Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement- Debating Domesticity: Neoliberalism, Gender, and
Politics of Home in Postsocialist Armenia
Jennifer Fluri (PI), Kaitlin Fertaly (co-PI)
Economic liberalization in formerly socialist states has produced anxiety among political groups
and individuals leading to a push for new regulations on family values, gender roles, and morality (Gal
and Kligman 2000; see also Hall 1997, Oza 2006, Ong 2007). Tensions around gender relations are
particularly acute in post-Soviet Armenia where various actors are currently debating practices of
domesticity and gender identities. The actors involved in these debates include international development
programs advocating for women’s participation in politics and wage labor, conservative political groups
promoting traditional gender roles and family values, and citizens who must navigate these transitions.
Economic shifts and changing gender roles also require citizens to endure within altered material worlds
where previous social reproduction practices are no longer successful or meaningful (Katz 2004; Povinelli
2011). Citizens face the need to find new strategies of provisioning, skills for wage and domestic labor,
and means to sustain themselves in a rapidly changing context. The proposed study will examine the
material and discursive contours of this new context in Armenia through two intertwined developments:
everyday practices of social reproduction and contemporary geopolitical debates about the home.
Various groups in post-Soviet Armenia have been contending with economic and geopolitical
anxieties caused by continual transitions. Many of these anxieties have manifested in new concerns over
gender roles and the socioeconomic and political meanings of home and domestic spaces. While many
scholars have thoroughly explored the effects of neoliberal economic restructuring in post-Soviet regions
on ethnicity, labor, and nationalism (e.g. Dunn 2004; Hann et al 2002; Verdery 1996; Platz 1996), few
scholars have paid attention to the connections between the intimate scale of gender and domesticity and
the geopolitical and economic changes in the region. This study will contribute to geographical analysis
of neoliberalization by examining the transcalar relations between domesticity, gender roles, and
economic restructuring (Mountz and Hyndman 2006; Nagar et al 2002; Pratt and Rosner 2013; Blunt
2005). Drawing on insights from feminist and critical geography scholarship, this study will investigate
how gender is spatially produced through economic and political change. More specifically, it will
analyze how the processes of neoliberalism and nationalism are redefining gender identities in
complimentary and competing ways. This project seeks to emphasize the discursive production of gender
and the material conditions within which people experience economic change to answer how disparate
discourses of domesticity affect gender roles within Armenian society. Because gender identities have
shifted as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the neoliberalization of the economy, the
proposed research seeks to address the mechanisms by which this has happened. The research questions
are as follows:
Discursive Productions of Gendered, Identities, Work, and Spaces
 What is the symbolic significance of the home and practices of domesticity in
geopolitical debates in Armenia?
 How has the home and domesticity been used by various actors—the state, independent
political groups, media, and individuals—to promote or resist neoliberal ideologies and
practices?
 How have the discourses produced by these groups codified certain forms of knowledge
about domesticity and created new gendered expectations for work and home life?
Gendered, Everyday Practices of Social Reproduction
 What are the impacts of economic restructuring on practices of domesticity and the
spatial politics of the home?
 How has the liberalization of the economy disciplined gendered domestic practices in
new ways?
 How does the home become a site for reproducing or contesting neoliberalism?
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Historical Context
The view that capitalism creates a ‘double burden’ for women shaped Soviet policies on domestic labor
(Marx 1978[1845]; Engels 1978[1884]; Lenin 1934). Lenin, for example, believed “petty housework
degrades” a woman, “chain[ing] her to the kitchen and nursery” where “she wastes her labor on barbarously
unproductive petty, nervewracking, and stultifying drudgery” (cited in Goldman 1993:5). Early Soviet ideals
for women’s domestic labor included moving it from the home to the public domain, linking women’s
freedom to their participation in wage labor, and diminishing the ideological reverence of motherhood
(Holland 1985; Goldman 1993). By the 1960s, however, the Soviet Union established policies for a new
category of “woman” whose participation in both wage and domestic labor was valued and revered (Goldman
1993). Soviet gendered subjectivities thus created a paradox: on the one hand, women could feel valued for
labor performed at home and at work, and on the other hand, they faced feelings of incompetence when they
were unable to complete all the necessary tasks set before them (Gal and Kligman 2000).
