Books by Lara McKenzie
In recent years, there has been a widespread fascination with age-dissimilar, heterosexual romant... more In recent years, there has been a widespread fascination with age-dissimilar, heterosexual romantic relationships. This interest is not new - these types of couples have been featured in Western media for decades, even centuries - yet qualitative research into such relationships has been limited.
This book examines how the romantic relationships of age-dissimilar couples are understood. Based on a range of interviews, McKenzie argues that historical shifts toward greater personal autonomy in partner selection, within relationships, and in marriage and relationship dissolution have been greatly overstated. Through her focus on age-dissimilar couples, whose increasing prevalence have often been seen to be part of this shift, she suggests that these relationships are an avenue through which shared cultural understandings of relatedness, as well as individualism, might be further analysed. McKenzie argues for an approach that emphasises cultural continuity, and which accounts for complexity and contradiction in how age-dissimilar relationships and romantic love are understood.
Examining key issues of kinship, ageing and emotion, Age-Dissimilar Couples and Romantic Relationships will appeal to scholars of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Family Studies and Sociology.
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Book Chapters by Lara McKenzie
Researchers at risk: Precarity, jeopardy, and uncertainty in academia, edited by Deborah L. Mulligan & Patrick Alan Danaher, Jan 5, 2021
This chapter explores how precarious academics experience and conceive of risks in and to their r... more This chapter explores how precarious academics experience and conceive of risks in and to their research, drawing on fieldwork at three Australian universities. Focusing on humanities, arts, and social sciences scholars, I examine the practical and methodological limitations that employment precarity places on early career researchers in these fields, encouraging short-term research that is then often critiqued for failing to meet disciplinary ideals. Moreover, the rise of postdoctoral positions on large, applied projects means that researchers frequently work beyond their interests and expertise. I further point to issues with undertaking “risky” research as a precarious academic, as interviewees talked of being advised to avoid certain kinds of projects. The increasing number of precarious researchers, and lengthening period during which researchers remain precarious, means this has a profound impact on research. Overall, this chapter examines precarity in relation to both emerging risks to early career researchers’ careers and to research itself.
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Romantic relationships in a time of ‘cold intimacies’, edited by Julia Carter & Lorena Arocha, Dec 10, 2019
Recently, social scientists’ investigations of couples have emphasised historical changes like th... more Recently, social scientists’ investigations of couples have emphasised historical changes like the growing idealisation of romantic love, greater personal autonomy in relationships, and the rising significance of distance and divorce. Much of this discussion—particularly Eva Illouz’s theorisation of ‘cold intimacies’—centres on the idea that obligation and commitment are losing out to individualised relationships and short-term pleasure. The growing prevalence of age-dissimilar couples is seen as reflecting this shift. In interviews with age-dissimilar couples in Australia, however, I found that, alongside fulfilment and free choice, commitment and obligation are enduring themes in people’s accounts of their personal lives. Here I explore how these couples’ talk about the beginnings and ends of their relationships reflects a dual logic: that love should be lasting and fulfilling.
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Intergenerational responsibility in the 21st century, edited by Julia M. Puaschunder, 2018
Scholars of European, North American, and other global North universities have observed a signifi... more Scholars of European, North American, and other global North universities have observed a significant generational shift in academic staff’s employment conditions. Aspiring academics are now subject to extended or indefinite periods of precarious employment, in contrast with a shrinking pool of relatively permanent academics, who largely gained employment many decades ago. Yet relations between these groups are rarely explored in depth. In this chapter, I offer an anthropological account of Australian precarious academics’ understandings and experiences of academic work in relation to their more permanently employed colleagues. I draw attention to patterns of intergenerational hierarchy and dependence, which led precarious academics to feel frustrated and resentful. Their dependence on stably employed colleagues meant that they rarely raised these issues within their workplaces, but, rather, used online fora and collectivities to voice their critiques. Although limited in their reach, I argue that such critiques raise possibilities for future resistance and change.
