With a focus on nine different national contexts, this book explores contemporary family diversity. With attention to the different welfare states and cultures of care in each setting, it problematises the pre-eminence of research and policy centred on heteronormative families, showing the extent to which family diversity exists cross-nationally in relation to different gendered and "family-friendly" policies. Considering variations in family forms, including differences in the number and marital status of parents, their gender, sexual orientation and biological relationship to the children (adoption), multi-cultural families, and families created by technological assistance or surrogacy, it presents demographic information, alongside quantitative and qualitative research, across a number of advanced countries. A contribution to our understanding of the diversity of family forms, how diversity is lived in families, and what family diversity means in various international policy contexts The Changing Faces of Families will appeal to scholars with interests in the sociology of the family.

Marriages that involve the migration of at least one of the spouses challenge two intersecting facets of the politics of belonging: the making of the 'good and legitimate citizens' and the 'acceptable family'. In Europe, cross-border marriages have been the target of increasing state controls, an issue of public concern and the object of scholarly research. The study of cross-border marriages and the ways these marriages are framed is inevitably affected by states' concerns and priorities. There is a need for a reflexive assessment of how the categories employed by state institutions and agents have impacted the study of cross-border marriages. This collection of essays analyses what is at stake in the regulation of cross-border marriages and how European states use particular categories (e.g., 'sham', 'forced' and 'mixed' marriages) to differentiate between acceptable and non-acceptable marriages. When researchers use these categories unreflexively, they risk reproducing nation-centred epistemologies and reinforcing state-informed hierarchies and forms of exclusion. The chapters in this book offer new insights into a timely topic and suggest ways to avoid these pitfalls: differentiating between categories of analysis and categories of practice, adopting methodologies that do not mirror nation-states' logic and engaging with general social theory outside migration studies. This book will be of interest to researchers and academics of Sociology, Politics, International Relations, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Human Geography, Social Work, and Public Policy. Barring one, all the chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