The significance of domestic labor was more easily recognized under the Soviet system in part due to
the unique relationship between public and private spheres. Because the central planning system was so
inadequate at providing for consumer needs, an informal, domestic economy became a necessary part of
everyday life (Kornai 2008, Verdery 1996). The informal economy largely consisted of barter and trade
between individuals or families based on a social relations and an accounting of personal favors (Ledeneva
1998). Significantly, the informal economy predominantly occurred in domestic spaces, reversing traditional
bourgeois understandings of public spaces as sites of production and private spaces as sites for consumption
(Gal and Kilgman 2000). Importantly, women became key economic actors as the home was made into a
sphere of life that was paradoxically in both opposition to and dependent on the state through the informal
economy. Using state-paid positions to obtain resources, they both produced economic goods and facilitated
extensive social networks of exchange (Pine 2000).
Neoliberal economic policies were introduced to former Soviet state in the 1990s drastically
transforming both the economy and social life. Basic neoliberal policies included privatization,
marketization and a drastic reduction in the capacity of the state. Importantly, however, it also included
social prescriptions such as the rejection “society” and the promotion of “individuals” who are free,
rational, and risk-taking (Stenning et al. 2010, 4). The notion of an autonomous, neoliberal subject was
extremely antithetical to the legacies of socialism because the socialist state indoctrinated collectivity as
inherent to socialist citizenship (Yurchak 2013, Dunn 2004). Moreover, collectivity—experienced most
acutely through informal social networks of exchange—was a necessary aspect of daily life because
people relied on others to navigate an erratic and incomplete centralized economy. Consequently, the
force and speed with which neoliberal policies were pushed into formerly communist regions produced
“violence of the economy” (Zizek 2008) as income disparities grew, the social safety net disappeared, and
moral communities frayed due to displacements and exclusion (Creed 2002, Kideckel 2002).
The recognition of the value of gendered labor also shifted with the introduction of neoliberalism
resulting in transformed gender roles and labor relations. Women were initially pushed out of paid labor
positions as growing nationalist sentiments reinforced the ideological significance of women’s roles as
wives, mothers, and bearers of tradition (Rudd 2000, True 2003, Gal and Kligman 2000). The prevailing
nationalist ideologies promoted a return to ‘traditional families’, where “the category of ‘woman’ became
a pivotal site where tradition and modernization are debated” (Kuehnast and Nechemias 2004, 3). New
state policies and nationalist ideologies “promoted the sexual objectification of women and support to
new dominant western – and aspiring western – masculinities in the market place” (True 2003, 23). In
other words, men were free to become modern subjects while women were encouraged to remain
traditional caretakers. Despite the necessity of women’s domestic labor in daily practice, gendered labor
performed in the home was no longer viewed as productive, valuable labor. Instead, neoliberal ideologies
subordinate domestic labor as “merely” consumption; domestic work no longer produces what the
centralized economy could not because consumer needs are fulfilled through the market.
In the context of neoliberalization in the former Soviet Union, gender roles and women’s place in
society have shifted several times to meet the social and political ideologies of the nation and
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differentiated economic policies. Shifts tied to the processes of marketization the dissolution of social
networks placed increased and uneven pressure on men and women to manage social reproduction;
previous household strategies such as queuing, hoarding, and informal exchange were replaced by social
relations based on monetary exchange, shopping, and individual choice. Despite the ideological pressure
for women to remain at home as caregivers, economic changes made it necessary for women to enter the
market place as consumers. Conservative groups use the idea of women as consuming and desiring
subjects to spread fear of the “westernization” of traditional family values, to criticize economic
liberalization, and to argue for more rigid gender roles where women’s place is in the home. In this
neoliberal context, practices of domesticity and women’s roles in society have become key sites of
discursive debate between collective and individual identities, command and free market systems,
tradition and modernity, and nostalgia for the past and anxieties in the present.
Literature Review
Theoretical Approach
To analyze both the material and discursive contours of neoliberalization in Armenia, the
researcher employs feminist and critical geography approaches. Together, these fields of thought
facilitate the investigation of how economic transformations materially affect everyday lives and how
gender subjectivities are reworked discursively through those same practices. Political economic theories
of capitalism foreground the significance of human labor for the production of value, which this study
draws upon to examine transformations in the value of human labor, specifically domestic practices and
skills of social reproduction (Elson 1979, Harvey 1982, Wright 2006). Feminist post-structuralism
analyzes how feminine and masculine subjectivities are wound into the networks of material production
occurring across scales from the most intimate bodily functions to flows of global capital (Pratt 2004).
The feminine subject is always “matter of production” (Butler 1993). By considering how laboring
bodies are discursively and materially produced, it is possible to conceptualize the ways that economic
restructuring and political discourse can produce new gendered subjects.
