Gender, Mobile Lifestyles andPlaces

Invitationto international workshop in TROMSØ, October 14th, 15th and 16th2014

Call for papers

We hereby invite you to an international workshoporganized by KVINNFORSK’s NCR-project: Mobile Lifestyles: Perspectives on Work Mobilities and Gender in the High North and we hope that all the participants will make a presentation.

The aim of the workshop is to present and discuss approaches, methods and research findingsthat increase ourknowledge of the practices and representations of women’s and men’s diverse work mobilities, bothpast and present, in the High North – an area that encompasses countries along the North Atlanticand North Pacific.Specifically, we are looking for papers that problematise relationships between gender,work mobilities,lifestyles and placein multiple sectors from service through to transportation and communications, retail and resource extraction and manufacturing in Arctic and subarctic contexts. This project is builtupon the assumption that the gendered drivers and consequences of work and work mobilities are variously impacted by places and the connections between them, as well as by local, regional and larger-scale labour marketsin different sectors and contexts, and by contemporary organizations of men’s and women’s work, households, and home and host communities. However, we are well aware of the need to study such processes using an intersectional perspective including attention to ethnicity, age and class in addition to gender

The importance of a gendered lens

We define gender broadly, in that it is dynamic and encompassing of a spectrum of orientation and identity. We know that gender informs all aspects of our lives, including the choices we make, the work that we do, our responsibilities and expectations, and especially our patterns and choices, or lack thereof, of mobility. Furthermore, we know that gender intersects with many factors; including for example age, class and place. .Our goals in this project and this workshop specifically are to develop new perspectives about mobile lifestyles, as well as about the structures and cultures of workplaces, households and communities,and the relationships between them. We believe that better insight into such processes and relations will contribute to new perspectives and understandings of the patterns of gendered mobilities, workand local life in the study areas including awareness of both the drivers of mobilities, their consequences, and the potential policy implications of these mobilities.

Through the workshop, we aim to explore :

a) the ways in which genderedwork-relatedmobile practices) relate to place, to industrial sectors, to gender and to institutions such as households, unions, business and community associations, etc).

“The place” can be aworkplace, community, town or city where the mobile men or women are employed orthe place where they live.This discussion will inform the development of future research on if and how diversely situated mobile workers, , employers and community and neighborhood leaders create interconnections and relationships between places.

b) how these mobile practices are represented in the media, official papers, and areas of cultural expression within the local, regional and national contexts in question.

Responses to this question will give us insight intosuch issues as when, and in what situations the different forms of gendered work mobilities are treated as positive, negative or challenging to the current order of things including the ways in which policies intersect with such mobilities and with what consequences. What aspects of mobility are foregrounded in these accounts and what are backgrounded or largely excluded from public discussion and policy formation?In short, under what circumstances and howare the different forms of mobility and their representations problematized in general and from a gender perspective?

Invited participants will be expected to deliver a presentation (paper) focused broadly on one or both ofthe two questions raised above. We are interested in papers that emphasize empirical, theoretical and methodological questions. Papers based on research that is in its early stages and research that is completed or close to completion are welcome. In order to broaden our scope and cover a more extensive area of the High North our collaborating partners from Canada, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands who have projects that focus on many of the same questions and themes, are especially invited to present their analyses and findings.

A proposal for the paper should be sent to Siri Gerrard () by July 1. This also includes the Norwegian project-participants and will serve as the basis forregistration for the workshop.

The final program will be distributed to the participantsby the 15th of September.

Participation at the workshop is free, but the participants must pay their own travel and stay.