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Being an Early Career Feminist Academic: Global Perspectives, Experiences, and Challenges, eds. R. Thwaites & A. Pressland, 2017
Abstract
The ageing and impending retirement of much of the academic workforce, as well as the gr... more Abstract
The ageing and impending retirement of much of the academic workforce, as well as the growing casualization of university staff, are two major issues impacting Australian universities today. These issues are particularly pertinent for recent PhD graduates who aspire to academic careers. While research has been carried out on this group in Australia, virtually all studies have been quantitative, or have focused solely on the casual academic. Such research has revealed a sharp increase in the proportion of casual academic positions over the past two decades (May, Peetz, & Strachan 2013). These casual employees are disproportionately female, and, indeed, women continue to be underrepresented in permanent academic positions across Australia (May 2011). In this paper, I offer qualitative insights into the experiences and practices of aspiring academics, who may or may not be employed as casuals. I draw on 17 semi-structured interviews conducted with both female and male early career academics in the arts, humanities, or social science.
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Journal Papers by Lara McKenzie
Nature: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, May 3, 2024
As COVID-19 vaccinations rolled out globally from late 2020, rules and recommendations regarding ... more As COVID-19 vaccinations rolled out globally from late 2020, rules and recommendations regarding vaccine use in pregnancy shifted rapidly. Pre-registration COVID-19 vaccine trials excluded those who were pregnant. Initial Australian medical advice did not routinely recommend COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy, due to limited safety data and little perceived risk of local transmission. Advice from local medical authorities changed throughout 2021, however, with recommendations and priority access during pregnancy. In Western Australia (WA), recommendations became requirements as the State government mandated vaccines for some workers, with brief availability of pregnancy exemptions. Through an examination of 10 in-depth interviews with WA pregnant women, we explore their decision-making and complex emotions regarding COVID-19 vaccinations, and how they balanced mandates, recommendations, and shifting considerations and perceptions of risk. Changing recommendations and rules-and media and popular interpretation and communications of theseled to confusion, including for medical professionals. Expectant parents had to negotiate the risks of COVID-19 disease, potential benefits and risks of vaccination, professional and personal costs of vaccine refusal, and interpret mixed medical advice. Our findings can inform the development and communication of public health policies and medical advice, and contribute to our understanding of bodily autonomy, risk, and decision-making beyond the pandemic.
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SSM - Qualitative Research in Health, 2024
The rapid transmission of SARS-CoV-2 demonstrated the world's interconnectedness, yet it also hig... more The rapid transmission of SARS-CoV-2 demonstrated the world's interconnectedness, yet it also highlighted the importance of distance and place in the spread of virus and the distribution, access, and uptake of vaccinations. We examine how people in rural spaces living in a high income country, Australia, thought about the state's governance of them during the pandemic and vaccine rollout, particularly regarding government's responsibility for them as citizens. Utilising interviews with regionally located Western Australians, we explore people's feelings of isolation, otherness, and subordination to governments perceived as distant and disinterested, as well as their sense of safety and seclusion. Distance-physical and imagined-plays a key role in rural understandings of individual-state relations and impacted responses to lockdowns and vaccine eligibility policies. We demonstrate how feelings of political distance and isolation were exacerbated by the pandemic-leading to resistance to government policies-and show how this informed and reflected rural Western Australians' self-understandings. We find that a sense of separation and subordination oriented people towards specific kinds of vaccine behaviours, including 'constructive deviance', in which people sought vaccinations on their own terms.
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Sociology of Health & Illness, Apr 7, 2023
Vaccination scholarship often explores how social networks foster vaccine refusal and delay, reve... more Vaccination scholarship often explores how social networks foster vaccine refusal and delay, revealing how social and institutional relations produce refusing or delaying parents and un- or under-vaccinated children. It is likewise critical to understand the development of pro-vaccination orientations by researching those who want to be vaccinated since such attitudes and associated practices underpin successful vaccination programmes. This article explores pro-vaccination sociality, personal histories and self-understandings during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia. We draw upon 18 in-depth interviews with older Western Australians, documenting how they articulate ‘provax’ identities in opposition to those they depict as ‘antivax’ others. Provax identities were clearly anchored in and solidified through social relations and personal histories, as interviewees spoke of ‘likeminded’ friends and families who facilitated each other’s vaccinations and referenced childhood experiences of epidemics and vaccinations. Access barriers relating to the vaccine programme drove interviewees to reimagine their provax status in light of not yet being vaccinated. Thus, interviewees’ moral and ideological understandings of themselves and others were interrelated with supply-side constraints. We examine the development of self-proclaimed ‘provaxxers’ (in a context of limited access); how they imagine and enact boundaries between themselves and those they deem ‘antivax’; and possibilities for public health research.
