Juggling digital communication and exploding paperwork
Sondra Cuban Professor Sondra Cuban is a professor and director of the Adult and Higher Education programme in Woodring College, with an interdisciplinary background in adult and higher education. Her areas of interest are in higher education and e-learning, service-learning, international and comparative education and community technologies for marginalised groups. Sondra has worked in a range of educational settings including prisons, libraries, community colleges, and non-profit organisations, and with disenfranchised groups and non-traditional students. Pivotal in her work is academic activism, with community-university partnerships, researching and teaching these through intersectional and critical approaches using ethnographic methods and with social justice aims.
In her video keynote, Sondra highlights findings from her ESRC study and subsequent book, Deskilling Migrant Women in the Global Care Industry.
She focusses on the differing literacy practices the women take part in, interweaving the separate work and family literacy approaches they use. Highlighting what she describes as, “text-based tactics”, Sondra illustrates how a predominance of paper-based documents and a lack of digital literacies in the workplace are used to restrict migrant workers to subordinate spaces in the UK Care industry. For example, she discusses the fact that highly skilled women were chosen for their professional skills as well as their experience for undertaking copious documentation. However, the paper-based workload though unnecessary, had to be manually duplicated, in essence as a means of social control by capturing every aspect of the women's work life. Conversely, her study highlights how “technological prowess and digital strategies” empowered this same group of migrant female workers to juxtapose with their professional lives, the management of their domestic, family and social lives in their countries of origin from their UK base. Sondra's study provides narratives from migrant women who communicate with children, parents, siblings and other family members through phones, internet and computers. Ranging from engaging with children through text messages on a daily basis, sometimes using single words to convey important messages, to liaising with teachers in schools and wider families members though internet mediums such as Skype.
You can access Sondra's Keynoteher .e
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