The proposed research contributes to existing literature within cultural geography (Meah 2013;
Blunt 2005; Lefebvre 1991[1974]), feminist geography (Katz 2004, Wright 2006, Pratt and Rosner 2013),
and economic geography (Brenner et al. 2010; Ong 2006; Harvey 2005) on the values of gendered labor
in a neoliberal economy, the interconnections between geopolitics and domestic spaces, and the spatial
politics of the home during and after economic and political transitions.
Neoliberalism and Neoliberalization
As a concept and an economic theory, neoliberalism emerged in the 1960s. Milton Friedman and
Gary Becker of the Chicago School drew on the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek to propose an economic
theory that saw self-interested individual actions as the key mechanism for most efficiently distributing
public resources (Harvey 2005). The central elements of neoliberalism as a political and economic
philosophy include the belief that the market is better than the state at distributing public resources and
the assumption that individuals can and should act to maximize their own self-interests. The Chicago
School’s theory of neoliberalism was used to attack “big government” and the bureaucratic welfare state
through Reaganomics and Thatcherism in the 1980s. Neoliberalism was also used to restructure and
privatize the public state sector in order to increase corporatization. Those same policies were imported
to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s under the title “the Washington Consensus”
and there were used as “adjustment” strategies for transforming the socialist economy through
privatization and deregulation (Wedel 2001).
As the predominant economic policy in the post-Soviet region and around the world,
neoliberalism is primarily understood in three ways. First, Marxist thinkers see neoliberalism as a global
hegemonic project which has become “common sense” to politicians, policy makers, and the public” and
one that produces violent structural inequalities (Harvey 2005, Smith 2000, Zizek 2008). Second,
scholars informed by post-structuralist theories conceive of neoliberalism as a technique of governance
where the “shrinking” of the state is accompanied by the growth of a number of new techniques for re-
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making citizen-subjects as free, self-managing, and enterprising. In this sense, neoliberalism is an array
of techniques for optimizing life in various forms that cannot be reduced to a “uniform global condition”
(Ong 2006, 14; see also Larner 2003). Third, neoliberalism is conceptualized as an “unruly and
unpatterned” process (Brenner et al. 2010, 36) that is geographically and historically differentiated,
locally complex, and never truly independent.
For this project, the researcher approaches neoliberalism as a process that is geographically,
culturally, and historically differentiated. When seen as an uneven process, it is possible to investigate the
ways that neoliberalism is perceived, experienced, and lived by “ordinary” citizens whose rights, roles,
and responsibilities are reshaped in the process. This approach emphasizes the ways that neoliberalism is
domesticated—how it is “negotiated, constituted, and made possible through the practices of everyday life
and social reproduction” (Stenning et al 2010, 3; see also Creed 1998, Gibson-Graham 1996)—in order to
evaluate both the inequalities that it produces as well as how new modes of governance discipline
practices of domesticity and gendered labor in new ways. Keeping both the ideological and
technological notions of neoliberalism at the center of the analysis allows the researcher to ask how new
kinds of gendered subjects may be produced through various techniques of discipline and regulation and
how economic restructuring has affected the material conditions for the practices of domesticity.
Debating Domesticity
The home has gained increased critical attention recently in geography and the social sciences
(Cieraad 1999; Miller 2001; Llwellyn 2004; Blunt and Varley 2006; Brickell 2012; Bryden 2004) as a
complex space that captures a range of meanings, experiences, and relations including “belonging and
alienation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear” (Blunt 2005, 6). In previous scholarship, however, the
home was often dismissed as insignificant because it was a “private” space, outside the realm of politics
and economics. Feminist scholars challenged that assumption by arguing that ideas about “formal” and
“public” politics rely on gendered constructions of “informal” and “private” making it impossible to
separate those two terms because public activities rely crucially on private ones (Staeheli, Kofman, and
Peake 2004).
If the home is instead conceived of as a transcalar site, it can demonstrate the fluidity of public
and private sphere and the ways that they are relational and mutually constituted (Dyck 2005, Marston
2003, Martin 2002). A significant body of literature now demonstrates precisely that point: the home
traverses scales from the domestic to the global such that it can no longer be conceived of as a bounded,
fixed, or confining location (Pratt 2004; Wheelock and Oughton 1996). At a domestic scale, the home has
been used to explore work, material culture, paid domestic labor, housing, and household structures. At a
national scale, the symbolic importance of the home has been used to inform debates about citizenship,
nationalist politics, and identity. Beyond the nation, geographies of home have been used to explore
diaspora communities and multiple places of belonging to global patterns of domestic labor in a new
neoliberal global economy.
