Janemaree Maher
Biographic Data
| ID | 98136 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Janemaree Maher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Janemaree |
| FAMILY NAME | Maher |
| SIGNATURE | MAHER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6592-8390 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 297 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
The dynamics of peer-to-peer care
Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese (2020) define radical care as 'as a set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds' (16). Yet they sound a note of caution when they argue that 'because radical care is inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures, it can be used to coerce subjects into new forms of surveillance and unpaid labor' (16). This article explores scaffolded peer-to-pe…
Children as co-researchers and confessional research tales
In a study on children, families and food messages in Victoria, Australia, we utilised a multi-methods approach that included visual data produced by primary-school aged children. Working with 50 families, we provided each child investigator with an iPad for 3-4 days and invited them to photograph family food events important to them. The analysis of visual data alongside child and family interviews revealed the diverse meaning-making practices c…
Productive exposures
Theories of vulnerability are most often seen in the anthropology of disaster studies, where socio‐economic and political inequalities produce environmental vulnerabilities, and the people situated in these locations are positioned as vulnerable and dependent 'Others'. Rather than reproduce vulnerability as a concept denoting weakness, this paper seeks to examine the generative capacities of vulnerability practised in parallel in ethnographic and…
The ineffable allure of sugar - Hammer cake, That Sugar Film and contradictory pleasures
This article explores the complicated place of sugar in the display of family connectedness and health in a white, middle class Australian family. In the context of heightened anxiety about childhood obesity, we present the Baker family as a case study to explore the pleasures and tensions that sugar consumption produces in families. On their birthdays, each child has a luxurious “Hammer Cake” coated in chocolate studded with sweets; simultaneous…
Mothering through and in Violence
Domestic and family violence research recognises mothering is impacted by and implicated in abusive relationships and increasingly attends to the negative impacts of domestic and family violence on children, whether or not they are direct targets of perpetrator abuse. Contemporary research also situates the undermining of the mother/child relationship as common in abusive relationships. Bringing together data from two projects - one investigating…
The Emerald Handbook of Feminism, Criminology and Social Change
Comprehensive and current, this handbook combines a wide range of international contributors to chart the uneasy relationship between feminism, criminology and victimology. It explores both the historical and contemporary questions posed by feminist work and is essential reading for anyone interested in feminism, criminology and social change
Justice perspectives of women with disability
The article explores the meaning of ‘justice’ for women with disability who have experienced and reported violent crimes, typically, sexual assault and family violence. It contributes to the small body of literature that considers justice as articulated by those who have experienced violence and represents the only published research that brings to the fore perspectives on justice from the viewpoint of women with disability. Based on interviews a…
The use of protection orders in response to adolescent family violence
Several Australian state and territory jurisdictions permit parents of adolescents using violence to be listed as affected persons on a family violence protection order (the notable exceptions being Queensland and Tasmania), however, as yet there is minimal understanding of whether this is an effective response to this complex form of family violence. In seeking to address this gap in current knowledge, this paper has two aims. It analyses Austra…
The family meals imperative and everyday family life
At a time of increasing diversity in family forms and family practices the evening family meal is promoted as an imperative; a straightforward solution to complex social problems such as childhood obesity, family breakdown and depression. In this paper we discuss the challenges faced by families in achieving this imperative on an everyday basis drawing on visual data generated by children from a qualitative research project with 50 diverse famili…
Children, ‘healthy’ food, school and family
This paper draws on a multi-method study with 50 families in Victoria, Australia. Primary school children were asked about food knowledge from school and whether they felt motivated to bring knowledge home. Generally, children and parents felt school food messages are unclear, contradictory and not relevant to them and this reduced the likelihood of messages coming home from school. We identify a critical difference in how families thought about …
Sibling violence
Sibling violence is an under‐researched field, and the impact of adolescent family violence (AFV) in particular on siblings is not yet well understood. The Australian study Investigating Adolescent Family Violence in Victoria elicited responses from siblings who had experienced AFV from their brothers or sisters, as well as reflections from parents and practitioners on the difficulties of addressing AFV directed towards siblings. This article exp…
Lone Wolf Terrorism Through a Gendered Lens
Family violence risk, migration status and ‘vulnerability’
In this paper, we draw on accounts of family violence risk offered by women from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities living in Victoria Australia, and examine how women’s migration and experiences of difference impact on the risks they face from family violence. Women in refugee and immigrant communities are often understood as experiencing additional barriers and vulnerabilities when they face family violence; implicitly cre…
