'Desiderio in search of a master': desire and the quest for recognition

This essay examines the manner in which desire and Hegelian recognition intersect in Angela Carter’s 1972 novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. After providing a brief description of Hegel’s famous account of the interaction between the lord and the bondsman, the essay goes on to discuss the manner in which the novel invests the figure of the love-object with the potential to become an ideal master. The image of the reflecting eye, which recurs throughout Carter’s text, is then analyzed as an enactment of, and a commentary upon, the desiring gaze

Technology becomes her

Why are so many of today's digital assistants presented as feminine? How does this relate to the history of workplace technologies and women's participation in the labour force? This article seeks to answer these questions, arguing that some elements of "women's work" are now being outsourced to machines – with interesting implications for our understandings of gender

Care under capitalism: the crisis of “women's work”

Who cares? Helen Hester explores the integrated crisis of work, home, and community, exploring the feminisation of care in reproductive labour, paid and unpaid, as we enter the era of the care economy

Mooney Award Committee Report

The 2001 James Mooney Award Committee Teviewed ten books submitted by six university presses. As we made our final evaluations we soon reached a consensus that two of the ten books were superior in meeting the criteria for the Mooney Award. Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African American Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1840-1950 / by Laurie Wilkie (2000, Louisiana State University Press). Reviewed by Hester A. Davis, Mooney Award Committee, Arkansas Archeological Survey The Estuary\u27s Gift: An Atlantic Coast Cultural Biography / by David Griffith (1999, Pennsylvania State University Press). Reviewed by Helen Regis, Mooney Award Committee, Louisiana State Universit

Anti-work architecture: domestic labour, speculative design, and automated plenty

This article presents a partial history of visions of technodomesticity in the global north, concentrating on dwellings which seek to problematize, challenge, or reorganize unpaid household labour. It is structured around three case studies, primarily drawn from the United States in the 1950s and 60s: the single-family suburban dream house, the bachelor pad, and the fully-automated future home. While these chosen examples may lend us certain resources for thinking about how best to mitigate the challenges of reproductive labour via living arrangements, they also possess a number of clear drawbacks or limitations. The article will argue that contesting these imaginaries (as much as learning from them) is likely to prove necessary in unpicking the connections between an inequitable distribution of unpaid intrafamilial domestic labour and the house itself as both a concrete site and an ideological formation – necessary, that is to say, in terms of building a meaningfully feminist conception of anti-work architecture

Student Voice: The Beacon in Our Journey to School Improvement

Is it possible to reduce the achievement gap simply by implementing effective instructional practices? Francis Scott Key Middle School in Montgomery County Maryland learned that building the cultural proficiency of teachers had to move beyond strategies. Francis Scott Key’s Student Voice Project helped both teachers and students transform their thinking about instruction, communication, and school improvement