Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Barbara Adam, Gender, Space, and Time is a brilliant study that offers a unique and original threefold conceptualization of how space and time is developed and applied in an empirical study of women's lives. Author Dorothy Moss focuses on the everyday practice and experience of women higher education students at a community college in northern England. Women's action is considered in relation to the complex and interconnected spheres of paid work, home, leisure, community, and higher education. Through highlighting concepts of space and time, the complex relationship between networks of power and personal action gains visibility. Moss conceptualizes women as centers of action and demonstrates the ways in which they construct personal pathways, connect different spheres of experience, integrate new time demands into the multiple rhythms of their everyday lives, and carve out personal space. Gender, Space, and Time is a timely and compelling work, certain to be of interest to scholars of sociology, women's studies, and anthropology.
Industry Reviews
This is a fascinating text, which yields valuable insight into the theorisation of space, time, and gender. Dorothy Moss brings together insights from a number of overlapping fields in exploring how women's everyday practices in higher education are shaped by dominant spatial/temporal representations and practices. Moss brings alive the voices of the women in her study across the fields of paid employment, housing and household, including childcare, friendship and relationships. She explores how these differing spatial and temporal modalities impact on women's experience of studying in higher education. She is alive to issues of class, geographical origin, race, and to other aspects of identity, and her sensitive analysis of the data captures the complexity of the lives of the women in her study. Full of wonderful insights, as well as theoretical rigour, this text deserves a wide readership among higher education practitioners and feminists, as well as social scientists with a specialist interest in the theorisation of space and time. -- Sue Clegg, Sheffield Hallam University
In an accessible, clearly argued and eminently reflexive book, Dot Moss focuses on time and space to explore gendered power and diversity. Gender, Space and Time examines women students' experiences from a critical realist and feminist perspective, to trace their physical, social and emotional movements between home, community, paid employment, and their studies. The sophisticated set of interlinked spatial and temporal concepts developed in this work - practices, representations and action - not only makes visible women students' struggles and achievements; they are also concepts that have wider purchase for understanding the complexity and range of women's lives and experiences. -- Rosalind Edwards, London South Bank University
