Gender and the Lived Body Experience of Academic Work during Covid19

The rapid transition to online teaching in response to Covid-19 presented unprecedented challenges for academic communities. Staff had vastly different experiences of engaging with technology, and these experiences are shaped by factors including gender, (dis)ability, socio-economic resources and caring responsibilities. We report findings from an intersectional interview examination of how 412 staff in a large London-based university adapted to teaching and researching from home at the beginning of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we construct grounded theory around the divisibility of the body, and the conflicts arising from the need to span home and work-life, our findings illustrate how patterns of inequity for women academics converge to construct ways of managing the boundary work of home and work with different degrees of successes. We document how management support and/ or existing expertise were vital to enable women academics to overcome obstacles to equitable work.

Communicating in a Multi-Role, Multi- Device, Multi-Channel World: How Knowledge Workers Manage Work- Home Boundaries

Technology keeps us connected through multiple devices, on several communication channels, and with our many daily roles. Being able to better manage one’s availability and thus have more control over work-home boundaries can potentially reduce interferences and ultimately stress. However, little is known about the practical implications of communication technologies and their role in boundary and availability management. Taking a bottom-up approach, we conducted four exploratory qualitative studies to understand how current communication technologies support and challenge work-home boundaries for knowledge workers. First, we compared email practices across accounts and devices, finding differences based on professional and personal preferences. Secondly, with wearables such as smartwatches becoming more popular, findings from our autoethnography and interview study show how device ecologies can be used to moderate notifications and one’s sense of availability. Thirdly, moving beyond just email to include multiple communication channels, our diary study and focus group showed how awareness and availability are managed and interpreted differently between senders and receivers. Together, these studies portray how current communication technologies challenge boundary management and how users rely on strategies – that we define as microboundaries – to mitigate boundary cross-overs, boundary interruptions, and expectations of availability. Finally, to understand the extent to which microboundaries can be useful boundary management strategies, we took a multiple-case study approach to evaluate how they are used over time and found that, although context-dependent, microboundaries help increase participants’ boundary control and reduce stress. This thesis’ primary contribution is a taxonomy of microboundary strategies that deepens our current understanding of boundary management in the digital age. By feeling in control, users experience fewer unwanted boundary cross-overs and ultimately feel less stressed. This work leads to our secondary contribution to individual and organisational practice. Finally, we draw a set of implications for the design of interactions and cross-device experiences

Email management and work-home boundaries

In my PhD research I am exploring the effect of email on work-home boundaries. The ultimate goal is to design a tool that helps people manage their email better and reduces the stress associated with this activity. I argue that this will require understanding individual differences in email behaviours and how email can impact work-home boundaries