Search

In this paper, I analyze the possibilities for organizing one's personal life around co-residing friendship and roommate relationships in the life course position of adulthood. The normative significance of coupledom and procreation as markers of adulthood has hardly diminished, although the nuclear family model has opened up in past decades in Euro-American countries. I argue that the close connection between coupledom and adult status sidelines communal living as a relational arrangement when persons age beyond the socially shared understanding of youth. Moreover, resisting this temporal order leads communal dwellers into a socially structured negotiation of their future trajectories, where personal autonomy in friendship and roommate relations poses an intra-relational obstacle to building a communal future. The paper is based on 31 interviews with residents of Finnish small-scale communes. Communal dwellers' negotiations of future trajectories dealt with finding someone to build their life with, whether commitment could be expected in friendship and roommate relations, and whether long-term communal living is compatible with existing housing structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how coupled adults arrange food-related labor in relation to their daily time allocation is of great importance because different arrangements may have implications for diet-related health and gender equity. Studies from the time-use perspective argue that daily activities such as work, caregiving, and non-food-related housework can potentially compete for time with foodwork. However, studies in this regard are mostly centered on individual-level analyses. They fail to consider cohabiting partners' time spent on foodwork and non-food-related activities, a factor that could be helpful in explaining how coupled partners decide to allocate time to food activities. Using 108 daily time-use logs from seventeen opposite-gender couples living in Toronto, Canada, this paper examines how male and female partners' time spent on non-food-related activities impact the total amount of time spent on foodwork by coupled adults and the difference in time spent on foodwork between coupled women and men. Results show that both male and female partners took a higher portion of foodwork when their partner worked longer. When men worked for additional time, the couple-level duration of foodwork decreased. Without a significant impact on the gender difference in foodwork duration, women's increased caregiving duration was associated with a reduction of total time spent on foodwork by couples. An increase in caregiving and non-food-related chores by men was associated with an increased difference in duration of foodwork between women and men, which helped secure a constant total amount of foodwork at the couple level. These behavioral variations between men and women demonstrate the gender differences in one's responsiveness to the change of partners' non-food-related tasks. The associations found among non-food-related activities and foodwork are suggestive of a need to account for partners' time allocation when studying the time-use dynamics of foodwork and other daily activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the scholarship on youth grows, so does the focus on the predicaments youth face increases. In particular, the phenomenon of waithood, which refers to a prolonged period of transition from youth to adulthood, has been attracting much attention from researchers. This article builds upon this growing literature by examining the roles that soccer academies in Ghana and shelters for unaccompanied young migrants in South Africa play in creating, sustaining, and spreading the waithood of youth. Even though both institutions operate in different spaces and promote distinct activities, they share a mutual goal by presenting themselves as educational stepping stones for a better present and future for African youths. Nevertheless, given the gaps between what both institutions claimed to provide and what they provided in reality, we argue that they served as the root of waithood for their young residents. As the following ethnography reveals, with worsening basic living conditions, infrequent access to school, and unattainable dreams about universities and European soccer leagues, many youths in shelters and academies were left incapable of assuming adult responsibilities and enjoying adult privileges. Our findings suggest that, unlike common perception of waithood as a phenomenon that takes place after school and before formal employment, waithood is also an institution-based phenomenon that can be facilitated within the education system. Simultaneously, in contrast to the common scholarly portrayals of waithood as an individual experience, we argue that waithood is a communal social phenomenon. At South African shelters and Ghanaian academies, the period of suspension and the prolonged journey to adulthood trickled-down to wider social and familial circles. The youth's efforts to seek alternative paths for adulthood, as well as the support they get from relatives and friends, reduces the loneliness of their waithood, though their contributions are hampered by local economic and political challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]