Kinship foster care involves placing children who cannot live at home in foster care with other members of their family or close network. This book sheds light on different aspects of kinship care development and practice. Using a 20-year longitudinal research study from Norway, this book shows the historical development of kinship care in Norway, research on kinship care, and how family life and relations are negotiated and lived in the span between private and public sphere. It includes the perspectives of the children, their parents and their relatives who have functioned as foster parents. Recognising that kinship care is complex, and needs to be understood and studied from different perspectives, the book describes, analyses and discusses a number of subjects: kinship care in a child welfare historical context, families who are part of kinship care and their perspectives, the formal frameworks around kinship care, and research approaches which have dominated research into kinship care. This book will be of interest to all scholars, students and professionals working in social work and child welfare more broadly, both in the Nordic countries and in a wider international context.

With its implications for health care, the economy, and an assortment of other policy areas, population aging is one of the most pressing issues facing governments and society today, and confronting its complex reality is becoming increasingly urgent, particularly in the age of COVID-19. In The Four Lenses of Population Aging, Patrik Marier looks at how Canada's ten provinces are preparing for an aging society. Focusing on a wide range of administrative and policy challenges, this analysis explores multiple actions from the development of strategic plans to the expansion of long-term care capacity. To enhance this analysis, Marier adopts four lenses: the intergenerational, the medical, the social gerontological, and the organizational. By comparing the unique insights and contributions of each lens, Marier draws attention to the vital lessons and possible solutions to the challenges of an aging society. Drawing on over a hundred interviews with senior civil servants and thousands of policy documents, The Four Lenses of Population Aging is a significant contribution to public administration, provincial politics, and comparative public policy literatures, and a timely resource for policymakers and general readers seeking an informed perspective on a timely and important issue.

This collection is the result of a five-year-long collaboration of sociologists in three countries: Sweden, Spain and the United States. In-depth, extended interviews with couples exploring many aspects of their daily lives provide significant insights into the impact of modernity, gender roles, and expectations concerning the meaning of money and the complex financial reality of households. Read Forbes' take on Janet Stock's book: http: //www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/10/16/ap4226514.html

This book shows how living in a highly racialized society affects health through multiple social contexts, including neighborhoods, personal and family relationships, and the medical system. Black-white disparities in health, illness, and mortality have been widely documented, but most research has focused on single factors that produce and perpetuate those disparities, such as individual health behaviors and access to medical care. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive perspective on health and sickness among African Americans, starting with an examination of how race has been historically constructed in the US and in the medical system and the resilience of racial ideologies and practices. Racial disparities in health reflect racial inequalities in living conditions, incarceration rates, family systems, and opportunities. These racial disparities often cut across social class boundaries and have gender-specific consequences. Bringing together data from existing quantitative and qualitative research with new archival and interview data, this book advances research in the fields of families, race-ethnicity, and medical sociology.

Love and the Politics of Intimacy articulates the concept of love within the relationship between the intimate and the social, rethinking how intimacy is conceived and experienced in the context of 21st-century neoliberalism. Reflecting on experiences of intimate, romantic and sexual love, and the role of individual identity, these essays explore historical trajectories that have culminated in particular, contemporary experiences of intimate love. Politically, this work links identity and articulation of the self to liberatory practices in the arenas of friendship, romance and sex. This interdisciplinary exploration of what love means in the 21st century incorporates academic writing and original creative work from established and emerging scholars around the globe. Essays from across the humanities and social sciences - including literary studies, sociology, psychology, philosophy and gender studies - interrogate the role of relational intimacy on topics of 'Love and Romance', 'Love and Liberation' and 'Love and Technologies of Intimacy'. The volume looks at the past, present and future in search of inspiration for transforming and re-charting the pathways of love, seeking a more diverse and emancipatory model of social life and what it would take to restore love to social and institutional spaces.