In a neo-liberal era concerned with discourses of responsible individualism and the 'selfie', there is an increased interest in personal lives and experiences. In contemporary life, the personal is understood to be political and these ideas cut across both the social sciences and humanities. This handbook is specifically concerned with auto/biography, which sits within the field of narrative, complementing biographical and life history research. Some of the contributors emphasise the place of narrative in the construction of auto/biography, whilst others disrupt the perceived boundaries between the individual and the social, the self and the other. The collection has nine sections: creativity and collaboration; families and relationships; epistolary lives; geography; madness; prison lives; professional lives; 'race'; and social justice and disability. They illustrate the inter- and multi-disciplinary nature of auto/biography as a field. Each section features an introduction from a section editor, many of whom are established researchers and/or members of the British Sociological Association (BSA) Auto/Biography study group. The handbook provides the reader with cutting-edge research from authors at different stages in their careers, and will appeal to those with an interest in auto/biography, auto-ethnography, epistolary traditions, lived experiences, narrative analysis, the arts, education, politics, philosophy, history, personal life, reflexivity, research in practice and the sociology of the everyday. Chapter 1: A Case for Auto/Biography; Julie Parsons and Anne Chappell. Section One: Creativity and Collaboration; edited by Gayle Letherby. Chapter 2: The Times are a Changing: Culture(s) of Medicine; Theresa Compton. Chapter 3: Seventeen Minutes and Thirty-One Seconds: An Auto/Biographical Account of Collaboratively Witnessing and Representing an Untold Life Story; Kitrina Douglas and David Carless. Chapter 4: Reflections on a Collaborative, Creative 'Working' Relationship; Deborah Davidson and Gayle Letherby. Section Two: Families and Relationships: Auto/Biography and Family, A Natural Affinity?; edited by David Morgan. Chapter 5: Life Story and Narrative Approaches in the Study of Family Lives; Julia Brannen. Chapter 6: The Research Methods for Discovering Housing Inequalities in Socio-Biographical Studies; Elizaveta Polukhina. Chapter 7: Auto/Biographical Research and The Family; Aidan Seery and Karin Bacon. Section Three: Epistolary Lives: Fragments, Sensibility, Assemblages in Auto/Biographical Research; edited by Maria Tamboukou. Chapter 8: Letter-Writing and the Actual Course of Things: Doing the Business, Helping the World Go Round; Liz Stanley. Chapter 9: The Unforeseeable Narrative: Epistolary Lives in Nineteenth Century Iceland; Erla Hulda Halldorsdottir. Chapter 10: Auto/Pathographies In Situ: 'Dying of Melancholy' in Nineteenth Century Greece; Dimitra Vassiliadou. Section Four: Geography Matters: Spatiality and Auto/Biography; edited by John Barker and Emma Wainwright. Chapter 11: "Trying to Keep Up": Intersections of Identity, Space, Time and Rhythm in Women Student Carer Auto/Biographical Accounts; Fin Cullen, John Barker and Pam Alldred. Chapter 12: Spatiality and Auto/Biographical Narratives of Encounter in Social Housing; Emma Wainwright, Elodie Marandet and Ellen McHugh. Chapter 13: "I Thought... I Saw... I Heard...": The Ethical and Moral Tensions of Auto/Biographically Opportunistic Research in Public Spaces; Tracy Ann Hayes. Section Five: Madness, Dys-order and Autist/Biography: Auto/Biographical Challenges to Psychiatric Dominance; edited by Kay Inckle. Chapter 14: Autist/Biography; Alyssa Hillary. Chapter 15: Reaching Beyond Auto? A Polyvocal Representation of Recovery From "Eating Dys-order"; Brid O'Farrell. Chapter 16: [R]evolving Towards Mad: Spinning Away from the Psy/Spy-Complex Through Auto/Biography; Phil Smith. Section Six: Prison Lives; edited by Dennis Smith. Chapter 17: Nelson Mandela: Courage and Conviction - The Making of a Leader; Dennis Smith. Chapter 18: The "Other" Prison of Antonio Gramsci and Giulia Schucht; Jeni Nicholson. Chapter 19: Bobby Sands: Prison and the Formation of a Leader; Denis O'Hearn. - Section Seven: Professional Lives; edited by Jenny Byrne. Chapter 20: Academic Lives in a Period of Transition in Higher Education: Bildung in Educational Auto/Biography; Irene Selway, Jenny Byrne and Anne Chappell. Chapter 21: Narratives of Early Career Teachers in a Changing Professional Landscape; Glenn Stone. Chapter 22: What Does it Mean to be a Young Professional Graduate Working in the Private Sector?; Jenny Byrne. Section Eight: 'Race' and Cultural Difference; edited by Geraldine Brown. Chapter 23: Now You See Me, Now You Don't! Making Sense of the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Experience of UK Higher Education: One Person's Story; Gurnam Singh. Chapter 24: Raging Against the Dying of the Light; Paul Grant. Chapter 25: Black Young Men: Problematisation, Humanisation and Effective Engagement; Carver Anderson. Section Nine: Social Justice and Disability: Voices From the Inside; by Chrissie Rogers. Chapter 26: Missing Data and Socio-Political Death: The Sociological Imagination Beyond the Crime; Chrissie Roger. Chapter 27: Co-Constructed Auto/Biographies in Dwarfism Mothering Research: Imagining Opportunities for Social Justice; Kelly-Mae Saville. Chapter 28: An Auto/Biographical Account of Managing Autism and a Hybrid Identity: 'Covering' for Eight Days Straight; Amy Simmons.

STEPHEN M. CHERRY draws upon a rich set of ethnographic and survey data, collected over a six-year period, to explore the roles that Catholicism and family play in shaping Filipino American community life. From the planning and construction of community centers, to volunteering at health fairs or protesting against abortion, this book illustrates the powerful ways these forces structure and animate not only how first-generation Filipino Americans think and feel about their community, but how they are compelled to engage it over issues deemed important to the sanctity of the family. Revealing more than intimate accounts of Filipino American lives, Cherry offers a glimpse of the often hidden but vital relationship between religion and community in the lives of new immigrants, and allows speculation on the broader impact of Filipino immigration on the nation. The Filipino American community is the second-largest immigrant community in the United States, and the Philippines is the second-largest source of Catholic immigration to this country. This ground-breaking study outlines how first-generation Filipino Americans have the potential to reshape American Catholicism and are already having an impact on American civic life through the engagement of their faith.

