This article discusses the use of video cameras in participant observation drawing on approximately 300 hours of video data from an ethnographic study of Swedish family life. Departing from Karen Barad’s post-humanistic perspective on scientific practices, the aim is to critically analyse how researchers, research participants and technology produce and negotiate children’s corporeal privacy. Ethnographic videotaping is understood as a material-discursive practice that creates and sustains boundaries between private and public, where videotaping is ideologically connected to a public sphere that may at times ‘intrude’ on children’s corporeal privacy. The limits of corporeal privacy are never fixed, but open for negotiation; ethnographers may therefore unintentionally transgress the boundary and thus be faced with ethical dilemmas. The fluidity of privacy calls for ethical reflexivity before, during and after fieldwork, and researchers must be sensitive to when ethical issues are at hand and how to deal with them.
This article concerns generation and food morality, drawing on video recordings of dinners in Swedish middle-class families. A detailed analysis of affect displays during one family dinner extends prior work on food morality (Ochs, Pontecorvo, & Fasulo 1996; Grieshaber 1997; Bourdieu 2003; Wiggins 2004), documenting ways in which participants may shift between distinct generational positions with respect to affects and food morality (from “irresponsible child” to caretaker positions). In our recordings, an elder sibling is shifting between a series of contrasting affective stances (Ochs & Schieffelin 1989; M. Goodwin 2006; Stivers 2008), linked to generational positions along an implicit age continuum: positioning himself, at one end of the continuum, as his young brother's accomplice, and at the other as an adult, a serious guardian of food morality. This study shows that generational positions are not fixed, but are positions adopted as parts of language socialization and interactional events.
This ethnographic study explores parenthood ideals and practices among eight Swedish middle-class couples. A pivotal term in the analysis is involved par- enthood, which is understood as a cultural norm prescribing that parents are responsible for their children, that they should spend much time with them, and develop close relationships to them. The study shows that children and their activities structure parents’ daily routines and that childcare is prioritized over the parents’ own leisure activities. A distinction is made between parents’ time with and time for their children. While ‘time with children’ refers to un- divided time spent with children, ‘time for children’ refers to childcare and household work that is carried out for the children’s sake. Even though both types of time could be regarded as child centered, parents ideally spend time with their children; however, facing time pressure they argue it is hard to live up to this ideal in ev eryday life. It is also argued that par ental involvement has different meanings for men and women in that the majority of the women assume primary responsibility for household work and childcare.
Most previous research on parental involvement in children's homework has focused on the pedagogical advantages or disadvantages of school assignments while neglecting the practice in its social context, family life. By studying parent–child homework negotiations in Swedish families, this paper examines how family members position themselves and each other in relation to Swedish discourses on homework and parental involvement. The study shows that parents want their children to do homework independently. It is hard for the parents to take up another subject position than that of a ‘responsible parent’ who helps the child with homework or controls that it is done. Thereby, the child is simultaneously positioned as ‘irresponsible’ whether that is the case or not.
The present article explores home–school relations by analyzing how Swedish teachers and parents negotiate responsibility for children's education and rearing through school letters. It draws on participant observations using a video camera in families, interviews with parents, and analysis of school letters written by teachers to parents. The division of public and private responsibility for children is negotiated in terms of expertise. Teachers position themselves as ‘educational experts’, and are able to prescribe how parents are supposed to be involved in children's education. Teachers construct parents as ‘rearing experts’, and ask them to take responsibility for their children's behavior in school by disciplining them at home. The prescribed parental subject is adopted by parents, particularly mothers, as they position themselves as involved parents.
The article documents how dual-earner families employ different household strategies when managing time and childcare in everyday life. In particular, the focus is the unforeseen consequences of household strategies, that is, novel emerging problems, cultural ideals and subjectivities. In this ethnographic study of eight middle-class couples in Sweden, I analyse three household strategies: delegating, alternating and multitasking. While parents apparently use these strategies to juggle the multiple demands of everyday life in a time-efficient way, they also comply with a norm of involved parenthood. Thus, when employing household strategies, the parents balance between enacting themselves as involved parents and running the risk of being understood as uninvolved.
Recent research shows that Swedish fathers to a great extent endorse an ideal of gender equality and the discourse on the ‘new’, involved fatherhood that for several decades has been dominating Swedish family politics is now also more or less hegemonic among Swedish men. At the same time, research argues that there is a discrepancy between ideology and practice. Parenthood still means different things for men and women since women, for instance, continue to take the main responsibility for childcare and household work. Drawing on an ethnographic study, this article analyses how eight Swedish middle class men construct themselves as involved fathers and how they negotiate their involvement in household work, childcare and close relations with their children. The article shows that even though the discourse on paternal involvement may be dominant, it is nevertheless contested. The men mostly constructed their involvement as being gender-equal, but at times they resisted it through articulating discourses on child- centredness, kinship and gendered division of labour. Thus, they reiterated themselves as involved fathers, but not always necessarily in line with the official dual-carer discourse.