In the context of globalization, feminist geographers have long shown that the loss of sovereignty
and control over foreign influence during the liberalization of the economy can prompt various attempts
to regain control over national identity and culture by reestablishing stricter control over women’s bodies
(Mayer 2000; Enloe 1993; Yuval-Davis 1997; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). Oza’s (2006) analysis of
the neoliberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, for example, shows how a “new liberal Indian
woman” is discursively represented through her practices of domestic consumption. The liberalization of
the economy has provided a space for women to express their desires through consumption. Yet, to
circumscribe the “new” woman’s desire, her consumption must be in relation to the patriarchal
household; the new Indian woman is a confident, rational actor in the market, but one who acts there on
behalf of her family in her expected role as mother and wife. The politics of domiciles and domesticity
thus demonstrate critical connections between debates over family values, economic restructuring, and
daily life particularly in the context of globalization and neoliberalization (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Pratt
2004). The politics of domiciles and domesticity thus demonstrate critical connections between debates
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over family values, economic restructuring, and daily life particularly in the context of globalization and
neoliberalization (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Pratt 2004).
To contribute to feminist conceptualizations of gender identity and the home, the proposed study
will investigate the symbolic significance of the home in contemporary Armenia and how various actors
have used it to support or contest the processes of neoliberalization. While the above examples show that
gender roles are expected to be flexible to meet contemporary political and economic needs (Blunt 2005;
Wright 2006, Barndt 2001; Davies et al 2005; Cupples 2005), more work is needed to understand how
domesticity and the spatial politics of the home are used to produce or contest national and/or neoliberal
identities as women are disciplined through responsibilities within the home such as maternity and
consumption. Following the re-materialization of studies in cultural geography (Whatmore 2006), the
proposed research will also go beyond examining the discursive production of subjectivities to examine
how political economic transitions and discursive shifts affect the material conditions through which
people experience and endure in the world by examining practices of social reproduction.
Social Reproduction and Practices of Everyday Life
Social reproduction refers to the “broad range of practices and social relations that maintain and
reproduce particular relations of production along with the material social grounds in which they take
place” (Katz 2004, x). It includes practices such as shopping, caring, gardening, or cooking through which
social and biological lives are reproduced both in the long term and on a daily basis. Social reproduction
also encapsulates the “indeterminate” practices of everyday life as well those more structured practices
that develop or evolve in relation to systems of production (Katz 2001, 71; see also Marston 2003).
Studies of social reproduction have a long, though often subordinate, history within economic
studies. Marx (1978[1845]) and Engels (1978[1884]) were the first to draw attention to the ways that
capitalism creates a “double burden” for women, first through class oppression and then through gender
inequalities. Despite this early awareness of gendered issues, women’s issues were often overlooked or
ignored in conventional economic studies that emphasized the economic “base” and formal spheres of
production. Feminists of the 1970s and 1980s drew on the Marx and Engels’s work to argue that
women’s lives and the “sphere of reproduction” was equally important to understandings of capital as was
labor performed in factories or other more formal sites (e.g. Hanson and Monk 1982). Their intention was
to highlight the significance of women’s reproductive activities to the daily and generational reproduction
of the labor force. Unfortunately, their approach tended to reinforce the notion that social reproduction
“belonged” to capitalism. Early theoretical approaches were thus successful at making women’s
reproductive labor visible, yet were not as useful at rescuing it from its subordinate status in relation to
capitalism (Gibson-Graham 1996, 35).
More recently, studies of gendered labor informed by post-structuralist approaches argue that the
“economy” is best understood not as a finished and coherent process but as a range of diverse practices
that includes productive and reproductive labor, capitalist and non-capitalist processes (Gibson-Graham
1996; Nagar et al. 2002; Rankin 2003; Lee et al. 2008; Mitchell 2002). This perspective has the advantage
of decentering what is normally taken for granted as “the economy” (gross domestic product measures,
finance, employment rates, etc.) by looking at the diversity of practices, negotiations, and factors that coexist with more dominant economic practices but are obscured from view. Thus social reproduction can
move from its subordinate role in theories of capitalism to a set of historically and geographically specific
practices that are mutually constituted with the relations of production. A notable example of informal
economic practices that originated in the Soviet period are blat networks, a distinctive form of exchange
based on personal relationships that have persisted into the post-Soviet period (Ledeneva 1998; see also
Wedel 1992, Caldwell 2004, Round et al 2008). Without taking these practices into consideration it
would have been impossible to understand how the system of centralized planning operated and why it
ultimately failed.
