Laundry power and care
Relational materialism, temporalities and spatialisation of communal laundering
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8943332 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Wiktoria Glad (0000-0003-3636-081X, Linköping University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 127 |
| Pages | 171-179 |
| Publication date | 2021-11-05 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Geoforum (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-7185 • E-ISSN: 1872-9398 |
| Publisher | Elsevier BV (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.10.019 |
| OpenAlex | W3214161418 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 38 |
Laundering activities enact a range of socio-material relations and spatialisation of infrastructures such as provision of machines, water, energy, laundry and lately digitalisation. Drawing on a case study on communal laundry facilities in Sweden, this paper focuses on socio-material relations and explores laundry practices in Swedish rental housing, aiming for a theoretical contribution in the field of care, which could incorporate spatial and temporal aspects to be more inclusive. Theoretically based in topologies of power, with sensitivity to processes of spatialisation and temporalities, the analyses show how decisions about design, space and technologies influence everyday life of tenants. The paper illuminates how availability and access to laundry facilities were conformed and individualised to reach expected standards. Laundry spaces were subject to digitalisation and automation technologies introduced to meet efficiency and environmental demands and handle perceived problematic tenant practices. Conclusions are that relational materialism in the field of care and scripting processes would benefit from explicitly including theoretical thinking about space and temporality, conceptualised as choreography. The approach “thinking with care” brought backgrounded laundering phenomena to the fore and pointed out laundering as a matter we should care about. Digitalisation and automation facilitated control of shared laundry spaces and ambitions to individualise laundry made private spaces, such as bathrooms, more attractive to host laundering activities but backgrounded social dimensions of communal laundering
Architectural engineering · Business · Epistemology · Laundry · Materialism · Political science · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Temporalities · Temporality · Computer Science · Engineering · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure
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| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |