Katrina Jaworski

Older men’s participation in community‐based men’s sheds programmes

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the lived experience of older men taking part in community-based shed programmes. Five men, aged 65 and over, who attended two different community sheds participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews in 2007. Data were analysed thematically with six main themes emerging as follows: ‘company of fellas’; ‘everybody’s got a story to tell’; ‘still got some kick’; ‘passing on your experiences’; ‘get on your goat’ and; ‘nobody’s boss’. Participation in community-based men’s sheds positively influences the health and well-being of older Australian men through provision of a ‘men’s space’ in which meaningful activities occur. Provision of community-based men’s shed programmes as among a range of activity options in the community may contribute positively to the physical, mental, social and occupational health of older men.

‘Nowadays you don’t even see your neighbours’: loneliness in the everyday lives of older Australians

Loneliness is a pressing social issue for older people globally. Despite this, there is a paucity of studies on how older people themselves perceive loneliness and how service providers can support them. This study sought to address the gap using in-depth and semi-structured interviews with 60 older people and eight focus groups with aged care service providers in Australia in 2007. A purposive sampling strategy was employed to incorporate maximum participant variation. People 65 years and over were recruited from four large service providers in two Australian states. Our findings show that loneliness is influenced by private, relational and temporal dimensions and whether older people feel that they have, or are seen by others as having, a sense of connectedness with the wider community. Participants expressed the importance of maintaining social contact and having a sense of connection and belonging to the community. Our study highlights both the significance of gathering the views of older people to generate an understanding about loneliness and the need to recognise loneliness as a diverse and complex experience, bound to the context in which it is understood and perceived and not synonymous with social isolation. Such an understanding can be used to both evaluate and improve upon programmes that address loneliness and to help maintain an integration of older people in the community.

Gender, embodiment and place: The gendering of skills shortages in the Australian mining and food and beverage processing industries

This article examines skills shortages in the context of the Australian mining and food and beverage processing industries. Drawing on Acker’s concept of inequality regimes, we examine gendered and classed bodies in relation to place. We argue that organizations are situated in place, and here, Australian rural places. We also argue that while specific industries are important to the rural economies, these economies are influenced by the gendered politics of place that occur at the site where the enterprise is located. Guided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ quantitative analyses of workforce profiles, and predominantly drawing on qualitative interviews with Human Resource (HR) personnel, we analyse the gendering of work, place and organizations across three themes: a) women, work and reproducing bodies; b) male embodiment, organization and place; and c) absent bodies: women and apprenticeships. The purpose is to show that assumptions about gender, embodiment and place influence how organizations understand and respond to skills shortages in the given industries.

THE GENDER-ING OF SUICIDE

In contemporary social and cultural contexts, suicide is understood as explicitly individual and a deliberate choice and act. This article examines whether the intelligibility of suicide can be thought outside the conditions through which knowledge is constructed. Focusing on gender as one epistemological condition, I ask how gender comes to reside in the material act of taking one’s own life. The aim is to demonstrate analytically that the gendering of suicide, as a material act presumed to exist as neutral and self-evident, is heavily dependent on, and related to, gender. By doing so, my intention is to prize open the terms that articulate the intelligibility of gender in suicide to expose any rifts, and to assess whether these can be used to interrogate the manner through which suicide is gendered. Selectively drawing on Judith Butler’s work on performativity as a heuristic tool, I argue that understanding suicide as a neutral and self-evident act is a masculine and masculinist effect that fails to sustain its discursive mode of production. Such an understanding is itself an effect that conceals the discursive workings of suicide. Suicide is already gendered at the moment of its configuration. I begin by outlining some of the predominant ways of understanding gender in suicide. I then discuss elements of Butler’s work on performativity and the relevant criticisms to situate my methodological use of the concept as a thinking practice. Following this, I consider what happens when the gendering of suicide is read analytically through performative and performativity. Finally, I pursue aspects of the ontology of suicide to challenge the production and maintenance of some of the gendered truths that dominate the way suicide is understood.

‘Elegantly wasted’: The celebrity deaths of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates

The article discusses the issue of gender in suicide cases, specifically when handled by newsprint media sources. The author looks closely at the media representations of the deaths of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates. The article notes that the coverage of these events did not necessarily draw a distinction between true and false due to the nature and celebrity of the deaths. The author suggests that truth claims represented in these deaths were linked with a masculine portrayal of suicide. The article also takes racial influence into account when looking at how these deaths were discussed in the media.

Suicide in older people: Revisioning new approaches.