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Feminist Anthropology, Sep 22, 2022
Parenthood is a transforming and enduring experience worldwide, yet it occurs in culturally disti... more Parenthood is a transforming and enduring experience worldwide, yet it occurs in culturally distinctive ways. Anthropologists’ analyses of this aspect of social life need to attend to these distinctions by applying concepts that are flexible but offer meaningful insights. This article investigates the complexities of modern parent–child relations, making two propositions that expand the concept of parenthood. I begin by arguing that the term parenthood should be more widely utilized by anthropologists when investigating kinship, due to its specificity and ability to address and contest issues of care and inequality. The notion of parenthood can reflect a diverse array of practices far beyond those of childbearing heterosexual couples—fostering, adoption, surrogacy, queer parenthoods, and parenthood via assisted reproductive technologies (ART)—while acknowledging the continued salience of normative parenting relations. I propose that feminist anthropologists could use the term parenthood to challenge the gendered assumptions surrounding motherhood and fatherhood (which remain highly influential regardless of parents’ relationship forms and sexualities) and to recognize and facilitate less rigid, less binary parenting performances. Drawing on anthropological, sociological, and feminist works on kinship, reproduction, and gender, I thus advocate for the conceptual utility of the term parenthood and point to future directions for such research.
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Higher Education, May 31, 2022
The higher education participation and success rates of students in low socioeconomic status (SES... more The higher education participation and success rates of students in low socioeconomic status (SES), regional, rural, remote, and isolated areas-who often attend university later in life-is a persistent concern in Australia and beyond. This article focuses on matureaged students in low SES, regional and remote areas in Tasmania, Australia, proposing that universities harness local belonging when providing learning opportunities. It draws on a thematic analysis of 19 semi-structured interviews with current and prospective university students, and community stakeholders. The study identifies time and place-based barriers to studying on campus: students' commitments outside of university; and geographical, cultural, and financial challenges. However, existing local infrastructure, such as libraries, create opportunities for face-to-face interactions and learning support for students who study online in their regional or remote communities, provided by staff and local volunteers. These barriers and solutions are discussed using the concept of 'belonging', framed spatially and culturally. Current literature on regional and remote higher education students tends to emphasise 'not belonging' in relation to distant urban or metropolitan spaces. We argue that 'belonging' can be fostered in local spaces with local people. Utilising 'untapped' local learning support and existing physical spaces mitigates geographical, cultural, and financial challenges, and provides academic and emotional support. We propose a coordinated network of physical study places and local people, including: regional 'satellite' campuses; regional study hubs; local public libraries; and schools, where online students can be supported, connected, and engaged in their studies whilst located in regional and remote communities.
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Gender and Education, Mar 24, 2022
Recent scholarship on universities explores how academics’ families and partners restrict their c... more Recent scholarship on universities explores how academics’ families and partners restrict their careers and how academic labour limits these relationships, both in highly gendered ways. Such research less often considers how people’s close relations might unevenly support them in continuously relocating; dedicating unpaid time to ‘career development’; or taking on or influencing them to remain in short-term, poorly paid precarious roles. This paper explores precariously employed post-PhDs in Australia, investigating their gendered careers and personal lives. Drawing on interviews at three public universities, it shows how women with children and partners in particular raise concerns over how their relationships and work interact. Here, certain kinds of workers – men and single women, unencumbered by family responsibilities and restrictions on travel, and with access to financial resources – appear better able to navigate moves to more secure work. This paper argues that support from close relations is productive and restrictive for precarious academics’ careers.