Victim stories and victim policy
Since the 1980s, victims’ voices have been increasingly heard and have been influential in policy debates. Since that time, the nature and presence of those voices has changed shape and form from the influence and presence of victim centred organizations to the rise of the high profile individual victim. The purpose of this article is to explore the presence of one victim’s story, Rosie Batty, and to examine her influence on the rise of the polic…
Working mothers, injury and embodied care work
In this article, we examine how mothers respond when injury interrupts maternal care, using the lens of embodied care, which we conceptualize as a form of ‘body work’. We draw on findings from a qualitative research project with two organizations in Australia that help people with injuries to return to work, examining the experiences of workers who are also mothers of dependent children. Mothers' inability to care for children during periods of i…
Criminology, gender and security in the Australian context
This article examines how it might be possible to make women’s lives matter in contemporary criminological understandings of security. In doing so it considers the conceptual complexity of security, and reflects on the criminological engagement with that complexity and the feminist contribution to it paying particular attention to current concerns with everyday security. The article deploys the contemporary Australian policy agenda on family viol…
From Hate to Prejudice
Official definitions of hate crime are viewed as overly narrow and unnecessarily exclusive. To enable more inclusive practices, many jurisdictions have embraced alternative terminologies such as bias crime, targeted crime and prejudice motivated crime. In this article, we examine how police agencies in Victoria, Australia, are grappling with incidents and responses to hate crime. Drawing on the accounts of high priority victim groups, we illustra…
Mothers caring through injury
In this paper, we discuss the value of qualitative research in a commissioned research project with the Transport Accident Commission (TAC) and WorkSafe under the auspices of Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR). The project was designed to examine existing quantitative data about the time taken to return to work by injured mothers and explore women's experiences of caring for children while seeking to recover from inj…
Policing hate crime
This article considers the implementation of police hate crime policy. Victoria, a state in Australia, provides a case study of a jurisdiction where police have introduced a Prejudice Motivated Crime Strategy without an animating hate crime offence. The article identifies the organisational, relational and operational challenges and opportunities that arise in the implementation of this strategy. The literature reveals that successfully policing …
Feminist Challenges to the Constraints of Law
Punishing Gendered Violence as Hate Crime
This article considers the use of aggravated sentencing provisions available under hate crime models to enhance punishment in selected cases of extreme violence against women. Grounded in an analysis of cases studies from Australia and New Zealand, this article adds to the literature on gender, hate crime and punishment by exploring the value of aggravated sentencing in key cases that mobilise public debate and disquiet about violence against wom…
Social class, anxieties and mothers' foodwork
In the context of concerns about childhood obesity, mothers are placed at the forefront of responsibility for shaping the eating behaviour and consequently the health of their young children. This is evident in a multitude of diverse sites such as government reports, health promotion materials, reality TV shows and the advice of childcare nurses and preschools. These sites produce a range of resources available to mothers to draw on to constitute…
The intersections of work time and care time
In post-industrial societies labour market de-regulation, the growth of non-standard work schedules and shifting gender patterns in the paid labour market are re-shaping family care practices and work/family balance. In this article, the work/family arrangements and practices of nurses are compared with those of builders in Melbourne, Australia. The concept of family time economies is used to explore the intersections of work time and family time…
Responsibility and resistance
Childhood obesity is identified as a key public health challenge. Women have been made responsible for this new aspect of ‘good’ child feeding. In this article we draw on a study of Australian mothers of preschool-aged children to explore how women integrate new demands for healthy eating into their daily feeding practices. We found that these women were highly responsive to discourses of responsibility for ‘healthy eating’ (and fearful of obesit…
Women's Care/Career Changes as Connection and Resilience
In this study, 20 nursing families were interviewed with a focus on the integration of family care needs and employment. The predominantly female cohort of nurses revealed considerable career change, employment breaks and the use of part‐time and casual work options as they worked to manage and integrate family care responsibilities with employment opportunities. Here, drawing on the stories of two particular respondents, I use Trentmann's notion…
Framing the mother
Currently in developed nations, childhood obesity is generating widespread concern and prompting social and institutional responses. Obesity is constructed as a broad public health crisis, but individuals are constructed as responsible for their own bodies and body sizes within this crisis. We are particularly interested in two aspects that focus on women as central to this phenomenon; the first is the imputation of maternal responsibility for th…
Social class, anxieties and mothers' foodwork