Practices of social reproduction are not only necessary to understandings of economic
transformations but they also usefully indicate how state and market driven policies are challenged or
contested through the rhythms and “tactics” of everyday life (Lefebvre 2004; de Certeau 1984). If social
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reproduction involves “intelligent embodied experience and knowledge, networks, power and resources,
and inherited ways of being” that are historically, culturally, and geographically variable (Stenning et al,
2010, 61; see also Bourdieu 1977), then it is possible to see how economic transformations are negotiated,
opposed, or produced through everyday reproductive practices (Povinelli 2011). In the former Soviet
Union, for example, previous scholarship has examined the practices of “making do” including the reusing, re-making, or other negotiations of products, representations, and activities of the established
status-quo (Caldwell 2004; Clarke 2002; Smith 2000; Fertaly 2012).
Practices of social reproduction are significant to the proposed study for two reasons. First, they
are necessary to understand macro-scale or national-scale political and economic processes because of the
ways that social reproduction both shapes and is shaped by the larger political economic structures (Katz
2004; Marston 2003; Kofman 2006; Bakker 2007). Through documenting and understanding the practices
of social reproduction, it is possible to see how economic transformations are made, negotiated, or
contested through everyday activities taking place within domestic spaces. Secondly, focus on social
reproduction makes it possible to document changes such as reduced state support, fewer economic
opportunities, and increased time-to-labor burdens. These social, economic, and political changes have
led to a growing cultural backlash against liberal gender roles and family values. An investigation of
social reproductive practices will answer how economic restructuring impacts the material practices of
domesticity and encourages new gender roles, relations, and disciplinary practices.
Field Site Justification
Armenians have experienced three different political economic regimes including state socialism as a
Soviet republic, state collapse (1991-1994), and currently a capitalist, market-driven economy (Dudwick
1994, 1997; Platz 1996). Because of these transitions, Armenia represents an important site for exploring how
economic transformations have affected daily life. Finally, Armenia remains a relatively safe and stable
country in contrast to other regions of the former USSR with growing conservative movements, which makes
a successful project here more feasible.
Within Armenia, fieldwork for this project will primarily take place at two sites—Sisian, the provincial
center of the southern region of Sunik, and Yerevan, the capital city. Using data from both an urban and rural
site will allow the researcher to understand how economic restructuring produces uneven, yet spatially
interconnected, social and material practices (Hart 2001, Smith 1984). Women in rural and urban areas have
very different economic opportunities and face very different ideologies concerning their roles in society. In
fact, preliminary fieldwork conducted in 2012 suggests that conservative values are more deeply entrenched
in rural areas where women’s movements are more regulated, while greater opportunities to participate in
wage labor in Yerevan give women more freedom to leave the home. Importantly, however, political protests
over social values and gender roles are primarily taking place in Yerevan, making it a key site for
investigating contemporary debates. Data from the two sites will be compared in order to analyze the
disparate manifestations of economic transformations and their differential effects for women’s daily lives.
Methodology and Methods
A qualitative approach allows for nuanced understandings of how neoliberal transformations are
experienced within the household and how participants respond to those changes through their everyday,
material practices (Berg 2004; Denzin and Lincoln 2005). This study will triangulate data gathered from
interviews, participant-observation, and a news database to understand how the value of women’s
domestic labor has been renegotiated as a result of economic restructuring and growing social
conservatism. This research method is necessary to examine the nuances of daily practices and the social
and material relations that can be obscured in questionnaires, surveys, and heavily structured interviews
(Meah 2013; Christie 2006; Gregson and Rose 2000). The qualitative research methods used here are
also informed by feminist epistemologies, which emphasize the importance of including the “everyday”
and gendered sites such as the home into macro-scale, and at times, masculinist theoretical and empirical
approaches (Nast 2004; Sharp 2005; Doucet and Mauthner 2006). More specifically, feminist
epistemologies guided the researcher’s decision to use participant-observation, open interview structures,
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and time-space diaries as these methods allow more space for participants’ opinions to be heard. To
ensure participants’ voices are included in all aspects of data collection and analysis, participants will be
asked to give feedback on preliminary analysis and on early drafts of written work (e.g. Nagar 2002;
Staeheli and Nagar 2002).
