Massey Documents by Type
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Item How (In)Visibility Shapes Women's Experience of Inequity in Prison Work: A Cooperative Inquiry With Women Working in Australian Men's Prisons(John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 2025-10-11) Walker C; Riley S; Stephens C; Beban AResearch shows that women working in men's prisons face both scrutiny and exclusion within a high-risk, masculinized occupational culture. Addressing a gap in theorizing the processes involved, this article explores the interplay of gender, visibility, and power through a poststructuralist-informed thematic analysis of data from 16 women participating in four cooperative inquiry groups in Australian men's prisons. Theorized through Lewis and Simpson's (in)visibility vortex, we demonstrate how gendered norms function to marginalize women. First, sexualization produces “abject exposure,” making women visible against the male norm, undermining their workplace legitimacy. Second, “disappearance” renders women invisible to the norm by positioning them as incapable and forms self-disappearance to protect oneself from exposure. Third, “revelation” occurs when women make gendered norms visible, which participants did through their existence as professionally competent prison workers and, at times, explicit challenges. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of (in)visibility in maintaining gender inequities in male-dominated organizational cultures, such as prison work, and offers a complex theorization of how sexualization, risk and fear, and professional competence operate within the (in)visibility vortex. We also evidence how cooperative inquiry can develop collective strategies for resistance, offering insights for transforming the gendered conditions of such environments.Item Methodological reflections on ethics, relations of care and reciprocity in feminist research praxis(SAGE Publications, 2025-06-26) Walters VM; Beban A; Ashley N; Cain TThis paper puts forward a model of feminist research practice, termed ‘TROVE’. This model emerged through methodological reflections on research ethics for a project exploring women's experiences of gender inequality over the life course. The paper discusses five relations of care that became core to the research: relations within the team; between researchers and participants; in participants' connection with their past, present, and future selves; among participants as a group; and across generations. Reciprocity, both in discourse and practice, played a pivotal role in these care relationships. The TROVE model highlights reciprocated relationships based on trust, recognition, openness, vulnerability, and empathy. These elements demonstrate the inherent value of care and reciprocity in feminist praxis and ethical research. They help to navigate tensions between procedural and situated ethics, and thereby have potential applications beyond explicitly feminist studies.Item Prefigurative politics in the platform economy: online sex workers restaging collective mobilisation through informal communities of care(Taylor and Francis Group, 2025-03-06) Palatchie B; Beban A; Nicholls TAs platform capitalist models of labour intensify, with jobs once done offline moving to online marketplaces, attention must be given to the political standing of platform workers and the constraints and possibilities of collective mobilisation. This study explores the everyday forms of resistance online sex workers undertake in private communication networks, finding that workers are strategically restaging where their collective mobilisation is occurring given the risks of public mobilisation. We discuss the value these communities have for workers and for broader understandings of prefigurative politics being undertaken within the platform economy of online sex work.Item Holding together Hope and despair: Transformative learning through virtual place-based education in Aotearoa, New Zealand(John Wiley and Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of New Zealand Geographical Society, 2025-02-18) Beban A; Korson CThis article explores how virtual place-based education can foster transformative learning for distance students through a study of the Spatial Awareness Project, a digital storytelling film and podcast we co-created with faculty and students. We found that students engaged with the resources in complex ways, with three dominant themes emerging in qualitative surveys of their emotional engagement: feeling joy, feeling unsettled, and feeling empowered. We argue that digital media that leaves students simultaneously positively affected and unsettled can enable transformative learning through discomfort, creating space for imagining the world in new ways, and sparking new conversations and connections within and outside the classroom.Item Challenges to Empowerment of Women through Value Chains: The Need to Move from Individual to Relational Empowerment(John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Institute of Social Studies, 2024-09-18) Nguyen P; Scheyvens R; Beban A; Gardyne SThis article examines the prevailing assumption by donors that connecting smallholder women to value chains will close the gender gap and empower women. Based on a case study of a programme that seeks to empower women through their integration into value chains in Vietnam, the article assesses women's empowerment across four dimensions: economic, psychological, social and political. The authors argue that women's engagement in value chains does not always financially benefit and empower women because patriarchal power structures within families, communities and businesses make it challenging for women to gain authority over production decisions in higher-value crops. Women in the study gained more autonomy over ‘women's crops’ which yielded small incomes, while men had control over production that was seen as ‘men's work’, and in large-scale and more lucrative production. Gendered power relations affect women's access to economic opportunities: in this context, development agencies should reconsider their approaches to women's economic empowerment by focusing on relational rather than individual empowerment. This means that women's economic empowerment programmes should involve both men and women, with targeted interventions ensuring women are empowered within the household and in their connections with the community, local authorities and businesses.Item Currying Favour with the Algorithm: Online Sex Workers’ Efforts To Satisfy Patriarchal Expectations(Springer Nature, 2024-09-19) Palatchie B; Beban A; Nicholls TThe rise of the online sex work industry is reshaping how people conceptualise and negotiate sexual encounters across digital and offline spaces. This article analyses content from an online sex work forum (AmberCutie