Despite widespread attention to issues of gender and economic exploitation at coffee's agricultural origins, works within coffee scholarship systematically overlook the workers at the final stage of production: baristas, the coffee shop employees who prepare and serve beverages. This article draws from data collected from over four hundred female American specialty coffee baristas to examine how their gender impacts their experiences at coffee competitions. I argue that barista competitions exist in order to legitimize the barista as a type of skilled laborer, but that these attempts rest on highly gendered understandings of skill, professionalism, and performance. Barista competitions attempt to present a unified industry face, but gender remains a salient issue through its unequal presence that renders female baristas as distinct and different from the ideal barista, who is assumed to be male. The conclusions drawn from this case study have broad significance for our understandings of gender and precariousness in the food industry, and the relationship between, and negotiation of, skill and perceived value. The rarefied world of specialty coffee competition magnifies and illuminates extant workplace issues regarding gender, which are characteristic of many forms of low-wage service labor in the United States.
Background
A barrier to achieving first trimester antenatal care (ANC) attendance in many countries has been the widespread cultural practice of not discussing pregnancies in the early stages. Motivations for concealing pregnancy bear further study, as the interventions necessary to encourage early ANC attendance may be more complicated than targeting infrastructural barriers to ANC attendance such as transportation, time, and cost.
Methods
Five focus groups with a total of 30 married, pregnant women were conducted to assess the feasibility of conducting a randomised controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of early initiation of physical activity and/or yoghurt consumption in reducing Gestational Diabetes Mellitus in pregnant women in The Gambia. Focus group transcripts were coded through a thematic analysis approach, assessing themes as they arose in relation to failure to attend early ANC.
Results
Two reasons for the concealment of pregnancies in the first trimester or ahead of a pregnancy’s obvious visibility to others were given by focus group participants. These were ‘pregnancy outside of marriage’ and ‘evil spirits and miscarriage.’ Concealment on both grounds was motivated through specific worries and fears. In the case of a pregnancy outside of marriage, this was worry over social stigma and shame. Evil spirits were widely considered to be a cause of early miscarriage, and as such, women may choose to conceal their pregnancies in the early stages as a form of protection.
Conclusion
Women’s lived experiences of evil spirits have been under-explored in qualitative health research as they relate specifically to women’s access to early antenatal care. Better understanding of how such sprits are experienced and why some women perceive themselves as vulnerable to related spiritual attacks may help healthcare workers or community health workers to identify in a timely manner the women most likely to fear such situations and spirits and subsequently conceal their pregnancies.
in this article, i examine the complications to funerary rituals caused by the cOViD-19 pandemic. specifically, i consider the breakdowns of normal systems of community food provisions to bereaved families, while reflecting on both the creativity of populations to create new ritual activities and the lingering effects of being unable to complete expected rituals. Beginning with the death of my father in the early days of the pandemic, i go on to trace the ways in which food provisioning to the bereaved changed alongside developments in understandings of the virus. these changes are contrasted with my previous experiences of food as abundant in funerary situations, in order to draw out the ways in which the cOViD-19 pandemic caused a major disruption in how care for bereaved persons is expressed.
Tillicum Village, a Seattle‐area dinner theatre attraction, purports to present an authentic version of Native tradition for visitors. I argue that the cultural elements presented at Tillicum Village represent only a superficial authenticity, one that mixes from several cultures yet claims to be a cohesive whole. Tillicum Village's claims to authenticity are undermined by the commodification of the self experienced by its theater performers, as well as the site's deliberately heterotopic construction. The discrepancies between the promotion and the reality of Tillicum Village reflect the recent conversion to a corporate enterprise, and ultimately undermine the site's educational potential.
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