This book draws together analysis of class, gender, ethnicity and processes of migration in the context of family-school relationships. It provides an original analysis of the role of class as gendered and ethnicised in the explanation of the reproduction of educational inequalities. This book's analysis of class is developed through insights into how class, gender, ethnicity and religion are interrelated and connected to patterns of advantages and disadvantages in transnational flows. It explores parental involvement in children's education in the migratory context as a key site for the analysis of social class positioning and repositioning, focusing on a group of migrant Muslim mothers living in Australia. This book sheds lights on the interconnection of class, gender, ethnicity and religion embedded in migrant mothers' lives and the roles of these facets in regard to the education of their children. Delving into Muslim migrant mothers' practices and beliefs concerning their involvement provides new understanding of how support of children's education is shaped by the process of migration along with the neoliberal reforms of education systems and in particular repositioning of social class.

This book explores care-leavers' access to their personal records. People who grew up in care in previous decades may know little about their family nor understand why they were placed in care nor how decisions were made about their lives. Personal records can be a source of this information. Murray posits that it is crucial that those releasing these records understand their significance. Taking a person-centred approach, the book is based on the moving life history accounts of people who have sought their records. Finding Lost Childhoods highlights the importance of records to their identity formation, recounts what they discovered about themselves and their family, and discusses the consequences of finding this information. With a focus on policy and practice implications, the book will be of particular interest to those engaged in the work of releasing records, as well as care-leavers themselves, professional bodies, and students and scholars with an interest in social work, policy studies, welfare studies and youth work.

This landmark text describes research-informed practices and applications of Medical Family Therapy (MedFT) across a range of care environments and clinical populations (e.g., family medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, psychiatry, alcohol and drug treatment, community health centers, and military and veteran health systems). It is a timely release for a rapidly growing field. It includes the work of some of MedFT's most innovative leaders, who expertly: illustrate MedFT in action across primary, secondary, tertiary, and other unique health contexts describe the make-up of healthcare teams tailored to each chapter's distinct environment(s) highlight fundamental knowledge and critical skillsets across diverse healthcare contexts detail research-informed practices for MedFTs who treat patients, couples, families, and communities Clinical Methods in Medical Family Therapy is a comprehensive source for any behavioral health student, trainee, or professional looking to understand the necessary skills for MedFTs entering the healthcare workforce. It is also an essential read for trainers and instructors who are covering the fundamental MedFT knowledge and skills across diverse healthcare contexts. This text was written to be applicable for a wide variety of healthcare disciplines, including family therapy, counseling nursing, medicine, psychology and social work.

This book draws upon ethnographic and qualitative research in the United States to demonstrate the means through which long-haul truck drivers navigate work and family tensions in ways that resonate across categories of race, class, gender and religion. It examines how Christianity and constructions of masculinity are significant in the lives of long-haul drivers and how truckers work to construct narratives of their lives as 'good, moral' individuals in contrast to competing cultural narratives which suggest images of romantic, rule-free, renegade lives on the open road. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, observations of long-haul truckers, and participation in a CDL school, this rich ethnography highlights how Christian trucking opportunities provide avenues through which balance is struck between work and family, masculinity and other identities. Embedded in larger social discourse about the meaning of masculinity and similar to evangelical perspectives such as those of the Promise Keepers, Christian truckers often draw upon older ideas about responsible, breadwinning fatherhood in their discourse about being good "fathers" while on the road. This discourse is in some conflict with the lived experiences of Christian truckers who simultaneously find themselves confronted by more contemporary cultural narratives of "the work-family balance" and expectations of what it means to be a good "worker" or a good "trucker." The book offers new insight in the field of work and family studies and an extremely relevant voice in the broader contemporary discourse in the United States on the meaning of fatherhood and religion in the 21st century.

