Publications

With the adoption of smart home technologies in the household, a new type of work is emerging, which has been termed ‘digital housekeeping’ or ‘digi-housekeeping’. Based on ethnographic data collected in smart homes, the paper analyses the ways in which digital housekeeping is associated with care in everyday domestic practices and what ideas of care are expressed in the visions, legitimation patterns and negotiations pertaining to the smart home.

This special issue takes as its focus the complex intermingling of private and public
and how digital technologies and their gendered design, use, and impact are enacted in what we consider the domestic, intimate, or personal sphere. The contributions
here include original research articles, case studies, policy analyses, and theoretical
contributions that challenge the traditional private/public dichotomies from a gender perspective and look into what role digital technology plays in re-conceptualising the notion of personal, intimate, or domestic in a contemporary digitalised society.

The aim of this article is to explain the gendered expectations on male teachers in primary schools and describe how male teachers construct their masculinity in relation to these expectations. The article presents the results of an ethnographic research in primary schools in Czechia. The results show that there are at least three most prominent areas—authority, effeminate behaviour, and care—where male teachers search for the appropriate and very narrow concept of masculinity. 

This paper is about how broader trends of anti-feminist politics and anti-feminist backlash are gradually being introduced into education as well. This article presents two case studies, Germany and Czechia. In conclusion, three re-masculinization strategies used to devalue femininity in education are presented. All strategies share an antifeminist core because they all devalue women and femininity and reinforce the current gender order.

This paper explores changes to the strongly gendered politics of representation in applied chemical research using visual material from company magazines of Czech-based chemical plants (1969–2000). The focus on visual representations gives us a novel perspective on the intersection of technology, gender and geopolitics. A detailed visual discourse analysis reveals that this visual representation is less about applied chemical research and more about femininity defined around a singular understanding of motherhood.

In this paper we explore what are some of the causes of the scarcity of women researchers in Czech international relations. We analysed a set of semi-structured interviews with international relations students and accessible syllabi. We identified some gendered barriers that might be blocking women researchers' access to the field, that are further exacerbated by the local circumstances of the foundation of the discipline, which shaped it as a predominantly masculine field with a specific gender-blind version of doing research and academic careers.

This policy paper is based on an in-depth analysis of working conditions and barriers to women’s career progress in research. The document consists of recommendations for action to advance gender equality in research for the state administration, key national players in research policy-making, and higher education and research institutions. The document aims to serve government bodies responsible for gender equality agendas. Overall, considerable support was given to measures concerned with combining parenting and research work.

The aim of the paper is to identify the problematic assumptions underpinning the discourse on the shortage of male teachers. This paper is based on qualitative ethnographic research conducted in kindergartens and elementary schools in the Czech Republic. The urgent need to get more male teachers into primary education is connected to the stereotypical belief that female teachers need to be 'complemented' by male teachers, because female collectives can be harmful without the presence of men.