Digital Technologies and Work-Family Boundaries: A Posthumanist, Performative Approach to Family Research

Our paper draws on a research project funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council that explores how boundaries are being made between work and family in everyday practices, and how technologies are implicated in constituting these boundaries.

Our paper will discuss the theoretical and methodological framework that we have developed to study work/family/technology figurations in the home, and that allows us to treat and study social and technological practices as mutually constitutive rather than separate. We draw on varying traditions of scholarship to do so such as: feminist science studies; studies of science and technology; material-semiotics; new materialism; and material culture studies. Our paper discusses how we make sense of family practices around technology use in light of this approach.

Our empirical study uses sensory, visual and participatory ethnographic methods (Pink 2009, Pink and Leder Mackley 2012, Leder Mackley et al 2013). Our overall approach is to invite family members to take part in the project as collaborators in the research by involving them in the selection of methods and production of artefacts. These methods include: a video tour of the home; using spaces, objects, photographs, and other artefacts to talk about work, family and technology; researcher- and respondent-regenerated photographs, films and diaries; individual and family interviews and conversations; and walk- or go-alongs as ways of participating in ‘A day in the life of …’ our participants. The study involves in-depth work with 5 households in North-East Scotland, with at least one child under the age of 18.