Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Gender as a Category of Knowledge

Käthe von Bose

 

Dissertation projekt:

Clinically Clean: Negotiations on Cleaning Work in Hospitals: An Empirical Study on the Relation of Power, Work, and Cleanliness 

 

 vonbose
 

Description of the Project

 

Cleaning work produces classifications of cleanli- ness and dirtiness, of (social) order and disorder. Moreover in the process of cleaning and the divi- sion of cleaning work, powerful negotiations and (gendered, racialized, sexualized) differentiations are made.

The aim of my qualitative empirical research project is to find the means by which working subjects are constituted within a hospital by doing different levels of cleaning work. How is cleaning work being performed and negotiated on a daily basis in a German hospital? How do the varying tasks of cleaning, removing of dirt, and production of hygienic cleanliness shape and (re)inforce powerful social relations between people? What are the strategies, agencies, and (dissident) actions of the workers who deal with them?

In order to explore those questions, I do fieldwork in various areas of work in German hospitals and interview people from several levels of the hospital hierarchy. 

                                               

 

Particulars

 

2011-2013 scholarship holder in the Research Training Group "Gender as a Category of Knowledge". Doctorate in sociology at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies (ZIFG) at the Technical University of Berlin. 2013 guest researcher at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics. 2015-2017 Postdoctoral fellow at the graduate college "Automatismen" ('Automatisms') at the University of Paderborn, 2017-2018 at the Chair of Sociology and Gender Studies, LMU Munich, since 10/2018 Head of the Department of Social Structure Analysis at the University of Potsdam (https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/sozialstrukturanalyse/team.html).

 

 

Selected Publications

 

Cleanliness, affect and social order: on agency and its ambivalences in the context of cleaning work. In: Megha Amrith u. Nina Sahraoui (Ed.): Gender, Work and Migration: Agency in Gendered Labour Settings. Farnham: Routledge, 2018. 46-62.

 

Klinisch rein. Zum Verhältnis von Sauberkeit, Macht und Arbeit im Krankenhaus, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2017.

('Clinically pure. On the relationship between Cleanliness, Power, and Work in Hospitals')

With Ulrike Klöppel, Katrin Köppert, Karin Michalski und Pat Treusch (Hg.): I is for Impasse. Affektive Queerverbindungen in Theorie_Aktivismus_Kunst, Berlin: b_books, 2015.

('I is for Impasse. Affective Queer Connections in Theory_Activism_Art')

 

 

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