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Journal of Family Theory and Review, Jul 14, 2021
This review explores research over the past quarter century on couples with age differences. I pr... more This review explores research over the past quarter century on couples with age differences. I present recent global trends in age-dissimilar couplings, illustrating a shift away from statistical marriage studies focusing on relationships' motivations, inequalities, and challenges, and largely underpinned by biological, economic, or demographic outlooks. Since the last review of age-dissimilar couples in 1993, there have been substantive qualitative developments. Scholarship looking beyond Euro-American contexts is increasingly common, as are approaches examining class, race, sexuality, culture, religion, and nationality, as well as age, marital status, education, and employment. This transformation informs new perspectives on power and partner choice. I argue that research now needs more fluid definitions of age differences, greater range in qualitative studies' geographies and methodologies, and continued consideration of the life course and intersecting differences. Examinations of age-dissimilar couples should thus focus on these relationships' varied configurations, explored through a range of social analyses.
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Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, Mar 10, 2021
In reflections on modern ‘neoliberal’ universities, narratives of quitting academia hold a specia... more In reflections on modern ‘neoliberal’ universities, narratives of quitting academia hold a special fascination. This is evidenced by the recent proliferation of ‘quit lit’: emotionally charged public statements elucidating people’s departures from academia. Yet scholarly examinations of quitting are exceedingly rare, especially those of precarious and ‘early career’ academics whose likelihood of departure is high. In this paper, I reflect on interviews with precarious academics in Australia, as well as reviewing worldwide Anglophone ‘quit lit’ authored by such academics. I distinguish accounts of quitting, leaving, remaining and returning, exposing how these labels reflect different positionalities and narratives. Uncovering the emotional dimensions of leaving and remaining, I reveal how emotions are expressed unequally depending on people’s capacities to depart and temporal proximity to leaving. Well‐rehearsed declarations of love and passion intersect with claims of no longer caring or losing hope, as well as with expressions of grief and anger. Expanding on literatures on the ‘hidden injuries’ of academia and the pernicious effects of ‘hope’ and ‘love’ on workers, I demonstrate how unequal expressions – in precarious academics’ ability to tell ‘quitting stories’ and to express less‐than‐optimistic emotional accounts – expose hierarchies among precarious academics and reflect their uneven capacities to resist.
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Anthropology in Action: Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice, Special issue: ‘COVID-19 and the transformation of intimacy: Lovers – deities’, Dawson, Andrew & Dennis, Simone (eds), Dec 1, 2020
This article examines the transformation of singledom during the COVID-19 pandemic, scrutinising ... more This article examines the transformation of singledom during the COVID-19 pandemic, scrutinising the impact of rules and regulations governing proximity, touch and sex. I focus on government responses in Australia, situating the nation’s experience in a global context. National discussions were strangely sexless, presuming widespread coupledom and emphasising the lost, non-sexual intimacies of families and older people. I contrast this to broader theoretical claims of a ‘transformation of intimacy’ that posit a move to atomised relations across the Global North, including a growing tendency towards singledom. Yet assumptions of coupledom clearly persist in Australian policy and social life. I reflect on transformations of singledom and living alone during and prior to the pandemic, exposing tensions between theorisations, local realities, and the governance of sex and singledom.
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Higher Education, Nov 2017
In recent years, research on higher education has increasingly examined the realities of internat... more In recent years, research on higher education has increasingly examined the realities of internationalisation, with a particular focus on international students’ experiences and internationalisation at home programs. These studies have explored the friendships of international students, including their relationships with both locals and internationals from other countries. However, local students’ perspectives and experiences of friendship are largely absent from this literature. The few accounts examining local students’ lives explicitly focus on improving their cross-cultural knowledge and engagement, or on rare cases of local–international student friendships. The overriding assumption in this literature is that the understandings and social practises of local students are major barriers to their relationships with internationals. This paper addresses this gap by exploring local students’ perspectives on the absence of friendships with their international peers. We utilise findings from a research project on internationalisation at home, involving interviews and focus groups with local and international students and staff at an Australian university. Focusing on locals’ discussions of potential friendships with internationals, we propose that these missing friendships are an important area of study. We find that these friendships are missing for several interrelated reasons: local–international friendships are considered unnecessary and are therefore unimagined by locals, who tend to assume that similarity and affinity naturally lead to friendships, and the structures and spaces that might facilitate friendships are absent. Ultimately, uncovering why these friendships are missing sheds fuller light on how relationships might be facilitated, potentially informing and improving universities’ internationalisation initiatives.
