Untitled: Women’s Work
This work is dance-based research into the lived experiences of women living and working in the Flint area, Michigan. It takes the body seriously as a site of lived experience to inform how we talk about women’s work. Untitled: women’s work is both scholarly art and artistic research. I used narrative inquiry, dance, and film as research methods. In it, women express what they hope for in a good job and the barriers they encounter in searching for and keeping them. Specifically, the research draws out two themes in bringing home the lived experience of working: rhythms and relationships and their continual establishment, disruption, negotiation, and maintenance.
Untitled: women’s work (originally called Living Jobs), is an interdisciplinary, multimedia work of scholarly art. While policy conversations about employment are ubiquitous, especially during election years, and there is a plethora of scholarship on all aspects of labor, the lived experience of working in all its complexities is difficult to capture. Yet, the immense popularity and staying power of such books as Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day (1974)) and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed: On (not) getting By in America (2001) underscores that there is an audience and need for narratives about particular individual experiences of work – precisely the type of fine grained detail that often gets left out of academic and policy debates but that art can capture.
This research was commissioned by University of Michigan CEW/NCRW conference on women’s ecomonic security, held May 14 – 16 2014.
Co-sponsors of the conference: Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, School of Social Work, Institute for Research on Women and Gender
Link to Untitled: women’s work film of the work and research process.
Link to Her life in Movement: reflections of embodiment as a methodology Chapter
Soma centred research project
The soma centred nature of the project addresses the belief that the lived experience is multi-layered, and that experience defies the positivist limitations of a single coherent narrative.
We use the language of dance and image as a methodology in order to address the multi-layered nature of the lived experience, particularly the translation from the original sensation of immediate empiricism that informs participants’ narratives, to the qualification of memories as they are solidified into independent events. It is in this translation of experience to communication that meaning can be locked into written text and in doing so become two-dimensional. From the soma centred approach of the research this is too early in the understanding process. By drawing on movement (dance) and image (film) the research seeks to provide for the somatic. Findings from the research will therefore be presented in the multi-layered format of dance, film and conversation.
‘Events turn into objects, things with a meaning. They may be referred to when they do not exist, and thus be operative among things distant in space and time, through vicarious presence in a new medium.’ (Dewey 1958 p.166)
This interdisciplinary research and presentation process allows for meaning to be operative beyond written text while not loosing meaning in abstract sensation. The nature of the topic “what makes a good job” affects people on levels from ethereal constructs of identification of Self to the physical needs of a hungry body. The arts are used in the research process to accept the challenges of translation of embodied experiences. This is done to acknowledge that the embodied being is not wedded to a chronological framework for meaning making nor relies on a totalizing discourse in order to communicate memory.
Methodology: A Narrative inquiry / ethnographic framework using interviews and ethnographic observation to inquire into ‘what makes a good job?’ Six participants drawn from the Detroit / Flint area will be consulted