This book provides a broad survey of Chinese rural households, examining ongoing changes in Chinese society and economy through the lens of the situation of rural families in China. Based on data from Zhejiang University's China Rural Household Panel Survey (CRHPS) in 2015 on rural households, which analyses all aspects of grass-roots rural households in China, this volume offers a scientific analysis of social development in rural China, exploring notably the basic structure, employment situation, income and expenditure, social security, and education situation of Chinese rural households, as well as the governance and public services of rural communities.

Another Mother gives voice to women who become mothers through the routes of adoption, surrogacy and egg donation, and their silent partners - the birth mothers, surrogate mothers and egg donors - who make motherhood possible for them. Exploring experiences of motherhood beyond the biological mother raising her child, Everington draws on interviews and a range of interdisciplinary approaches to produce illuminating personal testimonies which expand our understanding of what it means to be a mother. The life writing narratives also examine the unique and hidden relationships that exist between adopters and birth mothers, egg donors and women who become mothers through egg donation, and surrogates and women who become mothers through surrogacy. Offering a fresh approach in life writing, using hybrid form encompassing edited interview, re-imagined scenes, poetry, personal essay and quotation collage, this topical book is recommended for anyone interested in motherhood studies, gender and women's studies, life writing studies, the sociology of reproduction, creative non-fiction writing approaches, oral history, and ethnography studies.

Working and communicating with parents is a fundamental part of being a teacher, and there are many interpersonal situations that you will be required to respond to in the classroom including difficulties at home, loss, abuse and special educational needs. In this smart and practical book, you will be provided with a framework for successful personal development to aid you in managing difficult communications with parents and the personal and professional challenges that come with modern teaching. Key topics include: * How to understand and develop compassion * How to manage different types of emotional challenges * Exploring different contexts where you will be communicating with families * Your role in developing communities * Working with families who have special needs and disability Cathie Freeman is a senior psychological wellbeing practitioner. Jenni Gates is an integrative counselling therapist.

We all know what it's like to be annoyed by little things that our husband, wife or partner does - leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube, leaving the toilet lid up, leaving dirty clothes on the floor - and we know how easily these little grievances of everyday life can spin out of control. In this brilliant new book the sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann shows us how and why sparks can suddenly fly even in the most well-adjusted couples.

They see themselves as being in total harmony but they are mistaken The clash between their uniquely individual attitudes to life rumbles on in silence until suddenly erupting in emotional outbursts each time an object or an attitude reveals for the thousandth time the unbearable and incomprehensible otherness of the partner.

When this occurs, a whole panoply of tactics is deployed, ranging from the combative (secret acts of revenge) through the neutral (sulking) to the subtly loving. But these stormy episodes within relationships can have a happy ending, for it is through learning to overcome these irritations and aggravations that love is ultimately strengthened.

This book provides a focused discussion of how families are governed through technologies. It shows how states attempt to influence, shape and govern families as both the source of and solution to a range of social problems including crime. The book critically reviews family governance in contemporary neo-liberal society, notably through technologies of self-responsibilisation, biologisation, and artificial intelligence. The book draws attention to the poor working class and racialised families that often are marked out and evaluated as culpable, dysfunctional, and a threat to economic and social order, obscuring the structural inequalities that underpin family lives and discriminations that are built into the tools that identify and govern families. Filling a gap where disciplinary perspectives cross-cut, this book brings together sociological and criminological perspectives to provide a unique cross-disciplinary approach to the topic. It will be of interest to researchers, scholars and lecturers studying sociology and criminology, as well as policy-makers and professionals working in the fields of early years and family intervention programmes, including in social work, health, education, and the criminologically-relevant professions such as police and probation.

Infant Mortality and Working-Class Child Care, 1850-1899 unlocks the hidden history of working-class child care during the second half of the nineteenth century, seeking to challenge those historians who have cast working-class women as feckless and maternally ignorant. By plotting the lives of northern women whilst they grappled with industrial waged work in the factory, in agriculture, in nail making, and in brick and salt works, this book reveals a different picture of northern childcare, one which points to innovative and enterprising child care models. Attention is also given to day-carers as they acted in loco parentis and the workhouse nurse who worked in conjunction with medical paediatrics to provide nineteenth-century welfare to pauper infants. Through the use of a new and wide range of source material, which includes medical and poor law history, Melanie Reynolds allows a fresh and new perspective of working-class child care to arise.