Are marriages made in heaven? In reality many people need a little help in the arrangement of such matters, whether from Jewish shadkhans (matchmakers), go-betweens, computer or video-dating agencies, marriage bureaux, Asian arranged marriages, gay dating agencies or personal ads. Originally published in 1984, the author's clear-sighted look at the mating trade takes some of the mystique away from the subject and is the first serious and detailed account of the 'third party' in marriage. Dr Mullan looks at the 'singles scene' and the 'arranged marriage' historically and cross-culturally, and makes it clear that there is nothing necessarily odd or deviant about the mating trade. It is a business like any other, and as long as people continue to want 'perfect partners', marriage, permanent relationships, dates and sex, and while evolving social structures make such demands ever more difficult to meet, the business will thrive. It could even expand and grow, but the author believes that first it will have to clean up its act!

Originally published in 1978 Working Couples deals with husbands and wives who both hold paid jobs. The editors, the late Robert N. and Rhona Rapoport, had established themselves as well-respected authorities on dual-career families, and in this study they call upon other specialists in the field to apply their research experience to the consideration of the particular problems confronting working couples at the time. They discuss how some of these issues had arisen and analyse how they were being dealt with in a number of contexts. Working couples at the time were subject to constraints of various kinds in meeting the challenges they faced, and there were many who rejected the lifestyle on these grounds; but there were many others for whom it worked. Numerous families were attempting to operate the pattern in new ways. Both may have separate jobs, and her income may not only be separate from his, but in some cases larger and more reliable. Such a situation creates its own problems, which need to be resolved. The authors look at and clarify some of the generic issues and discover which resolutions have been satisfactory, as well as the various devices created for helping dual-worker families to function.

This edited book highlights the identities and practices of ethnically diverse families and schools in contexts where multicultural policies are not always a priority. In an era of globalization and ensuing population mobility, it places a focus on Asia-Pacific, a continent with diverse customs, populations, and languages, but grapples with what it might mean to be multicultural. The book features studies and frameworks that illustrate how minoritized communities engage with the diversity they live in and strategies in adjusting and adapting to their sociocultural environments, including practices that might support these efforts. This book represents initiatives and interdisciplinary scholarship from Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Australia, South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan, which underscore the intersection of identities, cultural values, efforts, conflicts, and religions in making diversity work in their contexts. Collectively, these works make a unique contribution by invigorating debates on the flows and evolvement of cultural values and practices within and across families and institutions. This book will appeal to researchers, practitioners, and readers with interest in the current state of cultural diversity among minoritized families in Asia-Pacific and beyond.

As our world becomes increasingly interconnected through economic integration, technology, communication, and political transformation, the sphere of the family is a fundamental arena where globalizing processes become realized. For most individuals, family in whatever configuration, still remains the primary arrangement that meets certain social, emotional, and economic needs. It is within families that decisions about work, care, movement, and identity are negotiated, contested, and resolved. Globalization has profound implications for how families assess the choices and challenges that accompany this process. Families are integrated into the global economy through formal and informal work, through production and consumption, and through their relationship with nation-states. Moreover, ever growing communication and information technologies allow families and individuals to have access to others in an unprecedented manner. These relationships are accompanied by new conceptualizations of appropriate lifestyles, identities, and ideologies even among those who may never be able to access them.

Despite a general acknowledgement of the complexities and social significance inherent in globalization, most analyses remain top-down, focused on the global economy, corporate strategies, and political streams. This limited perspective on globalization has had profound implications for understanding social life. The impact of globalization on gender ideologies, work-family relationships, conceptualizations of children, youth, and the elderly have been virtually absent in mainstream approaches, creating false impressions that dichotomize globalization as a separate process from the social order. Moreover, most approaches to globalization and social phenomena emphasize the Western experience. These inaccurate assumptions have profound implications for families, and for the globalization process itself. In order to create and implement programs and policies that can harness globalization for the good of mankind, and that could reverse some of the deleterious effects that have affected the world's most vulnerable populations, we need to make the interplay between globalization and families a primary focus.

