Women and work-life balance: a case of austerity and authenticity

Recent evidence suggests that support for gender equality appears to be declining amid concern that women who play a full role in the work force do so at the expense of family life. Although this has been exacerbated by the economic downturn there were pre-recessionary signs of concerns that the welfare of children was being compromised when women find themselves with the double burden of employment and family care. These work-life balance issues are examined from the point of view of looking at how this characterised for women as a problem of authentic self-realisation in terms of working towards and achieving an optimum balance. This kind of dichotomisation allows for different aspects of the self to be pitted against each other: the professional career-orientated aspect and the personal relationship aspect. The paper argues that work-life balance discourse is counter-productive in that it reinforces the inequalities for women that it seeks to redress.

Infants, interfaces, and intermediation: digital parenting and the production of 'iPad baby' videos on YouTube

We investigate the ways young children’s use of mobile touchscreen interfaces is both understood and shaped by parents through the production of YouTube videos and discussions in associated comment threads. This analysis expands on, and departs from, theories of parental mediation, which have traditionally been framed through a media effects approach in analyzing how parents regulate their children’s use of broadcast media, such as television, within family life. We move beyond the limitations of an effects framing through more culturally and materially oriented theoretical lenses of mediation, considering the role mobile interfaces now play in the lives of infants through analysis of the ways parents intermediate between domestic spaces and networked publics. We propose the concept of intermediation, which builds on insights from critical interface studies as well as cultural industries literature to help account for these expanded aspects of digital parenting. Here, parents are not simply moderating children’s media use within the home, but instead operating as an intermediary in contributing to online representations and discourses of children’s digital culture. This intermediary role of parents engages with ideological tensions in locating notions of “naturalness:” the iPad’s gestural interface or the child’s digital dexterity.