Families have become an increasingly important source of support for the elderly, and gerontologists are directing more and more attention to older adults and their families. This bibliography reviews the most significant works on families and aging published within the past ten years. Jean Coyle has selected and annotated nearly 800 books, articles, films, dissertations, and government documents. The detailed annotations summarize and evaluate the significance and usefulness of each item, and the comprehensive author and subject indexes make this volume a valuable reference tool. A thoughtful introduction surveys the most noteworthy research on families and aging done in the last decade. This is followed by eleven chapters, that address such topics as widowhood, intergenerational relationships, family caregiving, and the role of older adults in ethnic and minority families. Gerontologists, social workers, and all those interested in families and aging will find this guide an indispensable source of information.

Using innovative, participatory research methods, this book offers new insights into the issues surrounding parental separation or divorce from the unique perspective, and retrospectives, of young adults. As they look back on their childhood, their views provide valuable insights into how children experience and accommodate their parents' separation. Drawing on the qualitative research findings, Kay-Flowers develops a new framework to provide a useful analytical tool for academics and practitioners working with children and families to make sense of young people's experiences and puts forward suggestions for improving support for children in the future.

Bringing together a range of perspectives, this book establishes a criminology of the domestic, paying particular attention to emerging spatial and relational reconfigurations. We move beyond criminologies of public and urban domains to consider over-looked non-public locales, and crimes and harms that occur in the home and other private spaces. Developed in the context of the COVID-19 lockdowns, where distinctions between public and private became increasingly untenable, the book considers how the pandemic has accelerated new patterns of behaviour, enabled by technology and shifting social relations. Drawing on a range of criminological topics, including victimisation, offending, property and violent crime, consumption, deviance and leisure, and zemiology, the book argues that the domestic sphere, and its relation to the public realm, needs to be more carefully conceptualised if criminology is to respond to new spatial and relational dimensions of changing lifestyles. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, politics, geography, history, gender, surveillance and security and all those interested in a criminology of the domestic sphere.

Trauma and the exposure to traumatic events is part of life, making the need for current and informed social work research and training in this area essential. Trauma, Spirituality, and Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Social Work Practice highlights unique and diverse circumstances throughout a client's lifecycle where trauma is experienced, how one's spirituality is awakened or activated, and how this experience can intersect with interventions toward posttraumatic growth (PTG). More than just a primer on trauma effects, the book offers social workers insights into how to properly assess current resources and individual levels of distress. It also provides practical strategies on how spirituality and spiritual practices can be integrated into psychotherapeutic interventions at various levels of social work practice. Addressing the impact of trauma-related events and emphasizing the importance of spirituality, the book will inspire and provide transferable knowledge that social workers can use to meet the unique needs of the clients, families, and communities they serve.

Couples seek therapy for a variety of reasons, from short-lived adjustment difficulties to deeply entrenched conflict. Yet marital therapy has lacked a conceptual framework for matching treatment to a couple's particular problem. This outstanding new book, by a team of researcher-clinicians from the Center for Family Learning, is the first to address this deficiency.The authors systematically assess the duration and intensity of a couple's present conflict, as well as how the spouses function alone and in their extended families. They have found that troubled couples tend to fall into one of four categories, each best suited to a particular treatment program. The mild conflicts of stage one, for example, respond well to a six-week educational program; whereas the extreme anger and alienation of stage three is best handled without direct confrontation.The authors describe their evaluation and treatment procedures--including assessing multigenerational systems, dealing with triangles, and reducing emotional arousal--and illustrate their explanations with lengthy case illustrations and session-by-session transcripts. Because it offers a carefully articulated, clinically tested method of treating a broad range of marital problems, this valuable book makes a unique and much-needed contribution to the field.

Anna Tarrant's revealing research explores the dynamics of men's caring responsibilities in low-income families' lives. The book draws on pioneering multigenerational research to examine men's involvement in care for their families. It interrogates how this is affected by the resources available and the constraints upon them, considering intersections of gender, generation and work, as well as the impact of austerity and welfare support. Illuminating aspects of care within economic hardship that often go unseen, it deepens our understanding of masculinities and family life and the policies and practices that support or undermine men's participation.