In the context of concerns about childhood obesity, mothers are placed at the forefront of responsibility for shaping the eating behaviour and consequently the health of their young children. This is evident in a multitude of diverse sites such as government reports, health promotion materials, reality TV shows and the advice of childcare nurses and preschools. These sites produce a range of resources available to mothers to draw on to constitute…
Between bodies and collectivities
Accumulating care
Women who mother and undertake paid work are often represented as moving between separate spheres of caring and paid labour whilst facing intractable temporal conflicts. Despite this conflict, often represented as a 'care time deficit', mothers in western societies have continued their movement into the paid workforce. I examine the different temporal modes of paid work and caring labour that women undertake and argue that there are temporal comm…
Time, caring labour and social policy
A mother by trade
Victim stories and victim policy
Since the 1980s, victims’ voices have been increasingly heard and have been influential in policy debates. Since that time, the nature and presence of those voices has changed shape and form from the influence and presence of victim centred organizations to the rise of the high profile individual victim. The purpose of this article is to explore the presence of one victim’s story, Rosie Batty, and to examine her influence on the rise of the polic…
The “New Man” is in the House
Many scholars and journalists argue that housework is slowly being transformed in the late-modern era, with men doing more housework, women doing less, and outside help being utilized more often. Much of this optimism is held out for the younger age groups, especially members of “Generation X” (those born between 1965 and 1979). Drawing on findings from interviews with 22 middle-class Generation X men, this article examines the meaning and value …
To be or not to be a mother
This article is based on a recently completed study of fertility decision-making in Victoria, Australia. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 100 women, it explores how dominant discourses of mothering influence women in their life decisions about children. While much research indicates that all women negotiate dominant ideals of good mothering, our findings suggest that such stereotypes need to be further broken down, since women with and …
Sibling violence
Sibling violence is an under‐researched field, and the impact of adolescent family violence (AFV) in particular on siblings is not yet well understood. The Australian study Investigating Adolescent Family Violence in Victoria elicited responses from siblings who had experienced AFV from their brothers or sisters, as well as reflections from parents and practitioners on the difficulties of addressing AFV directed towards siblings. This article exp…
The intersections of work time and care time
In post-industrial societies labour market de-regulation, the growth of non-standard work schedules and shifting gender patterns in the paid labour market are re-shaping family care practices and work/family balance. In this article, the work/family arrangements and practices of nurses are compared with those of builders in Melbourne, Australia. The concept of family time economies is used to explore the intersections of work time and family time…
Between provisioning and consuming
Contemporary Western societies focus considerable policy and media attention on the ‘epidemic of childhood obesity’. In this paper we examine the mobilisation of notions of responsibility and consumption in these discussions, and consider the implications they have for women as mothers. In particular, we are interested to explore the potential conflicts mothers face as care providers and nurturers when responsible care is framed as withholding or…
Visibly Pregnant
In recent years, feminist theorists have examined the use of visual technologies in pregnancy and argued that these technologies are reconstructing the meaning of pregnancy. The imaged body of gestation can be deployed to distinguish and separate maternal and foetal interests. Drawing on this work, 'Visibly Pregnant: Toward a placental body' argues that the use of visual technology also obfuscates that which it purports to make clear. The images …
Criminology, gender and security in the Australian context
This article examines how it might be possible to make women’s lives matter in contemporary criminological understandings of security. In doing so it considers the conceptual complexity of security, and reflects on the criminological engagement with that complexity and the feminist contribution to it paying particular attention to current concerns with everyday security. The article deploys the contemporary Australian policy agenda on family viol…
Lone Wolf Terrorism Through a Gendered Lens
Women's Care/Career Changes as Connection and Resilience
In this study, 20 nursing families were interviewed with a focus on the integration of family care needs and employment. The predominantly female cohort of nurses revealed considerable career change, employment breaks and the use of part‐time and casual work options as they worked to manage and integrate family care responsibilities with employment opportunities. Here, drawing on the stories of two particular respondents, I use Trentmann's notion…
Justice perspectives of women with disability
The article explores the meaning of ‘justice’ for women with disability who have experienced and reported violent crimes, typically, sexual assault and family violence. It contributes to the small body of literature that considers justice as articulated by those who have experienced violence and represents the only published research that brings to the fore perspectives on justice from the viewpoint of women with disability. Based on interviews a…
Children, ‘healthy’ food, school and family
This paper draws on a multi-method study with 50 families in Victoria, Australia. Primary school children were asked about food knowledge from school and whether they felt motivated to bring knowledge home. Generally, children and parents felt school food messages are unclear, contradictory and not relevant to them and this reduced the likelihood of messages coming home from school. We identify a critical difference in how families thought about …