Forum (ACF)) to examine how online sex workers establish boundaries between their online and offline lives to manage competing expectations from their partners and viewers. Our analysis reveals a misogynistic double standard whereby workers are seen to threaten monogamous values, while viewers escape the same level of moral culpability. We argue that the cultural logics of monogamy function to delegitimise the labour involved with online sex work and increase the risk posed to online sex workers through retributive misogyny, including cyber-harassment toward sex workers. This impacts sex workers’ emotional and financial wellbeing and reinforces gendered power relations by prioritising stereotypically masculine pleasure over workers’ economic interests.Item Older women's constructions of equality over the lifecourse(Cambridge University Press, 2024-01-01) Beban A; Walters V; Ashley N; Cain TGender and age are central organising principles of social relations, with socially constructed gendered and age-based norms influencing patterns of social behaviour, power and inequality. Despite recent literature highlighting the importance of subjective measures of equality, including as a significant predictor of wellbeing, there is a gap in studies focused on subjective equality in research on ageing. Drawing on an equality ranking exercise and life herstory interviews with 20 older-aged women (65+) in Aotearoa New Zealand, this article focuses on the intersectionality of age and gender, analysing the ways in which participants constructed their experiences of equality over the lifecourse from their standpoint as older-aged women. The analysis reveals a significant rise in subjective equality from childhood to older age, with more varied responses in childhood and a convergence of responses from adolescence onwards. Participants' constructions of equality differed: age was the dominant construct of equality women ascribed to their childhood years, while gender inequality came to the fore during their teenage years. In early to mid-adulthood, women found ways to navigate gendered inequality in various life domains, while in older adulthood equality was constructed as freedom and life satisfaction. This trajectory suggests that the frames individuals use to make sense of equality and their personal experiences are not fixed; they are fluid and shift throughout the lifecourse.Item Fair but not Equal: Negotiating the Division of Unpaid Labour in Same-Sex Couples in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-01-01) Beban A; Roberts GResearch suggests that same-sex couples have a more egalitarian approach to the division of labor (DOL) than different-sex couples. Based on multi-stage interviews with ten same-sex couples in Aotearoa NZ and Australia, we analyze how couples negotiate, perform, and perceive the fairness of their division of reproductive household labor. We found that same-sex couples had diverse patterns of dividing labor, and most were not equally sharing housework. Yet, most couples felt their DOL was fair. We argue that three key factors enabled participants to construct their DOL fairly, even when unequal: flexibility in allocating labor, communication, and revaluing unpaid labor as equal to paid labor, as an act of love, which can be culturally significant. Most participants explained their labor division as pragmatic, based on availability and preference, rather than gender, supporting theories of relative resources and time availability in shaping fairness perceptions. However, all participants were aware of how gender shaped their relationships, and some consciously sought to undo gender and heteronormativity through their labor practices. This study contributes to academic theorizing of how LGBTQ + families “do gender” and “do heteronormativity” through unpaid labor and affirms the importance of intersectional analysis for understanding labor practices and perceptions.Item The lucky and unlucky daughter: Gender, land inheritance and agrarian change in Ratanakiri, Cambodia(John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2024-04-01) Beban A; Bourke Martignoni JIn many agrarian societies, women come to own land, and people secure care in old age through land inheritance. The social norms guiding inheritance shape gendered, generational and class-based relations of power in rural areas, and intra-family land rights can be lost when inheritance norms shift. In Cambodia's northeastern Ratanakiri province, rapid agrarian change over the past decade—including the expansion of land grabs, cash cropping and Khmer in-migration—is transforming decision-making around inheritance. Based on a large sample of qualitative interviews and focus groups carried out in 2016 and 2020 with Indigenous and Khmer communities, we focus on the ways in which intergenerational and gendered obligations of care are being reconfigured as land scarcity and inequalities within rural areas become more pronounced. We argue that social norms around land inheritance are in flux, with a proliferation of diverse practices emerging including a shift from matrilineal to bilateral inheritance amongst some Indigenous families, the deferment of marriage and inheritance decisions due to a lack of land and parents taking on debt to buy land and secure care in older age. These changes are reconfiguring gendered and generational identities in relation to land and have potentially negative consequences for land-poor families, in particular, for poor Indigenous women. These changes are symptoms of a larger ‘crisis of care’ in rural communities.Item The agrarian transition in the Mekong Region: pathways towards sustainable land systems(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-01-01) Ehrensperger A; Nanhthavong V; Beban A; Gironde C; Diepart J-C; Scurrah N; Nguyen A-T; Cole R; Hett C; Ingalls MThe agrarian transition, with its rapid growth in land-based investments, has radically altered agrarian and forest landscapes across the Mekong Region. These processes were enabled and accelerated by choices of actors in the public and private sectors with the aim of alleviating poverty and boosting socioeconomic development. We examine to what extent these goals were achieved and for whom, with a focus on poverty alleviation, gender equality, and forest conservation. Our descriptive assessment shows that the sustainability outcomes of the agrarian transition offer a highly variegated picture that is often not reflected in national level statistics used for monitoring the distance to target towards achieving the 2030 Agenda. Based on our findings, we sketch pathways for a more sustainable agrarian transition in the region. These pathways are explored in greater detail in three framing papers of the special issue “Agrarian Change in the Mekong Region: Pathways towards Sustainable Land Systems’.