Participant Criterion, Sampling, and Basic Analysis Procedures
The researcher will examine Armenian society by way of three categories: 1) ordinary citizens 2)
government, and 3) NGOs and independent political groups. Citizens selected for participantobservation, oral-history interviews, or semi-structured interviews will come from diverse backgrounds
including various income levels, family structures (nuclear, multi-generational, single-parent, etc.), and
work histories (involvement in different types of paid and unpaid labor including government work, local
business, informal networks, etc.) (Bradshaw and Stratford 2010). The researcher will use criterion and
chain sampling as methods for locating subjects from across these different backgrounds (Cresswell 2013;
Russell 2002). All established IRB guidelines for receiving consent from participants and protecting their
identities and personal information will be followed.
Collected data from magazines, interviews, field notes, and other sources will later be translated
and transcribed as necessary, then analyzed based categorization using NVivo10 software (Rubin and
Rubin 2011; Waitt 2010). The categories will indicate the context of that data (who, where, and when),
practices and interactions (an event, who influenced the event, and actions performed at the event),
attitudes (statements of judgment made about an action or event), and experiences (statements of feelings
about the action or event). These categories will be developed into codes useful for organizing data along
lines of similarity or relationships (Cope 2010). Using this method, transcripts and notes will be analyzed
to find repeated codes and relationships (Peace and van Hoven 2010). More specifically, the researcher
will look for relationships in the data that reflect how new narratives for gender roles and expectations are
developed in popular news and media sources by looking for similarities across age, gender, employment,
family roles, etc. Similar patterns will be analyzed from data collected via participant-observation and
interviews to assess how new discourses are affecting material practices. Preliminary data analysis will be
used to inform current hypothesizes, adjust interview questions, and refine observations in an iterative
feedback process.
Methods for Addressing the Discursive Production of Gender Identities, Work, and Space:
Semi-structured interviews with representatives from NGOs, government agencies, and political
groups will be analyzed to address how various actors are currently using the symbolic and material
importance of the home to promote social and economic agendas. Interview data will be compared to
news and magazine particles pertaining to gender policies and popular forms of domesticity. The
researcher will rely on discourse analysis to assess they ways that dominant narratives or forms of
knowledge become privileged over others.
Semi-structured interviews with participants from selected institutions will investigate the goals
of the organization as they relate to gender issues, policies, or debates (Dunn 2010). Participants who are
government, NGO, or political group representatives will be selected based on their involvement in
development projects or policy making that directly or indirectly target women. Such development
institutions will include the Center for the Development of Civil Society, Rural Areas Economic
Development Programme, World Vision, the Women’s Rights Center, and USAID. The researcher will
also interview government representatives from the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs and the Ministry
of Culture. Representatives from the Republican Party of Armenia and the Prosperous Armenia Party—
both socially conservative political groups—will also be interviewed.
The researcher will also collect a database of news and magazine articles pertaining to the
current debates around gender policies, social values, and women’s transforming role in the home,
politics, and the economy from the last 5 years. The articles will come from popular magazines like
Yerevan, Orer, and Ianyan and from news sources such as Tert News and Armenia Now (independent
news sources) and Armenpress, the state-run news source. Articles will be entered into NVivo10,
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translated, and coded according to topic, actors involved, and opinion on the debated gender policy or
issue. Data from magazines and news sources will be used to understand how contemporary debates
around gender issues are discursively framed and contested by various groups. Discourse analysis of this
material will address who made the text, who commissioned it, who the intended audience is, if (or
where) the narratives appear elsewhere, what the (intended) relationship between the text and the reader
is, and other categories or relationships as they become meaningful (Waitt 2010).
Methods for Investigating Gendered, Everyday Practices of Social Reproduction
Semi-structured interviews, time-space budget diaries, and participant-observation will address
how economic restructuring has influenced practices of domesticity and encouraged new gender roles,
relations, and disciplinary practices. Using these methods, the researcher will assess the practical,
material means through which the home is a site for producing or contesting neoliberal economic policies
and practices (Meah 2013; Kearns 2010).
Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with ordinary citizens (n=80-100; divided between
participants in each Yerevan and Sisian) and will be used to understand how households and individuals
perceive and experience changes associated with economic restructuring. Interview questions will explore
the participants’ current economic situation, their current and past practices of economic survival, the
ideological value of their paid and unpaid work, and the social climate surrounding gender roles and
responsibilities in their community. Data will be collected in the form of interview notes, digital audio
recordings, and photographs (with consent). Interviews will be summarized, translated, transcribed, and
coded. Content analysis will be based on the types of work performed, participation in formal and
informal economic practices, the value ascribed to different types of labor, and views on gender roles and
economic opportunities. Follow-up interviews will be conducted with selected individuals and will be
used to clarify previous responses, to ask for additional information, and to engage select participants in
preliminary data analysis.
