‘War – a family affair. Anthropological perspectives on family life, parenting and gender in the light of military deployment’
Wednesday 1 February 2017
15.00 Cornwallis North West, Seminar Room 4
Introduced by Maj Hedegaard Heiselberg, visiting PhD student with CPCS
Abstract
My presentation will first of all be an introduction to my PhD project which focuses on Danish soldiers and their families before, during and after military deployment. I will present some of my initial findings, including the article ‘Fighting for the Family: overcoming distances in time and space’, which will be one out of three analytical articles in my PhD thesis. Secondly, I will discuss the arguments of my second article, which I will be working on during my stay in the UK. The main aim of which is to understand the struggles faced by women married to soldiers as they try to balance professional careers and family life during deployment. Based on ethnographic examples, I argue that the frustrations experienced by these women are something else and more than a sacrifice of time. The tasks of everyday family life are interwoven with notions of parenthood, gender and identity, and thus these women’s situation becomes an issue not only of gender equality and family life in the Danish military but also a reminder to empirically and analytically acknowledge the everyday.
About the speaker
I am a PhD Student at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen and the Danish Veteran Centre. My PhD Project focuses on Danish families going through military deployment. Based on ethnographic fieldwork before, during and after military deployment, I examine how soldiers’ spouses and younger children experience everyday family life when separated from their husband and father. From an analytical perspective, my project seeks to understand how expectations of intimacy and presence within family relations are challenged and negotiated by families’ attempts at staying in touch during deployment.
By shedding light on the struggles faced by women married to soldiers, as they try to balance professional careers and family life, the study furthermore discusses norms and ideals about parenthood and gender in a Danish context. Finally, my project is a critical study of the Danish military and an attempt to understand processes of militarization by investigating the relationship between the two institutions – family and military. Prior to this PhD project I studied parenting and fatherhood among Danish fathers on paternity leave in Copenhagen as part of my MA in anthropology.