Vider uncovers how LGBTQ people reshaped domestic life in the postwar United States. From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histories of queer and trans politics have almost exclusively centered on public activism. In The Queerness of Home, Stephen Vider turns the focus inward, showing that the intimacy of domestic space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life. Beginning in the 1940s, LGBTQ activists looked increasingly to the home as a site of connection, care, and cultural inclusion. They struggled against the conventions of marriage, challenged the gendered codes of everyday labor, reimagined domestic architecture, and contested the racial and class boundaries of kinship and belonging. Retelling LGBTQ history from the inside out, Vider reveals the surprising ways that the home became, and remains, a charged space in battles for social and economic justice, making it clear that LGBTQ people not only realized new forms of community and culture for themselves-they remade the possibilities of home life for everyone.

Brown Bodies, White Babies focuses on the practice of cross-racial gestational surrogacy, in which a woman - through in-vitro fertilization using the sperm and egg of intended parents or donors - carries a pregnancy for intended parents of a different race. Focusing on the racial differences between parents and surrogates, this book is interested in how reproductive technologies intersect with race, particularly when brown bodies produce white babies. While the potential of reproductive technologies is far from pre-determined, the ways in which these technologies are currently deployed often serve the interests of dominant groups, through the creation of white, middle-class, heteronormative families. Laura Harrison, providing an important understanding of the work of women of color as surrogates, connects this labor to the history of racialized reproduction in the United States. Cross-racial surrogacy is one end of a continuum in which dominant groups rely on the reproductive potential of nonwhite women, whose own reproductive desires have been historically thwarted and even demonized. Brown Bodies, White Babies provides am interdisciplinary analysis that includes legal cases of contested surrogacy, historical examples of surrogacy as a form of racialized reproductive labor, the role of genetics in the assisted reproduction industry, and the recent turn toward reproductive tourism. Joining the ongoing feminist debates surrounding reproduction, motherhood, race, and the body, Brown Bodies, White Babies ultimately critiques the new potentials for parenthood that put the very contours of kinship into question.

Work life in academia might sound like a dream: summers off, year-long sabbaticals, the opportunity to switch between classroom teaching and research. Yet, when it comes to the sciences, life at the top U.S. research universities is hardly idyllic. Based on surveys of over 2,000 junior and senior scientists, both male and female, as well as in-depth interviews, Failing Families, Failing Science examines how the rigors of a career in academic science makes it especially difficult to balance family and work. Ecklund and Lincoln paint a nuanced picture that illuminates how gender, individual choices, and university and science infrastructures all play a role in shaping science careers, and how science careers, in turn, shape family life. They argue that both men and women face difficulties, though differently, in managing career and family. While women are hit harder by the pressures of elite academic science, the institution of science-and academic science, in particular-is not accommodating, possibly not even compatible, for either women or men who want to raise families. Perhaps most importantly, their research reveals that early career academic scientists struggle considerably with balancing their work and family lives. This struggle may prevent these young scientists from pursuing positions at top research universities-or further pursuing academic science at all- a circumstance that comes at great cost to our national science infrastructure. In an era when advanced scientific research and education is more important than ever, Failing Families, Failing Science presents a compelling inside look at the world of the university scientists who make it possible-and what universities and national science bodies can do to make a difference in their lives.

This book examines the use of violence by children and young people in family settings and proposes specialised and age-appropriate responses to these children and young people It interrogates the adequacy and effectiveness of current service and justice system responses, including analysis of police, court and specialist service responses. It proposes new approaches to children and young people who use violence that are evidence based, non-punitive, and informed by an understanding of the complexity of needs and the importance of age appropriate service responses. Bringing together a range of Australian and International experts, it sheds new light on questions such as: How can we best understand and respond to the use of family violence by young people? To what extent do traditional family violence responses address the experiences of adolescents who use violence in family settings? What barriers to help seeking exist for parental and sibling victims of adolescent family violence? To what degree do existing support and justice services provide adequate responses to those using adolescent family violence and their families? In what circumstances do children kill their biological and adopted parents? The explicit focus on child and adolescent family violence produces new knowledge in the area of family violence, which will be of relevance to academics, policy makers and family violence practitioners in Australia and internationally.