Participant observation will be used as the primary methods for addressing the ways
neoliberalization has disciplined gendered domestic practices in new ways and for identifying possible
forms of resistance to neoliberal economic ideologies. Participant observation provides information on
actual (not perceived) gendered divisions of labor, potentially revealing contradictions between
ideological values and everyday practices. It will also be implemented as a comparative tool for creating
and revising interview questions in an iterative feedback loop (Berg 2004). This method is necessary for
the researcher to experience the physicality of domestic labor and the material conditions in which it is
performed.
Participant-observation will take place with 25-30 households (12-15 at each fieldsite),
approximately a quarter of the number of participants in semi-structured interviews. This sample size
allows for longer periods of observations within each household. The anticipated observation period will
last 10-14 days, during which time the researcher will make arrangements with participants to spend
several hours a day and at various times (morning, afternoon, evening) working with participants as they
perform daily chores including gardening, animal care, food provisioning, care work and other household
activities. When agreed upon between the researcher and the participants, the researcher may stay with
the participants for 2-4 nights depending upon availability of time and appropriate housing. To document
household activities, the researcher will rely on field notes, videos, and audio recordings (Creswell 2013;
Bernard 2006). Data collected from participant-observation will be compared with data collected in semistructured interviews and in the time-space budget diaries. Data will be coded for the type of work, the
intensity of the labor, with whom it was performed, and for whom it was performed.
Participants who have agreed to in-depth participant-observation (n=25-30) will be asked to keep
time-space budget diaries of their unpaid labor for approximately two weeks. The researcher will ask
participants to record what household activities they performed in a day, where those activities were
performed, how long they lasted, and who other participants were. They will also be asked to include a
short description of each activity and a commentary about events in the dairy. These diaries supplement
participant-observation particularly in situations where there is a high likelihood of “strong observer
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effects” (Zimmerman and Wieder 1977). They provide a space for participants to articulate thoughts and
ideas that do not necessarily fit within the style and logic used by the researcher (Lantham 2003). They
also encourage participants to articulate certain profoundly ‘practical’ aspects of their knowledge of daily
labor practices and experiences in domestic spaces (Giddens 1984, 7; see also Latham 1999, 2003).
Finally, because women’s domestic tasks often mesh together, time-space analysis can account for
numerous, often-unacknowledged tasks and their spatial trajectories (Samarasinghe 1997). Diaries will
be collected by the researcher prior to participant-observation and will be used to generate follow-up
interview questions. The information in the diaries will be entered into NVivo10 coded with both
descriptive and analytic codes that indicate the type of activity, who was involved, and the meanings
ascribed to those activities by the participant.
Table 1. Summary of Research Questions, Methods, and Data Analysis
Research Questions
Methods
What is the symbolic significance of the
home and practices of domesticity in
geopolitical debates in Armenia? How
has it been used by various actors—the
state, independent political groups, and
individuals—to promote or resist
neoliberal ideologies and practices? How
have these discourses produced new
expectations for gender roles?
Semi-structured
interviews; news
and magazine
article database
What are the impacts of economic
restructuring on practices of domesticity
and the spatial politics of the home? How
has the liberalization of the economy
disciplined gendered domestic practices in
new ways? How does the home become a
site for reproducing or contesting
neoliberalism?
ParticipantObservations;
Semi-structured
interviews; timespace budget
diaries
Type of Data
Collected
Interview notes,
audio recordings,
interview transcripts,
news and magazine
images and articles.
Data Analysis
Field notes, interview
notes, audio
recordings, interview
transcripts, video
footage, time-space
budget diaries.
Coding qualitative
data for trends; crossreferenced descriptive
and analytic codes
Discourse analysis of
newspaper and
magazine articles and
images; interview data
analysis cross
referenced with
discourse analysis
Research Timeline
The proposed study will take place over the course of 10 months, from January 2016 to
September 2016. During the first phase of research, the co-PI will collect news and magazine articles
relevant to public debates over gender roles and conduct interviews with ordinary citizens, government
officials, and NGO or development representatives in Yerevan for approximately 2 months. The second
phase, lasting approximately 4 months, will include extensive participant observation and semi-structured
interviews with ordinary citizens in Yerevan. The third phase of research will take place in the provincial
town of Sisian. This phase will last 4 months, during which time the researcher will conduct participantobservation and semi-structured interviews with ordinary citizens in Sisian and the surrounding villages.
