The Political Economy of Reproduction: Motherhood, Work and the Home in Neoliberal Britain

This thesis investigates how the processes and practices of reproduction have been transformed not only by the ascendant political rationality of neoliberalism but also by women’s struggles that have reconfigured motherhood, the domestic home and the gendered organisation of employment. Through exploring both the 1970s feminist demand for “free 24- hour nurseries” and the contemporary provision of extended, overnight and flexible childcare, care that is often referred to as “24-hour childcare”, the research contributes to feminist understandings of the gendered and racialised class dynamics inside and outside the home and the wage. The research repositions the ‘Woman Question’ as, yet again unavoidable and necessary for comprehending and intervening in the brutalising consequences of capitalist accumulation. Situated within the Marxist feminist tradition, the work of reproduction is understood as a cluster of tasks, affective relations and employment that have historically been constructed and experienced as ‘women’s work’. The interrelation between the subjectivity of motherhood and the political economy of reproduction is analysed through a feminist genealogy of 24-hour childcare in Britain. Using ethnographic encounters, archival research and interview data with mothers and childcare workers, the research tells a story about the women who have worked both inside and outside the home, raised children, cooked and cleaned, and who, both historically and in the present, continue to create an immense amount of wealth and value. As women's labour market participation has steadily increased over the last 40 years, the discourse of reproduction has shifted to one in which motherhood is increasingly constructed as a choice. Within neoliberal discourse the decision to have a child is constructed as a private matter for which individuals bear the costs and responsibility. The thesis argues that, as a result of motherhood being constructed more and more as something that is chosen, the spaces of resistance and opposition towards motherhood have been limited and resistance has been individuated and privatised.

Citizen journalism and political participation : the youdecide project and the 2007 Australian Federal Election

The 2007 Australian Federal election not only saw the election of a Labor government after 11 years of John Howard’s conservative Coalition government. It also saw new levels of political engagement through the Internet, including the rise of citizen journalism as an alternative outlet and mode of reporting on the election. This paper reports on the You Decide 2007 project, an initiative undertaken by a QUT-based research team to facilitate online news reporting on the election on a ‘hyper-local’, electorate-based model. We evaluate the You Decide initiative on the basis of: promoting greater citizen participation in Australian politics; new ways of engaging citizens and key stakeholders in policy deliberation; establishing new links between mainstream media and independent online media; and broadening the base of political participation to include a wider range of citizen and groups.

Mapping the Australian political blogosphere

Network crawling and visualisation tools and other datamining systems are now advanced enough to provide significant new impulses to the study of cultural activity on the Web. A growing range of studies focus on communicative processes in the blogosphere – including for example Adamic & Glance’s 2005 map of political allegiances during the 2004 U.S. presidential election and Kelly & Etling’s 2008 study of blogging practices in Iran. There remain a number of significant shortcomings in the application of such tools and methodologies to the study of blogging; these relate both to how the content of blogs is analysed, and to how the network maps resulting from such studies are understood. Our project highlights and addresses such shortcomings.