s lives. However, drawing on Hall (1990), it could be suggested that what is considered to be ‘an East Asian way’ in a transnational setting is not the same as what it is in their ‘home’ countries because it is ‘imagined’ and ‘reconfigured’ in a diasporic context. In this sense, I argue that the mothering ideologies and gendered lives for my participants are ‘hybridised’ forms that are distinctive from those existing in both their ‘home’ countries and England.

 

“I should have married an Englishman”: East Asian women’s perception of their husband’s ethnicity on gendered division of household labour

 

Dr Hyun-Joo Lim, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences

University of Bristol’s Centre for East Asian Studies at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies organised a workshop on Europe and East Asia for PhD researchers and early careers academics on Friday 27 March. This was a great opportunity for an academic like me, whose interest lies in East Asia and migrants from this region, to present my work and to network with emerging scholars in the field.

My presentation in this workshop focused on East Asian (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) women’s perception of their husband’s ethnicity in the division of housework and how they construct different modes of masculinities based on ‘race’ and ethnicity. This paper was drawn from my PhD, which examined the life stories of first generation East Asian women living in England. One of the objectives of the study was to explore gender relations at home and the ethnicity of the husband emerged as a major factor affecting them. My findings indicate a certain degree of differences in the division of household labour between couples, depending on whether they have got married to British men or East Asian men. Three participants reported to have egalitarian gender relations at home with men sharing housework and childcare either equally or even taking primary roles. All the women in this category got married to white British men. By contrast, 11 women said that they took almost sole responsibility for housework and childcare, regardless of their employment status. Among this group all but one woman were married to East Asian men.

Whilst the above findings are interesting and illuminate some degree of reality in these women’s experiences, the aim of my research is not to present a generalisable fact. Rather, I was interested in how these women construct divergent modes of masculinities in their talk and its theorisation. Therefore, my paper focused more on the nuanced meanings of East Asian women’s narratives and the impact of cultural imperialism on their perception of masculinities. More revealing than my above findings is the way women divide masculinities along the racial line and place a kind of hierarchical order. Often in their stories British men were depicted positively as egalitarian and doing a lot in the house. If they didn’t, they were represented as outdated like East Asian men. In contrast, East Asian men were portrayed as backwards and traditional, who did not move a finger in the house.

The idea of ‘racialised masculinities’ was developed from the concept of ‘racialised femininities’ based on the work of Pyke and Johnson (2003), which explored the way second generation Korean- and Vietnamese-American women construct femininities in their everyday life. According to this study, young Asian American women depicted American and Asian femininities in a dichotomised way, similar to the way my participants talked about British and East Asian masculinities. Their participants represented American femininity as independent, active and assertive, superior to Asian femininity, which is seen as passive, weak and hyperfeminine. My paper illuminates East Asian women’s internalisation of the discursive construct of the Orient by the West (Said’s 1978) and how it continues to affect their everyday psyche, resonating in their language. I concluded the presentation, arguing that racially divided masculinities overlook persistent gender inequality in Britain as well as variation within a society. For instance, it is well documented that women continue to take the majority of household work, including childcare, in Britain, despite some increase in men’s participation (e.g.  Crompton, et al. 2007; Geist 2010; Kan 2012). Simultaneously, a growing number of East Asian men, especially those who are well educated and have professional jobs, are contributing more and more to housework and childcare (Ishii-Kuntz, et al. 2004; Schwalb, et al. 2004, 2010; Yoon and Chung 1999). The paper was very well received with a lot of follow-up questions and round table discussions.

 

 

New paper on obesity research

Colleagues associated with the Health Economics Research Unit (HERU), Health Services Research Unit (HSRU) and the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health (all based at the University of Aberdeen), the Nursing, Midwifery & Allied Health Professional Research Unit (University of Stirling), the Scottish Collaboration for Public Health Research & Policy (SCPHRP) based at the University of Edinburgh and the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health (CMMPH) at Bournemouth University published their latest paper on obesity research.  The paper ‘A systematic review of the cost-effectiveness of non-surgical obesity interventions in men’ is published in the journal: Obesity Research & Clinical Practice.  This systematic review summarises the literature reporting the cost-effectiveness of non-surgical weight-management interventions for men. Studies were quality assessed against a checklist for appraising decision modelling studies.  This research is part of the larger ROMEO study.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Faculty of Health & Social Sciences

 

Reference:

Boyers, D., Avenell, A., Stewart, F., Robertson, C., Archibald, D., Douglas, F., Hoddinott, P., van Teijlingen, E., A systematic review of the cost-effectiveness of non-surgical obesity interventions in men, Obesity Research & Clinical Practice (online first)

Putting ‘Emotions’ on the Research Agenda at BU – two new international scholars and professors at BU raise the research profile on the emotions

The study of emotions is multi-disciplinary. This is shown in the research profiles of two of the newly appointed professors at BU who bring international research and publishing profiles to two different faculties. Professor Ann Brooks is Professor of Sociology in HSS and Professor Candida Yates is Professor of Communication in FMC. Both academics have been involved in researching the emotions from different perspectives.

Ann has been involved in research on the emotions since 2010 when she became part of the Australia Research Council Grant funded Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 2011-2017, with a grant of $24 million AUD spread across 5 universities. Ann remains an International Investigator with the ARC until 2017 and her projects are outlined here: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/research/researchers/ann-brooks.aspx. She has recently established a new research cluster on space, emotions and cities in conjunction with a colleague at the Centre: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/research/research-clusters/space,-cities-and-emotion.aspx.

She has published a number of books in the area of the emotions and social change including the following both with Routledge, the most recent being Emotions and Social Change (Routledge New York, 2014) (with David Lemmings).   Other books on the emotions include Emotions in Transmigration (Palgrave 2012) (with Ruth Simpson) and Gender Emotions and Labour Markets-Asian and Western Perspectives (Routledge 2013).


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ann is working with Candida and Professor Barry Richards of FMC in the development of new Masters programmes in the area of emotions among other areas.  Candida’s research applies a psychosocial approach to the study of emotion, media and popular culture and her current work focuses on the psycho-cultural dynamics of emotion and UK political culture. She is Director (with Caroline Bainbridge, University of Roehampton) of the AHRC Research Network: Media and the Inner World (www.miwnet.org), that brings together media professionals, clinicians and academics to explore the role of emotion in media and popular culture. Candida has developed that work through public engagement, research publications, consultancy and also as Editor of the Karnac Book Series: Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture that explores the emotionalisation of popular culture in different contexts, including TV, film, music and social networking, www.karnacbooks.com/SeriesDetail.asp?SID=114

Candida has published widely on the psycho-cultural dynamics of emotion, gender and popular culture, and her publications include Emotion: Psychosocial Perspectives (co-ed, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and Psychoanalysis and Television (co-ed, Karnac Books, 2013); Media and the Inner World; Psycho-cultural Approaches to Emotion, Media and Popular Culture (co-ed, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and The Play of Political Culture, Emotion and Identity (in Press, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).