This book unpacks and interrogates dominant constructions of mothering, making use of interdisciplinary, ideological and theoretical perspectives to investigate how new rhetorics of mothering can expand the realm of maternal care-givers beyond the biological definitions of motherhood. This diverse collection is at the cutting-edge of rhetoric, feminism and motherhood studies, and the chapters challenge the confines of biological parenting as heteronormative within the neo-liberal nuclear family. The contributors examine, how despite the diversity of parental relationships, many are excluded by the understanding of mothers biologically tied to their children. The volume seeks to expose the underpinnings of biological primacy and argues that twenty-first century families and familial circumstances are ill- served by biological ideology. Topics include: Re-Imagining Queer Black Motherhood, Chicana Feminist approaches to reproductive justice, the commercialization and medicalization of infertility, and ableism and motherhood. This is a unique and fascinating book suitable for students and scholars in gender studies, sexuality studies, communication studies, sociology, and cultural studies.

In this groundbreaking collection, editors Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris place sexuality at the center of slavery studies in the Americas (the United States, the Caribbean, and South America). While scholars have marginalized or simply overlooked the importance of sexual practices in most mainstream studies of slavery, Berry and Harris argue here that sexual intimacy constituted a core terrain of struggle between slaveholders and the enslaved. These essays explore consensual sexual intimacy and expression within slave communities, as well as sexual relationships across lines of race, status, and power. Contributors explore sexuality as a tool of control, exploitation, and repression and as an expression of autonomy, resistance, and defiance.

This popular text, now in a third edition, offers readers a vivid perspective on the cultural and social complexities of food practices and the current food system. Synthesizing insights from the multidisciplinary field of food studies, this book engages readers' curiosity by highlighting the seeming paradoxes of food: how food is both individual and social, reveals both distinction and conformity, and, in the contemporary era, seems to come from everywhere but nowhere in particular. Each chapter begins with an intriguing case study and ends with suggested resources and activities. Chapter topics include identity, restaurants and food media, health, marketing, industrialization, global food, surplus and scarcity, and social change. Updates and enhancements in this edition reflect new scholarly insights into how food is involved in social media, social movements, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout, the book blends concepts and empirical accounts to address the central issues of culture, structure, and social inequality. Written in a lively, accessible style, this book provides students with an unrivalled and multifaceted introduction to this fascinating aspect of social life.

This edited book engages with the rapidly emerging field of the geographies of digital sexualities, that is, the interlinkages between sexual lives, material and virtual geographies and digital practices. Modern life is increasingly characterised by our integrated engagement in digital/material landscapes activities and our intimate life online can no longer be conceptualised as discrete from 'real life.' Our digital lives are experienced as a material embeddedness in the spaces of everyday life marking the complex integration of real and digital geographies. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the ways that our social and sexual practices such as dating or casual sex are bound up online and online geographies and in many cases constitute specific sexuality-based communities crossing the digital/material divide. The aim of this collection is to explore the complexities of these newly constituted and interwoven sexual and gender landscapes through empirical, theoretical and conceptual engagements through wide-ranging, innovative and original research in a new and quickly moving field.