Working mothers, injury and embodied care work
In this article, we examine how mothers respond when injury interrupts maternal care, using the lens of embodied care, which we conceptualize as a form of ‘body work’. We draw on findings from a qualitative research project with two organizations in Australia that help people with injuries to return to work, examining the experiences of workers who are also mothers of dependent children. Mothers' inability to care for children during periods of i…
Responsibility and resistance
Childhood obesity is identified as a key public health challenge. Women have been made responsible for this new aspect of ‘good’ child feeding. In this article we draw on a study of Australian mothers of preschool-aged children to explore how women integrate new demands for healthy eating into their daily feeding practices. We found that these women were highly responsive to discourses of responsibility for ‘healthy eating’ (and fearful of obesit…
Freeing Time? The 'Family Time Economies' of Nurses
This study uses the 'family time economies' concept for a nuanced investigation of family work-care experiences in 20 Australian nursing families. The family time economy captures information on the management and coordination of work and care responsibilities in families. Our study investigates how nurses were utilizing nursing flexibility to support time for caring for their families. We report on couple interview research which offered importa…
Policing hate crime
This article considers the implementation of police hate crime policy. Victoria, a state in Australia, provides a case study of a jurisdiction where police have introduced a Prejudice Motivated Crime Strategy without an animating hate crime offence. The article identifies the organisational, relational and operational challenges and opportunities that arise in the implementation of this strategy. The literature reveals that successfully policing …
Mothering through and in Violence
Domestic and family violence research recognises mothering is impacted by and implicated in abusive relationships and increasingly attends to the negative impacts of domestic and family violence on children, whether or not they are direct targets of perpetrator abuse. Contemporary research also situates the undermining of the mother/child relationship as common in abusive relationships. Bringing together data from two projects - one investigating…
From Hate to Prejudice
Official definitions of hate crime are viewed as overly narrow and unnecessarily exclusive. To enable more inclusive practices, many jurisdictions have embraced alternative terminologies such as bias crime, targeted crime and prejudice motivated crime. In this article, we examine how police agencies in Victoria, Australia, are grappling with incidents and responses to hate crime. Drawing on the accounts of high priority victim groups, we illustra…
I Don't Want Her to Be Overweight Like I Was as a Girl
Widespread concern about a childhood obesity ‘epidemic’ has focused attention on the bodies, weight and food behaviours of mothers and their children. In childhood obesity-related discourse, mothers' bodies are framed in relation to the bodies of children, most directly in claims that fat mothers produce fat babies. Drawing on data from a qualitative study involving interviews with mothers of pre-school aged children, this paper examines how the …
Visibly Pregnant
In recent years, feminist theorists have examined the use of visual technologies in pregnancy and argued that these technologies are reconstructing the meaning of pregnancy. The imaged body of gestation can be deployed to distinguish and separate maternal and foetal interests. Drawing on this work, 'Visibly Pregnant: Toward a placental body' argues that the use of visual technology also obfuscates that which it purports to make clear. The images …
We Don't Do Babies
In Dead Ringers , the question of gestation is central. In this paper, through the frame of the medical and filmic gazes, I examine how visual scientific knowledge and the maternal body explore and contain the inherently dangerous and threatening nature of pregnancy. The use of male subjects in this film acts as a primary defense against the implications of gestation. I examine the use of visual technologies as they structure the bodies and subje…
I wonder what he’s saying”
[W]here women face the judgement of their sisters’
(2004). ‘[W]here women face the judgement of their sisters’: Review of Helen Garner, (2004) Joe Cinque's Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law, PanMacmillan, Sydney. Current Issues in Criminal Justice: Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 233-240
The “New Man” is in the House
Many scholars and journalists argue that housework is slowly being transformed in the late-modern era, with men doing more housework, women doing less, and outside help being utilized more often. Much of this optimism is held out for the younger age groups, especially members of “Generation X” (those born between 1965 and 1979). Drawing on findings from interviews with 22 middle-class Generation X men, this article examines the meaning and value …
A mother by trade
Honouring White Masculinity
(2005). Honouring White Masculinity: Culture, Terror, Provocation and the LAW. Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 147-164
It's much easier to get help for the baby
There is a substantial amount of investigation of women’s experience of giving birth in Australia, and a developing understanding of women’s experiences of their own health in the postpartum period and use of health services. This article reports on a preliminary study investigating women’s post-birth health experiences. The study involved focus groups with thirty-two women involved in maternal and child health care groups. We found that all wome…
Prone to Pregnancy
To be or not to be a mother