Mechanisms for Ensuring Success
The co-PI has previously conducted fieldwork on gendered household practices in Sisian (20082009) and preliminary dissertation fieldwork in the summer of 2013. She has completed intensive
language study, formed relationships with future participants, and cultivated strong networks of
academics, including Armenian scholars, who will review the co-PI’s progress.
Data will be sorted and evaluated monthly to ensure it addresses the proposed research questions.
At these intervals, the researcher will present the preliminary data to her dissertation committee who will
review and discuss the effectiveness of the sampling methods, timing, coding, and preliminary analyses.
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Selected participants will also be actively involved in the research process including evaluations of
preliminary analysis and reviews of early drafts of final written work.
Presentations of this research will be given in Yerevan, Armenia through the Caucasus Research
Resource Centers and at Yerevan State University. The research will be disseminated through lectures given at
the National Institute of Ethnology and Archaeology in Yerevan where feedback on preliminary writing and
data analysis will be solicited and used for further revisions. The research will also be presented at the annual
meeting of the Association of American Geographers and of the American Anthropological Association.
Subsequent research from this project will be disseminated not only via a dissertation manuscript, but also
through publications in Gender, Place & Culture, American Ethnologist, and Antipode.
Intellectual Merit of the Proposed Work
The intellectual merit of this study comes from the examination of taken-for-granted assumptions about
the public sphere, wage labor, and gender roles in society. It elucidates these issues by stepping outside
mainstream capitalism to a region that is still grappling with its non-capitalist history and in doing so provides
an empirical account of postsocialist economic restructuring and the ways Armenian households negotiated
these changes since 1991. Empirically, it will draw attention to the daily lives of women and their
contributions to the economy that have been previously ignored or devalued by studies that dismiss unpaid
work performed for others as oppressive or servile. It will also document the gendered dislocations and
exclusions experienced by citizens in societies with neoliberal economic restructuring thereby drawing
attention to the ways in which neoliberal technologies are used to justify and legitimate those exclusions
(Povinelli 2011, Ong 2006). Theoretically, this study examines postsocialist neoliberalism by considering how
it is produced, reproduced, and contested across scales from the nation to the household. In doing so, it
examines the ways that capitalism itself operates by relying on non-capitalist practices (Gibson-Graham 1996;
Mitchell 2002) and contributes to the understandings of value and labor in market and non-market systems
(Wright 2004, Katz 2004, Dunn 2004).
Broader Impacts of the Proposed Work
The broader impacts of this study are threefold. First, this study contributes to geopolitical
understandings of the rise of conservative political movements in the former USSR by examining the impacts
of economic transformations from within domestic spaces. Various political groups in the former Soviet
Union on the conservative right have used the symbols of “home” and “family” to justify not only restrictive
social policies but also decisions to engage in transnational conflicts. In Armenia, however, geopolitical
conditions have remained relatively stable despite similar rising conservative movements. The proposed
investigation into the significance of the home in relation to geopolitical and geoeconomic changes may
usefully reveal how some reconfigurations of gender and domesticity, like those in Armenia, support or
promote relative political stability. The proposed study can enhance understandings of the geopolitical issues
in the Caucasus region and in the former Soviet Union by making connections between the reorganization of
domestic labor and the conservative, pro-Russian movements in the context of an emerging macro-political
divide between the EU and its eastern neighbors. Secondly, the proposed study informs broader debates in
development policies and programs addressing gender inequalities and women’s empowerment issues. The
connections between economic transformations, domestic labor, and women’s roles in society refocuses
gender and economic development policies by drawing attention not only to the multiple labor burdens faced
by women, but also the discursive and material contexts in which they must navigate those burdens.
Specifically, this study can advise gender development projects initiated by USAID and the US Department of
State in the region, informing their regional policies so there is a greater likelihood of alleviating gendered
poverty and violence and a greater chance of improving women’s social status. Finally, this study will directly
support the intellectual and professional development of young scholars in Armenia. The researcher will
develop curriculum in collaboration with faculty and students for a graduate seminar at Yerevan State
University about geographies of the home, feminist theories, and intimate geopolitics. She will also work
closely with young scholars in Armenia by mentoring and training them in qualitative research methods and
analysis.
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