The overarching mission of the rescue services comprises three main areas of responsibility: protection against disasters and accidents; crisis management; and civil defence. This mission covers a long chain of obligations in trying to improve societal prevention capabilities and manage threats, risks, accidents, and disasters concerning generic as well as individual safety. It follows a reactive social chain of threat-risk-crisis-crisis management-care-rehabilitation.
The authors in this book show that the interesting occupational characteristics of these societal duties are their connection to gender and crisis management in a wider sense. Gendered practices, processes, identities, and symbols are analytical lenses that provide a particular understanding and explanatory base that has received far too little attention in the academic literature. This book identifies four major themes in relation to a gendered understanding of the rescue services, and more generally emergency work:
- Masculine heroism
- Intersectional understandings of sexuality, class, and race
- Gender and technology
- Gender equality and mainstreaming processes
This book shows how the rescue services constitute a productive ground for contemporary gender studies, including feminist theory, masculinity and sexuality studies. Its critical perspective provides new directions for emergency work and crisis management in a broader sense, and in particular for scholars and practitioners in these areas.
Mathias Ericson currently works as an Associate senior lecturer and researcher at the Department for Cultural Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden. He holds a PhD in sociology with research interests in masculinity, risk and professions. His doctoral thesis, Up Close. Masculinity, Intimacy and Community in Firefighters’ Work Teams, is an ethnographic study of homosocial practices among male firefighters. He has worked with research projects on gender implications of educational restructuring within the fire fighter profession and the shift from reactive to proactive modes within the rescue service. His current research interest concerns masculinity, vulnerability and necropolitics in the case of the rescue service work broadened spectrum of mortality and risk calculation. Ulf Mellström is a social anthropologist and Professor of Gender Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. Mellström has previously held professorships in Gender and Technology Studies and critical studies of Men and Masculinities. He has been an appointed research fellow at Clayman Institute of Gender Studies, Stanford University, USA, Department of Gender Studies, Duisberg University, Germany, and School of Social Sciences, University Science Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia. Dr. Mellström has explored the professional culture of various groups of technicians, including civil engineers and motorcycle mechanics, based on extended periods of ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden and Malaysia. He has also developed approaches to the understanding of the gendering of technology, in particular with regard to technology and masculinity. He is author of several monographs, edited collections and articles that have appeared in leading journals. He has since 2006 been the editor of NorMa - International Journal of Masculinity Studies (with Taylor & Francis from 2014). Key publications, see attached CV. Mellström has previously published with Ashgate, Masculinity, Power, and Technology: A Malaysian Ethnogra
