This project will study discourses and practices of gender and ICT by looking at how the discourses of gender and ICT pertain to the everyday life practices of ICT and to investigate in what areas, how and to what extent gender plays a part in actual uses of ICT. The project will study variations at different levels or sites for such discourses and practices in a Nordic comparative and contemporary perspective. The choice of contrasts, in terms of countries and aspects to compare, are grounded in what prior research has established to be theoretically and practically central. The project will gather data that allow us to map public discourses, the discursively reported uses of people in specific local communities and to investigate ethnographically the actual practices of particular individuals and households. The project is theoretically grounded on a radical late-Wittgensteinian practice perspective that underlines the importance of contextualizing comparisons of practices. This theoretical perspective offers a way to grasp and analyze the diversity in gendering pointed to by post-structural theory without limiting it to a discursive or textual matter that is straining or free-floating, but rather by anchoring them to contexts where their resemblances and diversities are founded. The project consists of two themes – families (a context) and young females (a gender category) – four modules (public discourse, local discourses, ICT-practices and theorizing) and six sub-projects (see below). The design is empirically and theoretically a means to provide new knowledge with Nordic (and global) relevance – which can serve as tools for rectifying gender divides in ICT-use, and to contribute to new theoretical perspectives on the gender and ICT. |