It is a simple story. A 37-year-old man belonging to the Traveller community is shot dead by a special unit of the French police on the family farm where he was hiding since he failed to return to prison after temporary release. The officers claim self-defense. The relatives, present at the scene, contest that claim. A case is opened, and it concludes with a dismissal that is upheld on appeal. Dismayed by these decisions, the family continues the struggle for truth and justice. Giving each account of the event the same credit, Didier Fassin conducts a counter-investigation, based on the re-examination of all the available details and on the interviews of its protagonists. A critical reflection on the work of police forces, the functioning of the justice system, and the conditions that make such tragedies possible and seldom punished, Death of a Traveller is also an attempt to restore to these marginalized communities what they are usually denied: respectability.

The spread of the Internet is remaking marriage markets, altering the process of courtship and the geographic trajectory of intimacy in the 21st century. For some Latin American women and U.S. men, the advent of the cybermarriage industry offers new opportunities for re-making themselves and their futures, overthrowing the common narrative of trafficking and exploitation. In this engaging, stimulating virtual ethnography, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer follows couples' romantic interludes at "Vacation Romance Tours," in chat rooms, and interviews married couples in the United States in order to understand the commercialization of intimacy. While attending to the interplay between the everyday and the virtual, Love and Empire contextualizes personal desires within the changing global economic and political shifts across the Americas. By examining current immigration policies and the use of Mexican and Colombian women as erotic icons of the nation in the global marketplace, she forges new relations between intimate imaginaries and state policy in the making of new markets, finding that women's erotic self-fashioning is the form through which women become ideal citizens, of both their home countries and in the United States. Through these little-explored, highly mediated romantic exchanges, Love and Empire unveils a fresh perspective on the continually evolving relationship between the U.S. and Latin America.

Embodied Family Choreography documents the lived and embodied practices employed to establish, maintain, and negotiate intimate social relationships in the family, examining forms of control, care, and creativity. Making use of the extensive video archives of family interaction in the US and Sweden, it presents the first investigation of how touch and interaction between bodies, in conjunction with talk, constitute a primary means of orchestrating activities through directives, thus creating rich relationships through supportive interchanges, and engaging in playful explorations of the world. Through close investigation of the sequential and simultaneous engagement of bodies interacting with other bodies, this book makes visible the important role touch plays in the context of contemporary Western middle class family life and is pioneering in its analysis of how the visual, aural, and haptic senses (usually analysed separately) mutually elaborate one another. As such, Embodied Family Choreography will appeal to scholars of child development, the sociology of the family and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

The study of new literacies is quickly emerging as a major research field. This book « samples work in the broad area of new literacies research along two dimensions. First, it samples some typical examples of new literacies - video gaming, fan fiction writing, weblogging, role play gaming, using websites to participate in affinity practices, memes, and other social activities involving mobile technologies. Second, the studies collectively sample from a wide range of approaches potentially available for researching and studying new literacies from a sociocultural perspective. Readers will come away with a rich sense of what new literacies are, and a generous appreciation of how they are being researched.

In the course of last two decades, the notion of care has become prominent in the social and cultural sciences. As a result of this proliferation of care in several disciplinary fields, we are observing not only the expansion of its conceptual meaning, but also an increasing imprecision in its usage. A growing amount of literature focuses on the intersection between work, gender, ethnicity, affect, and mobility regimes. In view of this growing field of literature, Anthropological Perspectives on Care looks at the notion of care from an anthropological perspective. Complementing earlier approaches, Alber and Drotbohm argue that an interpretation of care in relation to three different concepts, namely work, kinship and the life-course, will facilitate empirical and conceptual distinctions between the different activities that are labeled as care.

This book offers a radical rethink of family policy in the UK. Clem Henricson, the family policy expert, analyses in detail the major shift in the role of the state viz a viz personal relationships in recent years, with its aspirations to reduce child poverty, increase social mobility and deliver social cohesion. Brought in by New Labour and carried forward, albeit in diluted form, by the Coalition, Henricson asks whether this philosophy of social betterment through manipulating the parent-child relationship is appropriate for family policy. She challenges the thinking behind the expectation that you can change a highly unequal society through the family route. Instead the argument is made for a family policy with its own raison d'etre, free of other government agendas. A premium is set on the need to manage the multiple core tensions in families of affection, empathy and supportiveness on the one hand and aggression, deception and self interest on the other. A set of coherent support and control polices for family relations are developed which endorse this awareness and embrace a fundamental shift in perspective for future progressive governments.