This article is based on a recently completed study of fertility decision-making in Victoria, Australia. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 100 women, it explores how dominant discourses of mothering influence women in their life decisions about children. While much research indicates that all women negotiate dominant ideals of good mothering, our findings suggest that such stereotypes need to be further broken down, since women with and …
The Fertile Fields of Policy? Examining Fertility Decision-Making and Policy Settings
OECD data suggest a significant gap between desired fertility rates and the total fertility rate achieved in developed industrial nations. In a qualitative study conducted in Australia in 2002 and 2003, people were asked how family policies influenced their decisions to have children. Participants did not clearly associate their fertility choices and prevailing policy settings. But their decision-making was grounded in commonplace accounts of inc…
A pregnant man in the movies
Progressing through labour and delivery
Time, caring labour and social policy
Accumulating care
Women who mother and undertake paid work are often represented as moving between separate spheres of caring and paid labour whilst facing intractable temporal conflicts. Despite this conflict, often represented as a 'care time deficit', mothers in western societies have continued their movement into the paid workforce. I examine the different temporal modes of paid work and caring labour that women undertake and argue that there are temporal comm…
Modified Maternalism
Work life, family life and care are all being substantially re-shaped in Australia as in other post-industrial societies. Concern about work/life balance has increased as domestic gender relations slowly change, the breadwinner/homemaker model becomes less dominant and families undertake more demanding and flexible modes of employment and care. Using data from a qualitative study of nurses and their families this paper explores how families are m…
The Globalization of Motherhood
Part 1 Introduction:The Globalization of Motherhood Wendy Chavkin Motherhood: reproduction and care JaneMaree Maher Part 2. Cross National Care Labor Mothers on the Move: Children's Education and Transnational Mobility in Global-City Singapore Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Shirlena Huang Stratified Workers/Stratified Mothers: Migration Policies and Citizenship among Ecuadorian Immigrant Women Gioconda Herrera Part 3 Transationa Adoption Intercountry Adopt…
Between bodies and collectivities
Framing the mother
Currently in developed nations, childhood obesity is generating widespread concern and prompting social and institutional responses. Obesity is constructed as a broad public health crisis, but individuals are constructed as responsible for their own bodies and body sizes within this crisis. We are particularly interested in two aspects that focus on women as central to this phenomenon; the first is the imputation of maternal responsibility for th…
Between provisioning and consuming
Contemporary Western societies focus considerable policy and media attention on the ‘epidemic of childhood obesity’. In this paper we examine the mobilisation of notions of responsibility and consumption in these discussions, and consider the implications they have for women as mothers. In particular, we are interested to explore the potential conflicts mothers face as care providers and nurturers when responsible care is framed as withholding or…
Freeing Time? The 'Family Time Economies' of Nurses
This study uses the 'family time economies' concept for a nuanced investigation of family work-care experiences in 20 Australian nursing families. The family time economy captures information on the management and coordination of work and care responsibilities in families. Our study investigates how nurses were utilizing nursing flexibility to support time for caring for their families. We report on couple interview research which offered importa…
Sex Work
Sex work has always attracted policy, public and prurient interest. Currently, legal frameworks in developed countries range from prohibition, through partial legalisation to active regulation. Globalisation has increased women’s mobility between developing and developed countries at the same time as women’s employment opportunities in the developed world are shifting. Family and intimate relationships are being transformed by changing demographi…
Ambivalent Regulation
Despite continuing contests in Australian states over the validity of sex work as work, Victoria and New South Wales (NSW) have been part of a global trend for states to decriminalise and/or legalise the sex industry. This article argues that although Victoria and NSW are united by their ambivalence toward the legal validity of sex work as work for women, this ambivalence is expressed and organised in different ways in each state, with consequent…
Nurse mothers valuing care at home and at work
Contemporary discussions about family care in western societies are generally framed in discourses of scarcity, as changing social structures put pressure on how parental care is delivered while paid care workers face time pressures and deficits in workplaces. From a recent study of nursing families in Australia, I focus on the care practices of mothers who are also nurses. I examine how these female nurses understood and managed competing care p…
Privileging Work Not Sex
We present findings from a study of sex workers recruited in indoor licensed premises in Victoria. While the study addressed regulation, enforcement and working conditions, we focus on the value of flexible well-paid work for two particular groups of female workers (parents and students). We link this issue of flexibility to broader gendered employment conditions in Australia, arguing the lack of comparable employment is crucial to understanding …
Sociology (46 works) · Political science (37 works) · Psychology (29 works) · Law (23 works) · Medicine (22 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Social science (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Gender Studies (14 works)