The present article analyzes how young self-injuring women and men construct themselves as ‘cutters.’ The study draws on observations of a Swedish Internet community connected to self-injurious behavior and departs from a poststructuralist framework in order to analyze how members position themselves and others in relation to cultural discourses on self-injury. Two main discourses are identified in the Web community: the ‘normalizing’ and the ‘pathologizing’ discourses, which give contrasting versions of self-injury, self-cutters, and their scarred bodies. Within the normalizing discourse, self-injurious behavior is regarded as a legitimate practice for dealing with mental health problems, ‘cutters’ are resilient, and their blood and scars are beautiful. In contrast, within the pathologizing discourse self-injurious behavior is understood as morally reprehensible, self-cutters are pathological, and their bodies are repulsive. In the Web community, members invoke both discourses, which leads to ambivalent subject positions. This study shows that the seemingly contradictory subject positions of the two discourses in fact are interdependent on each other as members draw on both the normalizing and the pathologizing discourses in order to become ‘authentic cutters.’
The present paper explores middle‐class fathers’ educational work by studying how they and their partners are involved in their children’s education at home, in school, and how they investigate school options and make decisions about educational issues. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of 30 dual‐earner couples in the Greater Los Angeles area, this article analyses how fathers position themselves in relation to discourses on parental involvement in education. In order to demonstrate the variety of ways fathers are involved three case studies are presented. It is illustrated how the men, by drawing on a discourse on involved fatherhood, position themselves in line with an ideal of parental involvement in education. Fathers who are doing less educational work than their spouses offer accounts for not taking a greater educational responsibility by drawing on a breadwinner discourse or by depicting mothers as gatekeepers of father involvement.
Youth sports have been recognized as an arena for men to meet increased cultural expectations of being involved in their children’s lives. Indeed, in contrast to other child care practices, many men are eager to take part in their children’s organized sports. Drawing on an ethnographic study of middle-class families in the United States, this study examines how men juggle two contrasting cultural models of masculinity when fathering through sports—a performance-oriented orthodox masculinity that historically has been associated with sports and a caring, inclusive masculinity that promotes the nurturing of one’s children. Through a detailed analysis of how fathers’ sports involvement unfolds on the ground, we show how men, in order to portray themselves as “good” fathers, attempt to strike a balance between pushing their children to excel and supporting them regardless of their performance. We propose that although men may value inclusive masculinity when fathering through youth sports, at the same time they exercise orthodox masculinity in other domestic domains
This article discusses the status of the concept of hegemonic masculinity in research on men and boys in Sweden, and how it has been used and developed. Sweden has a relatively long history of public debate, research, and policy intervention in gender issues and gender equality. This has meant, in sheer quantitative terms, a relatively sizeable corpus of work on men, masculinities, and gender relations. There is also a rather wide diversity of approaches, theoretically and empirically, to the analysis of men and masculinities. The Swedish national context and gender equality project is outlined. This is followed by discussion of three broad phases in studies on men and masculinities in Sweden: the 1960s and 1970s before the formulation of the concept of hegemonic masculinity; the 1980s and 1990s when the concept was important for a generation of researchers developing studies in more depth; and the 2000s with a younger generation committed to a variety of feminist and gender critiques other than those associated with hegemonic masculinity. The following sections focus specifically on how the concept of hegemonic masculinity has been used, adapted, and indeed not used, in particular areas of study: boys and young men in family and education; violence; and health. The article concludes with review of how hegemonic masculinity has been used in Swedish contexts, as: gender stereotype, often out of the context of legitimation of patriarchal relations; "Other" than dominant, white middle-class "Swedish," equated with outmoded, nonmodern, working-class, failing boy, or minority ethnic masculinities; a new masculinity concept and practice, incorporating some degree of gender equality; and reconceptualized and problematized as a modern, heteronormative, and subject-centered concept.
This study analyzes parent involvement by employing ethnographic methods and discourse analysis of parent–child talk about homework. We juxtapose what is often presented as a straightforward and unproblematic concept of parent involvement in education policy and research with actual instances of the day-to-day practices and reported experiences of parent involvement in children's homework in the U.S. and Sweden. Our analyses show that parent involvement may be either parent or child initiated, and varies widely according to how much homework the child is assigned, the child's orientation to homework and a number of other factors. Analyses demonstrate that parents become involved in two main ways: 1. through anticipating and planning the activity of homework and 2. by directly participating in the accomplishment of the homework task itself. We additionally highlight in the paper that there is an inherent tension between a parent's responsibility for homework and the child's responsibility for homework, and that parent involvement can cause tension in communication in the parent–child relationship.