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Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Jun 1, 2017
Anthropologists and sociologists frequently suggest that marriage is undergoing rapid, worldwide ... more Anthropologists and sociologists frequently suggest that marriage is undergoing rapid, worldwide transformation. Yet, while trends in nuptiality and divorce are used to demonstrate its decline, heterosexual marriage based on romantic love remains a cultural ideal in many contexts. This tension is reflected in cultural products like television programmes, including the increasingly popular genre of reality romance television. In this paper, we focus on an Australian version of a recent programme format, Married at First Sight (MaFS), in which ‘singles’ are matched by ‘relationship experts’ and then meet for the first time at their wedding ceremonies. The show purports to document singles’ lives prior to, during and following their weddings. By considering the content and structure of the show, as well as public and media responses to it, we explore Married at First Sight Australia in the context of other reality romance programmes produced and popular in Australia. We propose that the show offers a discourse of marriage based on objective compatibility rather than individual choice, but nonetheless dependent upon scripts of romantic love. Further, MaFS reflects (uneven) realities and popular understandings of transformation in modern Australian marriage.
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Teaching Sociology, Feb 2016
Study-abroad and international-student programs are commonly understood to transform their partic... more Study-abroad and international-student programs are commonly understood to transform their participants into “global citizens” possessing “cross-cultural competencies.” Similar benefits are anticipated from “internationalization at home”—defined as any on-campus, internationally related activity—whereby international students engage with and thus enrich the lives of domestic students. In this article, we reflect on a research project tied to two coursework units, in which largely domestic undergraduate students undertake qualitative research with or about international students. When developing the project, we postulated that the researcher–informant engagement that characterizes qualitative research mirrors that required for effective domestic–international student engagement. In describing engagement, we utilize research on experiential learning, which suggests that experiences can become knowledge only through reflection, analysis, and synthesis. We examine the ways that cross-cultural engagement and experiential learning gained through students’ qualitative research might lead to the realization of the anticipated benefits of internationalization at home.
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Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, Special issue: ‘Peripheral cosmopolitanisms’, George, Molly, Fitzgerald, Ruth P., & Jaye, Chrystal (eds), Nov 2016
Anthropological examinations of romantic love often describe it as immaterial and transcendent, y... more Anthropological examinations of romantic love often describe it as immaterial and transcendent, yet simultaneously anchored in materiality. In this paper, I uncover how the concept of transcendence can elucidate studies of cosmopolitanism. Based on interviews with heterosexual, age-dissimilar couples in Australia, I explore shared understandings of relationships, focusing on the dimensions of age, nation, and distance. Interviewees spoke of their relationships as transcending – as well as simultaneously constructing – distance and (age and national) difference. I consider four examples that illuminate these dimensions, interrogating how these are thought to be transcended (or not) by Australian couples. Situating these cases in relation to existing cosmopolitan analyses, and to the anthropology of love, I conclude that further consideration of the notion of transcendence could extend and strengthen research in this field.
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Popular Anthropology Magazine, Jul 1, 2014
In recent decades, numerous social scientists have argued that people are increasingly free to ch... more In recent decades, numerous social scientists have argued that people are increasingly free to choose their partners, with social, cultural, and structural constraints being of less and less significance. Focusing specifically on age-dissimilar relationships, this article explores people’s shared understandings of who is selected as a mate. It is based on 24 semi-structured interviews, which were undertaken with people currently or previously in such relationships. Three apparently contradictory understandings emerged. First, partner similarity was seen as important. Second, the degree to which partners’ distinct characteristics complemented, or were compatible with, one another was understood to be significant. Third, interviewees expressed the view that, rather than being based upon a series of pre-determined criteria, love for a partner was “blind” to factors such as age, class, culture, and ethnicity. This paper explores these three shared understandings, focusing on how apparent contradictions were resolved or minimized by interviewees.
