5 research outputs found
(Un)filial daughters and digital feminisms in China: The stories of awakening, resisting, and finding comrades
This thesis sets out to understand Chinese feminist struggles in a so-called digital era by looking at the experiences and practices of an emerging generation of digital feminists that came into light in Chinese feminist movements. Conceptually and methodologically, this research took inspirations from an interdisciplinary body of literature including feminist theory, sociology, media and cultural studies, girlhood studies and gender studies. Inspired by online ethnography and feminist participatory methodologies, it combined an online tracking of feminist events on Weibo with semi-structured interviews and social media diary study with 21 Chinese girls and young women.
This thesis explores the embedded and embodied experiences of these participants as they discover and learn about feminism, resist and challenge gender and sexual inequalities, and try to build connections with like-minded people within and beyond the digital sphere. By charting feminist responses and resistance to familial discourses and norms around girlhood and young femininity, I show the emergence of feminist subjectivities of (un)filial daughters that arises from but also comes to reconfigure gender and sexuality within a neoliberal and postsocialist context of patriarchal familism in China. I build upon the concepts of networked counterpublics and networked affects to explore how these (un)filial daughters are networked to carve out spaces for feminist discussion in social media. Employing an affective-discursive analysis, I also tune into how networked feminist resistance and alliances are formed not merely on the basis of how women and feminists talk about these issues but also how they feel
Machines for living in: communication technologies and everyday life in times of urban transformation
This thesis investigates the degree to which our everyday conceptions of 'place' have
changed in contemporary society, especially in relation to the use of information and
communications technologies (ICTs). The empirical evidence is a case study of 20
low-income families who live in Santiago, Chile. These families had just moved to a
new social housing estate from the shantytowns and/or situations of extreme
overcrowding.
The first section of the thesis examines how their conceptions of 'place' have
changed as a result of the move. On the one hand, it is difficult for them to perceive
the housing estate as a 'place' with the same characteristics as their former home
environments (close social networks, common history, etc.) due to a difficult and still
incomplete adaptation. On the other hand, their social exclusion, especially
demonstrated in terms of their limited spatial mobility, means that their everyday life
still unfolds in a limited and relatively static number of places. In these circumstances
they develop a minimal concept of place based not on an emotional attachment to a
space, but rather on particular practices located in certain time and space. This
concept of place is labelled here as 'localities of practices'.
The second part of the thesis examines how these 'localities of practices' are
becoming increasingly 'mediated,' or the increasing degree to which the use of ICTs
permeates the conceptions of place of the members of these families through an
analysis of practices related to the use of three particular technologies. The first
study shows how the home is a project that has to be constructed in a constant
competitive interplay with the place created by television use.
The second analyses how the noise produced by hi-fi technologies at very high
volumes is used to redefine the spaces of the housing estate against the background
of their quite limited material surroundings. The third shows how the use of mobile
phones, and the 'media space' created by them, reconstitutes and gives a new
meaning to the limitations that these families face when moving through the urban
environment of Santiago.
As a result of these continual processes of mediation the thesis concludes that along
with the physical environment of the housing estate, the spatial environments created
by the use of media technologies are key to the construction of 'place' to such a
degree that is almost impossible to consider one without the other. They, together,
are their "machines for living in"; the setting in which their everyday lives unfold
Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World
The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management
- mathematical methods in reliability and safety
- risk assessment
- risk management
- system reliability
- uncertainty analysis
- digitalization and big data
- prognostics and system health management
- occupational safety
- accident and incident modeling
- maintenance modeling and applications
- simulation for safety and reliability analysis
- dynamic risk and barrier management
- organizational factors and safety culture
- human factors and human reliability
- resilience engineering
- structural reliability
- natural hazards
- security
- economic analysis in risk managemen