We collect stories told by informants spontaneously and after the interviewer’s questions.
We collect stories told by informants spontaneously and after the interviewer’s questions.
Interviewees re-construct episodes and actions situated into sociocultural and historical contexts.
They give meanings to these episodes, they interpret them at the exact time of the interview, by using several cultural lenses (those they learn to use taking part in the practices in many cultural settings, like the one of physicists, of women, and so forth).
The interview-questionnaire: different kind of answers - hard to ‘handle’: to be aware
Open question about carrer path:
the answer is a short autobiography,
narrative of the episodes of their lives
Research questions
1. Which practices/interactions/situated activities do they tell us ?
We are mostly interested in those about gender, working activities, power games
2. What do they tell us about their decisions ? How do they play a part in the social practices ?
Which agency can we envisage ?
Research questions
3. Which cultural models do they refer to interpret their lives and social practices they take part in together with their parents and mentors and sons etc. ?
We are interested especially in those about science, physics, gender
If we compare the ways in which our informants interpret social practices which are somehow similar, we could understand cultural models common to them.
In terms of our methodological perspective, we do not analyse interviews with definite expectations about which those grups are -e.g. leavers/stayers-
………. on the other hand it is understandable that we have some expectations in this respect !!!
………. on the other hand it is understandable that we have some expectations in this respect !!!
Why do we talk about agency ?
Why do we talk about agency ?
How do we conceive gender ?
To make/do gender
Gender: as a social construct not as a attribute residing in one’s personality, self concept, or traits that determine gendered roles and actions.
It does not exists in persons but in transactions: we do gender (West and Zimmerman, 1987) while we talk/act (performative character: Butler, 1990 )
Gender is a salient social and cognitive means through which information is filtered, selectively processed, and differently acted upon to produce self-fulfilling prophecies about women and men.
Crawford e Chaffin (1997)
Gender system for organizing relations of power and status;
it functions at three levels: sociocultural, interactional and individual.
Sociocultural/structural: gender as a system of power relations.
Sociocultural/structural: gender as a system of power relations.
Gender ideology is disseminated, (re)produced e.g. through the representation of gender stereotypes in the mass media, patriarchal structures of family and religion, structuring of the workplace around gender inequality.
The authors underline that who hold position of power within academic disciplines participate in the social construction of gender (through rhetorical practices, publication policies, theoretical biasis, etc)
Interpersonal level: gender as a cue. People, treated differently in ordinary everyday interactions, come to behave differently in return. Gender is enacted, negotiated and recreated.
Interpersonal level: gender as a cue. People, treated differently in ordinary everyday interactions, come to behave differently in return. Gender is enacted, negotiated and recreated.
Individual level: gender as masculinity and femininity. People come to accept gender distinctions that are visible at the structural level and enacted at the interpersonal level as part of the self-concept. They ascribe to themselves the traits, behaviors and roles that are the norm for people of their sex within the culture.
Again we have to think accross disciplinary boundaries for keeping sight of the system as a whole.
Gender as a serious game, Sherry B. Ortner 1995
She suggests a model of practice that embodies agency but does not begin with, or pivot upon, the agent, actor or individual (…) she suggests serious games as an image to capture simoultaneously the following dimensions:
That social life is socially organized and construed, in terms of defining categories of actors, rules and goals of the games, and so forth
Social life is precisely social, consisting of webs of relationship and interaction between multiple, shiftingly interrelated subject positions, none of which can be extracted as autonomous ‘agents’