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Journal of Academic Language and Learning, Aug 2013
Much of the literature concerned with evaluating public and private schooling focuses upon year 1... more Much of the literature concerned with evaluating public and private schooling focuses upon year 12 examination results. Investigating the transition to university, some studies have compared these results with first-year university marks. Very few researchers, however, have looked beyond students' marks. This paper examines how “school type” affects student performance, participation, and experience in a university outreach program – SmARTS. SmARTS is run through The University of Western Australia's (UWA) Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (FAHSS). It engages year 11 students in a six-month research project, facilitated by the use of both e-learning and more traditional face-to-face methods. This paper is based on research that evaluated the 2009, 2010, and 2011 programs. The methods employed include analyses of student completion rates and results, as well as 198 student surveys, ten school coordinator surveys, and three group interviews with tutors. Based on schools' socio-economic backgrounds, fees, and examination results, we have divided schools into four types: top-tier private, second-tier private, top-tier public, and second-tier public. Our findings suggest that top-tier private and top-tier public school students have the highest levels of participation, the lowest drop-out rates, and gain the highest results in SmARTS, while the opposite is evident for second-tier public school students. We also found, however, that second-tier public school students reported to have gained more generic skills from the program than did other groups. Our findings suggest that analysing examination results provides only a limited picture of how students experience the transition to university. We argue that through research and practice such as ours, inequalities can be more accurately measured, and thus minimised, before students enter university.
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Books by Lara McKenzie
This book examines how the romantic relationships of age-dissimilar couples are understood. Based on a range of interviews, McKenzie argues that historical shifts toward greater personal autonomy in partner selection, within relationships, and in marriage and relationship dissolution have been greatly overstated. Through her focus on age-dissimilar couples, whose increasing prevalence have often been seen to be part of this shift, she suggests that these relationships are an avenue through which shared cultural understandings of relatedness, as well as individualism, might be further analysed. McKenzie argues for an approach that emphasises cultural continuity, and which accounts for complexity and contradiction in how age-dissimilar relationships and romantic love are understood.
Examining key issues of kinship, ageing and emotion, Age-Dissimilar Couples and Romantic Relationships will appeal to scholars of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Family Studies and Sociology.
Book Chapters by Lara McKenzie
The ageing and impending retirement of much of the academic workforce, as well as the growing casualization of university staff, are two major issues impacting Australian universities today. These issues are particularly pertinent for recent PhD graduates who aspire to academic careers. While research has been carried out on this group in Australia, virtually all studies have been quantitative, or have focused solely on the casual academic. Such research has revealed a sharp increase in the proportion of casual academic positions over the past two decades (May, Peetz, & Strachan 2013). These casual employees are disproportionately female, and, indeed, women continue to be underrepresented in permanent academic positions across Australia (May 2011). In this paper, I offer qualitative insights into the experiences and practices of aspiring academics, who may or may not be employed as casuals. I draw on 17 semi-structured interviews conducted with both female and male early career academics in the arts, humanities, or social science.
Journal Papers by Lara McKenzie
This book examines how the romantic relationships of age-dissimilar couples are understood. Based on a range of interviews, McKenzie argues that historical shifts toward greater personal autonomy in partner selection, within relationships, and in marriage and relationship dissolution have been greatly overstated. Through her focus on age-dissimilar couples, whose increasing prevalence have often been seen to be part of this shift, she suggests that these relationships are an avenue through which shared cultural understandings of relatedness, as well as individualism, might be further analysed. McKenzie argues for an approach that emphasises cultural continuity, and which accounts for complexity and contradiction in how age-dissimilar relationships and romantic love are understood.
Examining key issues of kinship, ageing and emotion, Age-Dissimilar Couples and Romantic Relationships will appeal to scholars of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Family Studies and Sociology.
The ageing and impending retirement of much of the academic workforce, as well as the growing casualization of university staff, are two major issues impacting Australian universities today. These issues are particularly pertinent for recent PhD graduates who aspire to academic careers. While research has been carried out on this group in Australia, virtually all studies have been quantitative, or have focused solely on the casual academic. Such research has revealed a sharp increase in the proportion of casual academic positions over the past two decades (May, Peetz, & Strachan 2013). These casual employees are disproportionately female, and, indeed, women continue to be underrepresented in permanent academic positions across Australia (May 2011). In this paper, I offer qualitative insights into the experiences and practices of aspiring academics, who may or may not be employed as casuals. I draw on 17 semi-structured interviews conducted with both female and male early career academics in the arts, humanities, or social science.
