Description:

THE CENTER FOR GLOBAL CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION,
An Interdisciplinary Initiative of Northwestern University School of Communication,

&

THE BUFFETT INSTITUTE FOR GLOBAL STUDIES

Present:

SHANI ORGAD
(Media and Communications, London School of Economics)

HEADING HOME: LIVED EXPERIENCE AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN, WORK, AND FAMILY

Date: Thursday, November 30, 2017
Time: 3-4.30pm
Place: Kresge Hall, 2-351 (Kaplan Institute Lecture Room)
(Reception to Follow)

ABSTRACT: Women in today’s advanced capitalist liberal democracies are encouraged constantly to “lean in,” while media and government champion women’s empowerment and success. Given this cultural climate, why do so many women who have worked as lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and other professionals, give up successful careers after having children? In this lecture, Shani Orgad examines this puzzling phenomenon. Drawing on in-depth interviews with educated mothers in London who left paid employment and exploring how their accounts relate to media and policy representations, Orgad highlights a stark disjuncture between the promise of gender equality and mothers’ painful experience of continued injustice at work and at home. Although their experiences often fly in the face of contemporary ideals and cultural fantasies of “having it all,” work-life balance, self-confidence, good mothering, working in the gig economy, and marriage as an egalitarian partnership, these women continue to interpret and judge themselves through these same ideals.

SHANI ORGAD is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communications. Her first degree was in Media and Communications with Sociology and Anthropology from The Hebrew University, and she has a Masters and a PhD in Media and Communications from the LSE. Her research interests include gender and the media, media representations and contemporary culture, representations of suffering, new media, the Internet and computer-mediated communication, narrative and media, media and everyday life, media and globalisation, health and new media and methodological aspects of doing Internet research.

She has lectured on Media, Culture and Society, Media Representations in a Global Age, Internet, and Computer Mediated Communication and Globalisation and Media and Gender to undergraduates and postgraduates in both Cambridge University and the London School of Economics. In 2008 Shani won an LSE Teaching Prize for Outstanding Teaching Performance. Shani was awarded the 2016/17 LSE Innovator Award.

This event is a part of the Northwestern University-London School of Economics Initiative. The funding for this event is generously provided by the Buffett Institute for Global Studies, the Department of Communication Studies, and the Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC) at Northwestern University.

For more information, please contact Gabby Garcia at gabbygarcia@u.northwestern.edu.