The wives of Civil war commanders had widely divergent roles in their marriages before, during, and after the war - some wives changed their roles as their husbands gained prominence. Most of the wives of military commanders in this collection sought to have some influence over their husband's professional career with mixed success. Carol Bleser strongly asserts that Varina Davis's role in running the Confederate government was much larger than many have previously believed. Shirley Leckie depicts Libbie Custer using her considerable charisma and charm to win political support for her husband and promote the Boy General. Virginia Jeans Laas finds Elizabeth Blair Lee continuously counseling her husband on military affairs and using her powerful family connections to help her husband's naval career. Jessie Fremont was essentially her husband's unofficial chief of staff, even going so far as to pay a visit to Abraham Lincoln to urge him to intervene on behalf of General Fremont. Lizinka Ewell similarly swayed her husband with military advice, pressuring him to keep her son out of harm's way in battle. However, there were limits to these wives' influence. Libbie Custer seemed always careful not to overstep her bounds; Lizinka Ewell, Varina Davis and Jessie Fremont each received harsh reminders of their limitations as women when they tried to overstep traditional gender roles and intercede on their husbands' behalf. Mary Lee, Amelia Gorgas, Julia Grant and Ellen Sherman seemed to fit the more traditional female role of nurturing to their husbands privately, but they were important confidantes who provided emotional support necessary to sustain their husbands on the battlefield. Emory Thomas demonstrates that General Lee regularly confided to his wife, Mary, military details from the front; Ellen Sherman and Julia Grant habitually acted as soothing tonics to their husbands during difficult times especially early in the war, when both men were under a good deal of public scrutiny. John Marszalek argues that Sherman regulary ignored his wife's advice. Yet, Ellen Sherman, like Jessie Fremont, boldly visited the president herself in hopes of gaining Lincoln's support in countering the harsh accusations hurled at her husband. Amelia Gorgas became the family's primary caregiver and financial support when a stroke incapacitated her husband Josiah. After his death, she continued to work to support herself and their family with her own income. Their son, William Crawford Gorgas, who eliminated yellow fever from the Panama Canal region, attributed much of his success in life to his mother. For other wives, their influence was not as apparent during the war as after - especially after their husbands' deaths. Mary Anna Jackson, La Salle Corbell Pickett and Libbie Custer became professional widows of military commanders who devoted their long lives after their husbands' deaths to promoting a romaniticized image of their husbands, their marriages and themselves. Jennifer Lund Smith states that Fannie Chamberlain was unqualified to counsel her husband: but none of the other wives in this collection were formally qualified as political or military advisors. These women, like women of most any time and place, had spheres of influence, intimate strategies, outside formal, exclusively male modes of official military and political communication. General Chamberlain's wife however honestly seemed indifferent to her husband's military career. This study brings the field of Women's Studies to Civil War history to show that their were many cultural battles simultaneously occurring on the homefront.

This book adopts a critical youth studies approach and theorizes the digital as a key feature of the everyday to analyse how ideas about youth and cyber-safety, digital inclusion and citizenship are mobilized. Despite a growing interest in the benefits and opportunities for young people online, both 'young people' and 'the digital' continue to be constructed primarily as sites of social and cultural anxiety requiring containment and control. Juxtaposing public policy, popular educational and parental framings of young people's digital practices with the insights from fieldwork conducted with young Australians aged 12-25, the book highlights the generative possibilities of attending to intergenerational tensions. In doing so, the authors show how a shift beyond the paradigm of control opens up towards a deeper understanding of the capacities that are generated in and through digital life for young and old alike. Young People in Digital Society will be of interest to scholars and students in youth studies, cultural studies, sociology, education, and media and communications.

Korean Wild Geese Families: Gender, Family, Social, and Legal Dynamics of Middle-Class Asian Transnational Families in North America explores the experiences of middle-class Korean transnational families, whose mothers and children migrate abroad for children's education while fathers remain in Korea and economically support their families, throughout transnational separation: before separation, during separation, and after reunification. It discusses the themes of (1) changes in wild geese parents' relative gender statuses, housework patterns, and spousal relationships; (2) changes in mothering/fathering practices and intergenerational relationships; and (3) wild geese families' settlement and integration in the host societies and re-adaptation to Korea after family reunification. Se Hwa Lee interviewed mothers in both the United States and Canada, as well as fathers in Korea, to compare the effects of immigration policies between the two countries in North America and present gender-balanced explanations. Se Hwa Lee also sheds light on Asian documented immigrants' hardships and different degrees of empowerment and incorporation in the host societies according to legal status, employment, additional education, and co-ethnic community membership. This book offers readers valuable venues to enhance their understanding of increasingly diverse transnational families in North America.

While hook-up culture on university campuses represents a part of the story, it is only part of the story. It is important to add to this and investigate the way the university itself brokers and seeks out specific forms of sexuality, sex, and connection amongst students. This book sheds light on how the university as an institution endorses certain forms of sociality, sexuality, and coupling, while excluding others. Building on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this book furthers the discussion on the impact these institutional measures have on students, and how students work through and around them - while simultaneously establishing relations outside of and beyond hooking-up.