Undertaken as a PhD project in Perth, Western Australia, this research utilized semi-structured interviews, focus groups, media analysis, and surveys, all of which allowed me to examine how the romantic relationships of age-dissimilar couples were understood. Describing and reflecting on the research process, this methods case explores the problems and possibilities of undertaking interviews and focus groups in anthropological and sociological research on age-dissimilar couples and couple relationships more broadly. I pay particular attention to the various methods of interviewing couples, issues of couple recruitment, and interactions of age, gender, and power in undertaking qualitative research.
Describing and reflecting on students’ research practices, as well as our own observations whilst developing and teaching the units in 2014 and 2015, in this methods case we explore the challenges and possibilities faced by first-time (student) qualitative researchers, within and beyond coursework units. These relate to the practicalities of carrying out research in a short timeframe and with limited resources; the validity and comparability of analyses based on a single interview or focus group; and the difficulties of recruiting international or study abroad student participants. Student research findings indicate that international and domestic students rarely interact with each other on campus, highlighting a gap between the rhetoric and realities of the international student experience, with loneliness being a major issue among these students.
The growing prevalence and (apparent) acceptance of age-dissimilar couples has often been seen as reflecting this shift to autonomy. Yet, through interviews with Australian age-dissimilar couples, I find that, alongside autonomy and free choice, commitment and obligation remain enduring themes in people’s accounts of their love lives. I thus argue for an approach that emphasises cultural continuity, and which accounts for complexity and contradiction in how age dissimilarity and love are understood within and across cultures.
In this paper, I explore depictions of singles’ marriageability on the Australian series of Married at First Sight. Drawing on theories of marriage and romantic love, I highlight how the stated desires, actions, and appearances of singles establish them as potential husbands and wives. For instance, prior to their televised marriages, they are seen participating in social and self-improvement activities designed to assist them in finding a permanent partner. They repeatedly express their desire and readiness for marriage, and their despondency at not yet having married.
In this paper, I offer qualitative insights into contingent academics’ experiences of unpaid and unstable work, drawing on interviews carried out across three universities in Australia. I suggest that current approaches to audit and bureaucracy in universities only partly account for my interviewees’ experiences. Rather, much of their everyday work was characterised by an almost total lack of accountability and transparency, and access to institutional resources depended on favours and friendships rather than coherent and enforceable rules. While official entry into more stable academic positions was widely considered to require significant amounts of (self-imposed and -monitored) bureaucratic work, such work could on occasion be successfully avoided.
Thus, I argue that Australian (and possibly other) universities’ processes and practices of audit and bureaucracy are uneven and hierarchical, with contingent academics occupying partially ‘free’ (largely unaudited and incompletely bureaucratised) spaces. Such ‘freedoms’ were treated with ambivalence, however, with interviewees yearning for the predictability of the bureaucratic structures that they imagined their more stably employed colleagues enjoyed.
Aspiring academics' work and lives were understood and enacted as 'uncertain' and 'insecure', and concerns regarding the impact of academic work on domestic life were commonplace. Issues raised related to an inability to 'settle down', including problems of relocating with a partner or child, troubles maintaining 'work-life balance', and financial difficulties, which were experienced as a barrier to parenthood and home ownership. Moreover, women in particular raised concerns over how their families and relationships impacted their academic career prospects. Yet it was apparent that people's intimate relations not only restricted but supported their pursuit of an academic career, and that their academic ambitions both limited and produced intimate relations. As such, in this paper I explore how intimacy and career insecurity mutually inform and shape one another.
My analysis of age, gender, and distance centres on the notion of romantic love as transcendent. Here, I make use of Charles Lindholm’s (1998:248) conceptualisation of romantic love as ‘a vision of the beloved other as a unique, transcendent and transformative being’. Lindholm (2006:16) suggests that love is ‘one way of transcending the existential limits of the self’, and can be disentangled from sexuality and, by extension, physicality. Drawing on Lindholm’s (1998, 2006) arguments, I examine couples’ understandings and experiences of romantic love, which they spoke of as transcending time (gendered age differences) and space (distance), yet as also inevitably located in the temporal and the physical.
