63. sociologický večer
What Happens When “Domestic Violence” Follows Women to Work?
host: prof. Lisa Brush, University of Pittsburgh
In the United States, conventional wisdom poses women’s employment as the solution to the social problems of both poverty and “domestic” violence against women. In this lecture, Dr. Brush presents evidence from her research about one of the big problems with posing women’s employment as the way to escape from poverty and abuse. The problem is a particular technology of coercive control men use against their wives and girlfriends: work-related control, abuse, and sabotage. The lecture sketches the conventional wisdom that considers women’s employment to be the escape route from the dual traps of poverty and abuse. Dr. Brush draws from her own research to look at three ways “work/family conflict” becomes literal, with important consequences for the assumptions of conventional wisdom about women’s employment. At the core of the lecture is Dr. Brush’s presentation of the thinking of the people who are most often the targets of shame, blame, and derision about poverty and battering: current and former welfare recipients. Dr. Brush puts forward their ideas about changing relationships and expanding life options, and grapples with the ways their emphasis on work puts issues of economic citizenship at the center of debates over dealing with the joint traps of poverty and abuse.
Monday October 1st 2012, 5.30 pm
Hollar building, room 112
Hollar, Fakulta sociálních věd, Smetanovo nábřeží 6, Praha 1 