How do Chinese, Japanese and Korean mothers in Britain make sense of their motherhood and employment? What are the intersecting factors that shape these women's identities, experiences and stories? Contributing further to the continuing discourse and development of intersectionality, this book examines East Asian migrant women's stories of motherhood, employment and gender relations by deploying interlocking categories that go beyond the meta axes of race, gender and class, including factors such as husbands' ethnicities and the locality of their settlement. Through this, Lim argues for more detailed and context specific analytical categories of intersectionality, enabling a more nuanced understanding of migrant women's stories and identities. East Asian Mothers in Britain will appeal to students and scholars across a range of disciplines and with an interest in identity, gender, ethnicity, class, migration and intersectionality.

Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated 'double shift' that result in widespread calls to either 'lean in' or 'opt out'? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves? In Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities, Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as 'individuals' and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter. Bueskens' theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women's duality, drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and 'rewriting the sexual contract'. Bridging this gap, Bueskens' interviews ten 'revolving mothers' to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disrupts the gendered dynamics of household work. A provocative and original work, Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities will appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in fields such as Women and Gender Studies, Sociology of Motherhood and Social and Political Theory.

This volume offers both theoretical and research-based accounts from mothers in academia who must balance their own intricate knowledge of school systems, curriculum and pedagogy with their children's education and school lives. It explores the contextual advantages and disadvantages of "knowing too much" and how this impacts children's actions, scholastics and developing consciousness along various lines. Additionally, it allows teachers, administrators and researchers to critically examine their own discourses and those of their students to better navigate their professional and domestic roles. Gathering narratives from academic women in traditional and nontraditional maternal roles, this volume presents both contemporary and retrospective experiences of what it's like to raise children amidst educational and sociocultural change.

Family Studies is a key area of policy, professional and personal debate. Perhaps precisely because of this, teaching texts have struggled with how to approach this area, which is both 'familiar' and also contentious and value laden. This innovative and reflective book deals with such dilemmas head-on, through its focus on family meanings in diverse contexts in order to enhance our understanding of everyday social lives and professional practices. Drawing on extracts and research by leading authors in the field of family studies, Understanding Family Meanings provides the reader with an overview of the basic concepts and theories related to families using readings with questions and analysis to encourage reflection and learning. Published in association with The Open University, the book centralises the question what is 'family' and focuses on family meanings as the key underpinnings for academic study and professional training. It explores the shifting and subtle ways in which individuals, researchers, policy-makers and professionals make sense of the idea of 'family' and in doing so considers issues of power, inequality and values which are integral to any understanding of family meanings. Audio discussions with leading authorities in the field are also available online to enhance the content and key concepts of the book. It therefore provides an excellent foundation for any module in family studies, as well as all professional training modules that include attention to families and close relationships, and for further learning in the area of families and relationships.

The process of becoming an adult in contemporary times is fragmented and unequal, shaped by chance, choice and timing. "Unfolding lives" presents a unique approach to understanding the changing face of youth transitions, addressing the question of how gender identities are constituted in late modern culture. The book follows individual lives over time, enabling the reader to witness gender identities in the making and breathing new life into static analytic models. At the heart of the book are vivid in-depth accounts of four young lives, emblematic of broader biographical trends. They reveal how inequalities and privileges are made in new and unexpected ways, through practices such as falling in love, coming out, acting out and religious conversion. A focus on temporal processes and changing meanings captures what it feels like to be young and shows the creative ways that young people navigate the conflicting and changing demands of personal relationships, schooling, work and play. "Unfolding lives" is also a demonstration of a method-in-practice, describing how longitudinal material can be analysed and animated to realise the relationship between personal and social change. Written in an accessible style that breaks the conventional academic mould, "Unfolding lives" is a compelling and provocative read. The book will be an essential text for students and academics involved in youth and gender studies as well as those interested in new directions in qualitative research methods and writing.