The whole world is changing with incredible speed towards something radically new, yet people across the globe also show resistance to the forces that homogenize our lives. This book deals with a community that has found its niche in the remote Niamgiri mountain range of Odisha (India) and is struggling to preserve its way of life: the Dongria Kond. In recent years, they made the headlines as the real "Avatars" because they successfully fought a multinational company's plans to mine the mountains. From the perspective of the Dongria Kond, these mountains are the seat of gods, and the whole environment is animated by spiritual forces. This highly complex cosmic order includes humans and non-humans and rests on a divine law (niam). This book captures the viewpoint of the Dongria Kond and provides deep insights into their vision of the world. It offers elaborate accounts of how the Dongria relate to the outside world, conceive of their own society and engage in complex rituals in order to (re-)establish the cosmos. The book confronts the reader with radically different imaginings of familiar human concerns: love, fertility, wealth, status and well-being.

An examination into aspects of the sexual as depicted in a variety of medieval texts, from Chaucer and Malory to romance and alchemical treatises. It is often said that the past is a foreign country where they do things differently, and perhaps no type of "doing" is more fascinating than sexual desires and behaviours. Our modern view of medieval sexuality is characterised bya polarising dichotomy between the swooning love-struck knights and ladies of romance on one hand, and the darkly imagined and misogyny of an unenlightened "medieval" sexuality on the other. British medieval sexual culture also exhibits such dualities through the influential paradigms of sinner or saint, virgin or whore, and protector or defiler of women. However, such sexual identities are rarely coherent or stable, and it is in the grey areas, the interstices between normative modes of sexuality, that we find the most compelling instances of erotic frisson and sexual expression. This collection of essays brings together a wide-ranging discussion of the sexual possibilitiesand fantasies of medieval Britain as they manifest themselves in the literature of the period. Taking as their matter texts and authors as diverse as Chaucer, Gower, Dunbar, Malory, alchemical treatises, and romances, the contributions reveal a surprising variety of attitudes, strategies and sexual subject positions. Amanda Hopkins teaches in English and French at the University of Warwick; Robert Allen Rouse is Associate Professor of English atthe University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Cory James Rushton is Associate Professor of English at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Contributors: Aisling Byrne, Anna Caughey, Kristina Hildebrand, Amy S. Kaufman, Yvette Kisor, Megan G. Leitch, Cynthea Masson, Hannah Priest, Samantha J. Rayner, Robert Allen Rouse, Cory James Rushton, Amy N. Vines

This book documents the journey of the survivors of sexual violence as they navigate the gruelling criminal justice and health care systems and the stigma and hostility in their communities in the aftermath of the incident. Through personal narratives of survivors and their family members, the book examines critical gaps in the existing networks of criminal procedure, health, and rehabilitation for survivors of sexual violence and rape. Using qualitative research, it distills the narratives gathered through interviews with survivors and their family members to understand their experiences and offers. The book contributes to the corpus of literature on different forms of violence against women in India with an emphasis on understanding the effectiveness of institutions, both formal and informal, in responding to sexual violence, and offering suggestions for changes in the health and support systems available to them. It documents post-incident interactions of survivors with family, community, the police, courts, lawyers, and hospitals and highlights the impact of rape on physical and mental health, work, relationships, education and housing for survivors and their families. This book will be of interest to those engaged in providing support to survivors of sexual violence as well as students and researchers of social work and social policy, health and social care, law, gender studies, human rights and civil liberties, gender and sexuality, social welfare, and mental health.

This book explores various practices and policies related to ageing issues in India. It addresses ageing concerns from a theoretical and empirical viewpoint with in-depth analyses of existential dimensions of ageing. It provides deep insights into ageing in India by discussing demographics related to health and social differentials, gender concerns, retirement problems, epidemiological transition taking place in the country with rising problem of dementia and mental health problems. It consists of 23 chapters written by various established as well as upcoming scholars in the field. The authors cover a broad range of topics with regard to provisions for institutional care, geriatric practice and emerging issues of elder abuse. The book will appeal to professionals and to lay people getting interested in ageing India from a social, health, gender, economic, psychological and emotional aspects.