This discussion paper identifies and examines several tensions inherent in traditional approaches to understanding older peoples suicide. Predicted future increases in the absolute number of elderly suicides are subject to careful interpretation due to the underreporting of suicides in older age groups. Furthermore, a significant number of studies of older peoples death by suicide examine risk factors or a combination of risk factors in retrospect only, while current approaches to suicide prevention in the elderly place disproportionate emphasis on the identification and treatment of depression. Taken together, such tensions give rise to a monologic view of research and practice, ultimately limiting our potential for understanding older peoples experience of suicide and suicidal behaviour. New approaches are necessary if we are to move beyond the current narrow focus that prevails. Fresh thinking, which draws on older peoples experience of attempting to die by suicide, might offer critical insight into socially-constructed meanings attributed to suicide and suicidal behaviour by older people. Specifically, identification through research into the protective mechanisms that are relevant and available to older people who have been suicidal is urgently needed to effectively guide mental health nurses and health-care professionals in therapeutic engagement and intervention.

The author, agency and suicide

In the essay, ‘What is an Author?’, Michel Foucault contends that ‘the author does not precede the works’. If this is the case, then what happens when the notion of the author as never outside discourse is grafted to suicide? What happens when suicide – most commonly defined as a deliberate taking of ones life – is read through the idea that the one who is doing the taking does not precede it? Does this not obliterate agency in suicide: the key ingredient necessary to marking the individual as the sole author of their death? This article responds to these questions by first considering what Foucaults contention might offer to understanding the constitution of agency in the act of suicide. The author then draws on elements of Judith Butlers work to consider a way of thinking of suicide which furthers Foucaults contribution. The article argues that positioning suicide as already part of discourse does not undermine the individual as the author of death, or makes the act of taking ones life any less deliberate. Conclusions are then drawn with a comment on Foucaults position on death being powers limit, and what this might mean for understanding suicide.

Towards an understanding of loneliness among Australian men: gender cultures, embodied expression and the social bases of belonging

Recent quantitative investigations consistently single out considerable gender variations in the experience of loneliness in Australia, and in particular how men are especially prone to protracted and serious episodes of loneliness. In 2017 the Director of Lifeline implicated loneliness as a significant factor in suicide among Australian men – currently three times the rate of suicide among women. Compared to women men also struggle to talk about loneliness or seek help from a range of informal and professional sources. We know very little about men’s experience of loneliness or why they are so susceptible to it currently and research is urgently needed in order to design specific interventions for them. To date, psychology has dominated the theoretical research on loneliness but in this article we argue that sociology has a key role to play in broadening out the theoretical terrain of this understanding so as to create culturally informed interventions. Most researchers agree that loneliness occurs when belongingess needs remain unmet, yet it is also acknowledged that such needs are culturally specific and changing. We need to understand how loneliness and gender cultures configure for men; how they are located in different ethnic, class and age cohort cultures as well as the changing social/economic/spatial/public/institutional bases for belonging across Australia. Theoretical enquiry must encompass the broader social structural narratives (Bauman, Giddens and Sennett) and link these to the changing nature of belonging in everyday life – across the public sphere, the domestic sphere, work, in kinship systems, housing and settlement patterns, associational life, in embodied relationships and online.

Assuming vulnerability: Ethical considerations in a multiple-case study with older suicide attempters:

In conceptualizing vulnerability, it is common for researchers to assume that some participants are more vulnerable on the basis of their membership of a particular group or because they exhibit particular characteristics. Older people are often viewed as inherently more vulnerable by ethics committees and the ethical guidelines committees construct. Because age alone does not confer or cause vulnerability, risk of harm to older research participants is not purely associated with their intrinsic connection to a vulnerable group, and classifying older research participants as vulnerable may not necessarily protect them from harm. Drawing on the preliminary findings of a qualitative study of older people who had survived a suicide attempt, we reflect on how the specific context of our study had the potential of framing older people as vulnerable, and describe ways in which these were managed and resolved. Specifically, we discuss potential for harm through the ethical principles of coercion and distress.

The methodological crisis of theorising genocide in Africa: thinking with Agamben and Butler

Theorising African genocide has reached a methodological crisis. This crisis is not only due to the poor understanding of contexts of genocide in Africa. Nor is it only caused by the continual theoretical reliance on Jewish Holocaust studies. This crisis is also due to the lack of analytical attention to how epistemological and theoretical frames might frame theorising African genocide. In response, I argue that it is essential to examine what frames approaches to theorising African genocide before we debate which approaches can be used. Put simply, we need to think through our approaches before we put them to analytical use. I develop my argument across two sites of analysis. I analyse Giorgio Agambens statement about the Jewish Holocaust camp as being everywhere by unpacking the context of this statement, and the methodology behind it. I also examine the use of framing theory in contemporary explanations of African genocide by evaluating the degree to which this theory is effective in light of Judith Butlers recent work on political vulnerability and war. I conclude by exploring what Agambens and Butlers works can do for developing ‘an archaeology of genocidal thinking’ as means of offering a more nuanced theorising of contexts of genocide in Africa.