By framing my discussion in terms of transcendence, I aim to explore some broad features of contemporary romantic love. More specifically, I consider to what extent love was seen as transcending time and space, and how this was influenced by gendered age differences and distance. I build on Mary Holmes’ (2004:180) work on distance relationships, in which she questions whether distance allows couples to overturn the ‘normalising, gendered processes’ of intimacy. In the case of age-dissimilar couplings, gender roles commonly receive a great deal of emphasis, with male-older couplings being seen as male-dominated and female-older ones as egalitarian or female-dominated. Thus, these relationships provide a fruitful means of exploring the transcendence (or not) of gender and age-based social roles, and of distance.
the intersection of free choice and fate in people’s understandings of why their relationships were formed. I do so by drawing on twenty-four semi-structured interviews with people in age-dissimilar, romantic relationships, which I conducted in Perth, Western Australia.
I focus in particular on two potentially contradictory understandings that were widely expressed by interviewees: relationships are chosen and love is fated. In regard to the
former understanding, it was claimed by interviewees that their relationships were chosen and entered into freely. Decisions about partnering were framed as uninfluenced by the views of family members, friends, or wider society. Many gave examples of how they had explicitly defied family members, in particular, when they had first chosen to be with their partners. In regard to their understandings of love as fated, they suggested that they had inevitably and uncontrollably ‘fallen in love’ with their partners. Here, some provided examples of how actions that they saw as morally indefensible—such as cheating on their ex-wives or -husbands—had actually been beyond their control. This paper explores the interaction of these two understandings, paying particular attention to how they co-existed in interviewees’ perspectives. "
The rollout of vaccines against COVID-19 is prompting governments and the private sector to adopt mandates. However, there has been little conceptual analysis of the types of mandates available, nor empirical analysis of how the public thinks about different mandates and why. Our conceptual study examines available instruments, how they have been implemented pre-COVID, and their use for COVID-19 globally. Then, our qualitative study reports the acceptability of such measures in Western Australia, which has experienced very limited community transmission, posing an interesting scenario for vaccine acceptance and acceptability of measures to enforce it.
Method
Our conceptual study developed categories of mandates from extant work, news reports, and legislative interventions globally. Then, our empirical study asked 44 West Australians about their attitudes towards potential mandatory policies, with data analysed using NVivo 12.
Results
Our novel studies contribute richness and depth to emerging literature on the types and varying acceptability of vaccine requirements. Participants demonstrated tensions and confusion about whether instruments were incentives or punishments, and many supported strong consequences for non-vaccination even if they ostensibly opposed mandates. Those attached to restrictions for disease prevention were most popular. There were similar degrees of support for mandates imposed by employers or businesses, with participants showing little concern for potential issues of accountability linked to public health decisions delegated to the private sector. Participants mostly supported tightly regulated medical exemptions granted by specialists, with little interest in religious or personal belief exemptions.
Conclusion
Our participants are used to being governed by vaccine mandates, and now by rigorous lockdown and travel restrictions that have ensured limited local COVID-19 disease and transmission. These factors appear influential in their general openness to COVID-19 vaccine mandates, especially when linked explicitly to the prevention of disease in high-risk settings.
Australian authorities made COVID-19 vaccines available for children aged under 5 years old with serious comorbidities in August 2022. There is presently no universal programme for young children, but crucial to any rollout's success is whether parents are motivated and able to vaccinate. By examining parents' vaccine intentions, this study aims to inform current and future COVID-19 vaccine roll-outs for children aged under 5 years.
Methods
As part of the mixed methods project ‘Coronavax: Preparing Community and Government’ we interviewed 18 Western Australian parents of young children about their intentions in late 2021.
Results
Two thirds intended to vaccinate if and when they could, with one third intending to delay for reasons including risk and safety perceptions, fears about side effects and influence from their social networks. However, even those choosing to delay were waiting rather than refusing.
Conclusions
To improve uptake, targeted messaging should emphasise that COVID-19 can be a serious disease in young children, with such messaging drawing on the reputability and esteem of scientific and technical authorities. Such messaging should be oriented towards parents of children with serious comorbidities at the present time. It will be important to emphasise that government vaccine recommendations are based on supporting families to protect their children and keep them healthy.