Cornelia Schadler

See my virtual self: dissemination as a characteristic of digital photography – the example of Flickr.com

‘You press the button, we do the rest’ was the well-known advertising slogan of the Kodak Eastman camera in 1888. This was the starting point of widespread amateur photography. It was the entrance of photography to the industrial age. From that point onwards, amateur photography spread all over the world. During the following 100 years people have produced a torrent of photographic images. They have shown them in slide shows, displayed them in albums and stored them in boxes.

Parental constructions of masculinity at the transition to parenthood: the division of parental leave among Austrian couples

Men and masculinity are considered a key factor in changing gender inequality at the transition to parenthood. Prior research on gendered division of parental leave concentrated on fathers’ perspectives. This paper includes perspectives of fathers and mothers who make use of parental leave in different ways and asks how masculinity is jointly constructed, how these constructions are linked to the use of parental leave, and if and how they are oriented towards hegemonic masculinity. The analysis is based on 44 qualitative interviews with 11 Austrian couples before and after birth when decisions concerning parental leave were made. Our case reconstructions reveal that parents considered parental leave a central element of masculinity as long as it suited fathers’ needs and circumstances permitted. The decisions for sharing parental leave were father-centred as both partners valued father’s leave higher than mother’s.

Key practices of the transition to parenthood: The everyday figuration of parents’ and children’s bodies and personalities through the lens of a new materialist ethnography

At the transition to parenthood humans become parents or children. Sociology traditionally defines the transition to parenthood as the attainment of a new role or a new cultural identity. Recent new materialist redefinitions of the human and human relations have consequences for the empirical and conceptual view on the transition to parenthood. Parents and children become figurations within material-cultural practices. Their bodies and personalities solidify in those processes. Research from this perspective has often focused on the conception and birth of children (and parents) within techno-scientific practices (e.g. IVF). The research presented here focuses on everyday material-cultural practices during the transition to parenthood to explicate how parents and children are produced during the transition to parenthood. This article gives detailed descriptions of four key practices that allow humans to gain the status of parent or child: gaining evidence over an existing pregnancy, the normalization of the foetus and the parents, the sexing of the child and the official registration of the child. These situated practices form ‘real’ parents and children and their living conditions.

How to Define Situated and Ever‐Transforming Family Configurations? A New Materialist Approach

Abstract Within the past few decades, the configuration “family” has included diverse living arrangements, yet traditional definitions of family persist. Accordingly, family studies scholars have discussed research strategies and theoretical approaches to define the shifting boundaries of family. In this article I propose the approach of new materialism for a contemporary definition of family that focuses on situated processes and the complex interplay of material‐discursive differentiation processes. This perspective enriches current debates on defining family by adding concepts of intracontextual posthuman practices and multilocal forms of agency to the discussion, thus allowing for a definition of family that helps make comprehensible todays ever‐transforming configurations.

Key practices of equality within long parental leaves

The birth of a child often reinforces an unequal division of employment and care work among heterosexual couples. Parental leave programmes that foster long leaves tend to increase this inequality within couples. However, by investigating a particularly long parental leave system, we show that specific practices enable parents to share care work equally. Our ethnographic study includes interviews with heterosexual couples, observations in prenatal classes and information material available to parents. Specific sets of practices – managing economic security, negotiating employment, sharing information with peers and feeding practices – involved parents who shared care work equally and parents who divided care work unequally. Contingent on specific situated practices, the arrangement of care work shifted in an equal or unequal direction. Even within long parental leaves, equality between parents was facilitated when economic security was provided through means other than income, when work hours were flexible, mothers had a close relationship to work, information on sharing equally was available and children were bottle-fed. Consequently, an equal share of care work is not the effect of solely structural, individual, cultural or normative matters, but of their entanglement in practices.