The Institute of Communities and Society (ICS) – led by Prof Meredith Jones, Director – supports inventive and imaginative research that is truly interdisciplinary. We focus on the social, community and cultural aspects of pressing contemporary issues including migration and movement, social unrest, intersectional inequalities, and institutionalised poverty. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/25442 2026-04-25T16:19:53Z 2026-04-25T16:19:53Z Jones, M http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/28693 2024-10-20T15:22:21Z 2024-07-12T00:00:00Z

Title: Holding and Being Held: Handbags as Container Technologies Authors: Jones, M Editors: Angerer, ML; Richardson, I; Schmedes, H; Sofoulis, Z Abstract: This paper explores the handbag as a material and symbolic container technology. Deploying Zoë Sofia’s “Container Technologies” theory and the phenomenological work of Iris Marion Young, it analyzes the handbag in terms of both what and how it contains. The mobilities that the handbag facilitates are considered alongside how carrying such an object impedes bodily mobility. The handbag’s particularities as a container make it a portable domestic lifeworld—here called a microworld—and a way to take the indoors outdoors, a way to mediate private and public spheres. I consider ways that handbags are connected to feminine ways of being in space, in terms of both enabling and disabling, and their roles in pedagogies of femininity.

2024-07-12T00:00:00Z