In this provocative history of parenting, Harry Hendrick analyses the social and economic reasons behind parenting trends. He shows how broader social changes, including neoliberalism, feminism, the collapse of the social-democratic ideal, and the 'new behaviourism', have led to the rise of the anxious and narcissistic parent.

In this provocative history of parenting, Harry Hendrick analyses the social and economic reasons behind parenting trends. He shows how broader social changes, including neoliberalism, feminism, the collapse of the social-democratic ideal, and the 'new behaviourism', have led to the rise of the anxious and narcissistic parent. The book charts the shift from the liberal and progressive parenting styles of the 1940s-70s, to the more 'behavioural', punitive and managerial methods of childrearing today, made popular by 'experts' such as Gina Ford and Supernanny Jo Frost, and by New Labour's parent education programmes. This trend, Hendrick argues, is symptomatic of the sour, mean-spirited and vindictive social norms found throughout society today. It undermines the better instincts of parents and, therefore, damages parent-child relations. Instead, he proposes, parents should focus on understanding and helping their children as they work at growing up.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence Gendering Women is an engaging and accessible account of how constructions of femininity fundamentally affect women's mental wellbeing through the life course. Led by women's life history accounts of growing up and growing older in the north of England, this book shows how experiences of becoming and being a woman - in family life, education, employment, motherhood and situations of violence - both enable and erode self confidence and esteem. The challenges to women's mental wellbeing cut across age and class differences and have profound impacts on the material conditions of women's lives throughout the life course. This is in turn a driver of inequality that is often under-recognised in mainstream policy. Based on feminist and ethnographically informed research with over five hundred women Gendering women provides a critical link between gender theory and the lived realities of women's daily lives and will appeal to students and academics in sociology and social sciences.

Transition to Parenthood moves beyond a one-study focus and captures multidisciplinary work on all families making the transition to parenthood. The book covers societal trends, changes, and most importantly expectations. Focus is also placed on how families are impacted by their surroundings and their individual members. Strengths and limitations of current theories are discussed, as well as how the phenomenon of parenthood requires a combination of both macro- and micro-level theories.

This book presents an in-depth study of twenty-four Hindu families, of different caste and class groups, who live in a newly urbanized part of India. Beginning with a two-year study of family organization and child-rearing practices in the mid-1960s, the author follows the lives of 132 children and their extended families over nearly three decades. The book's main focus is women--the socialization of girls and the significance of women's roles through the life cycle in a society where the patrifocal extended family is predominant. The author examines the effects of caste and class on women's lives, and the effects of recent schooling and delayed marriage. Longitudinal research makes it possible to examine the impact of recent urbanization and modernization on groups of contemporary Indian women. The voices and changing perspectives of these women are captured in a series of intergenerational interviews that imply further change for Indian systems of family and gender. Students and researchers in the fields of psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, and women's studies will find this book to be as intriguing as it is essential.

This volume examines human flourishing and its relationship to other key concepts in moral theory. Some essays question whether a theory of human nature can allow us to develop an objective list of goods valuable to all agents. Some look at the role of relationships in a good life, or ask whether an ethical theory based on human flourishing can accommodate concern for others. Other essays analyze the function of social-political institutions in promoting the flourishing of individuals. Still others explore the implications of flourishing for political theory and principles of social justice.

This book explores the lived, embodied experiences of aging men as a counterpoint to the weary stereotypes often imposed on them. Conventionally, in Western cultures, they are seen as inevitably in decline. The book challenges these distorted images through a detailed analysis of aging men's life stories.

The five Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, are well-known for their extensive welfare system and gender equality which provides both parents with opportunities to earn and care for their children. In this topical book, expert scholars from the Nordic countries, as well as UK and the US, demonstrate how modern fatherhood is supported in the Nordic setting through family and social policies, and how these contribute to shaping and influencing the images, roles and practices of fathers in a diversity of family settings and variations of fatherhoods. This comprehensive volume will have wide international appeal for those who look to Nordic countries and their success in creating gender equal societies.