Women (Re)Negotiating Care across Family Generations: Intersections of Gender and Socioeconomic Status

Changing Generations, a study of intergenerational relations in Ireland undertaken between 2011 and 2013 by the Social Policy and Ageing Research Centre (SPARC), Trinity College, Dublin, and the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology (ICSG), NUI Galway, used the Constructivist Grounded Theory method to interrogate support and care provision between generations. This article draws on interviews with 52 women ages 18 to 102, allowing for simultaneous analysis of older and younger women’s perspectives. The intersectionality of gender and class emerged as central to the analysis. Socioeconomic positions shape contrasting forms of interdependency among family generations, ranging from “enmeshed” lives among lower socioeconomic groups to “freed” lives among higher socioeconomic groups. Women are initiating changes in how care and support flow across generations. Older women in higher socioeconomic groups are attuned to how emotional capital women expend across family generations can constrain (young) women’s lives. In an expression of solidarity, older women are renegotiating the place of care labor in their own lives and in the lives of younger women. A new reciprocity emerges that amounts to women “undoing gender.” This process is, however, deeply classed as it is women in higher socioeconomic groups whose resources best place them to renegotiate care.

Women and Curiosity in Early-Modern England and France:Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture

one of three editors of a peer reviewed book of essays ; final manuscript to be submitted on 15 September 2015

Beckett and Performance

The recent interest in genealogical criticism in Beckett Studies, fuelled by the reading notes that Beckett compiled in the 1920’s and 1930’s, has led to a particular focus on Beckett’s formative years, and on the intersections between his work, especially the novels and early criticism, and his intellectual reading. While this has produced much valuable and fascinating matrial, perhaps it is time to return to the works themselves, and especially, to the theatre. Having just published a book on Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama (London, Routledge, 2010), I would like to develop further the area of presence and performance in Beckett’s theatre. Performance studies and phenomenology have offered new ways of approaching the ontology of performance in Beckett’s theatre, and I intend to analyze this, with particular reference to specific productions of Beckett’s plays. Firstly, I want to look at some of Beckett’s own comments about particular performances / productions (for example in the Barbara Bray correspondence, Trinity College Dublin), and, secondly, to analyze from the perspective / experience of an audience member a number of performances by (mainly Anglophone) ‘Beckett actors’, including Billie Whitelaw and David Warrilow. Drawing on recent discussions of presence and performance (Jane Goodall, Cormac Power), I will offer some reflections on the complexity of presence (of persona and performer, of body and voice) and its haunting power in performances of Beckett’s drama.

On the derived category of a regular toric scheme

Let X be a quasi-compact scheme, equipped with an open covering by affine schemes U s = Spec A s . A quasi-coherent sheaf on X gives rise, by taking sections over the U s , to a diagram of modules over the coordinate rings A s , indexed by the intersection poset S of the covering. If X is a regular toric scheme over an arbitrary commutative ring, we prove that the unbounded derived category of quasi-coherent sheaves on X can be obtained from a category of Sop-diagrams of chain complexes of modules by inverting maps which induce homology isomorphisms on hyper-derived inverse limits. Moreover, we show that there is a finite set of weak generators, one for each cone in the fan S. The approach taken uses the machinery of Bousfield–Hirschhorn colocalisation of model categories. The first step is to characterise colocal objects; these turn out to be homotopy sheaves in the sense that chain complexes over different open sets U s agree on intersections up to quasi-isomorphism. In a second step it is shown that the homotopy category of homotopy sheaves is equivalent to the derived category of X.

'Law of their own': notes on legal alterity in early nineteenth-century Ireland

This article investigates intersections between legal and literary discourse in Ireland in the early 19th century, and explores how judicial tropes, in particular that of an “alternative judiciary”, shape perceptions of Irish identity as well as cultural expression. Whilst Ireland and the Irish were typically characterized as lawless, this article examines the ubiquitous presence of alternative legal systems, focusing on the writings of Thomas Moore (1779–1852) and William Carleton (1794–1869). These representations, and the questions of authority and legitimacy that they provoke, are considered within critical debates about the development of literary forms in Ireland, and the inherent relationship that legal alterity evokes between textual and judicial authority.