This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Astroem seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children's literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.

This collection explores mobile childhoods: from Latvia and Estonia to Finland; from Latvia to the United Kingdom; from Russia to Finland; and cyclical mobility by the Roma between Romania and Finland. The chapters examine how east-to-north European family mobility brings out different kinds of multilocal childhoods. The children experience unequal starting points and further twists throughout their childhood and within their family lives. Through the innovative use of ethnographic and participatory methods, the contributors demonstrate how diverse migrant children's everyday lives are, and how children themselves as well as their translocal families actively pursue better lives. The topics include naming and food practices, travel, schooling, summer holidays, economic and other inequalities, and the importance of age in understanding children's lives. Translocal Childhoods and Family Mobility in East and North Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology and human geography.

When gay couples become parents, they face a host of questions and issues that their straight counterparts may never have to consider. How important is it for each partner to have a biological tie to their child? How will they become parents: will they pursue surrogacy, or will they adopt? Will both partners legally be able to adopt their child? Will they have to hide their relationship to speed up the adoption process? Will one partner be the primary breadwinner? And how will their lives change, now that the presence of a child has made their relationship visible to the rest of the world? In Gay Dads: Transitions to Adoptive Fatherhood, Abbie E. Goldberg examines the ways in which gay fathers approach and negotiate parenthood when they adopt. Drawing on empirical data from her in-depth interviews with 70 gay men, Goldberg analyzes how gay dads interact with competing ideals of fatherhood and masculinity, alternately pioneering and accommodating heteronormative "parenthood culture." The first study of gay men's transitions to fatherhood, this work will appeal to a wide range of readers, from those in the social sciences to social work to legal studies, as well as to gay-adoptive parent families themselves.

A thought provoking, persuasive, challenging, and above all practical guide for beginners and more experienced therapists alike. It shows the demands and complexity of marital work and is an important reminder of the interdependence of theory and practice.

Family mobility decisions reveal much about how the public and private realms of social life interact and change. This sociological study explores how contemporary families reconcile individual members' career and education projects within the family unit over time and space, and unpacks the intersubjective constraints on workforce mobility. This Australian mixed methods study sampled Defence Force families and middle class professional families to illustrate how families' educational projects are necessarily and deeply implicated in issues of workforce mobility and immobility, in complex ways. Defence families move frequently, often absorbing the stresses of moving through 'viscous' institutions as private troubles. In contrast, the selective mobility of middle class professional families and their 'no go zones' contribute to the public issue of poorly serviced rural communities. Families with different social, material and vocational resources at their disposal are shown to reflexively weigh the benefits and risks associated with moving differently. The book also explore how priorities shift as children move through educational phases. The families' narratives offer empirical windows on larger social processes, such as the mobility imperative, the gender imbalance in the family's intersubjective bargains, labour market credentialism, the social construction of place, and the family's role in the reproduction of class structure.

Analysing diverse media representations of men who provide primary care to their children, this book demonstrates how the practice of fatherhood - and of masculinity - is changing, and the ways media representations sensationalise and reinforce gender inequities in regards to carework. This book examines disparities between practices of carework amongst heterosexual couples and media representations of men who provide primary care, whilst also including a discussion of media accounts of primary caregiving amongst gay couples. The book also provides a detailed analysis of the relationship between care labor and public understandings of masculinity. Assessing whether media accounts of fathers who provide primary care undermine egalitarian approaches to the division of labor amongst heterosexual couples, this book is a vital intervention into public discourse about masculinity, fathering and caregiving. This book will an important resource for students, researchers, educators and practitioners as it brings together a range of in-depth literatures, and empirical analyses to provide a clear overview of contemporary fathering. It will be essential reading in the fields of gender studies and masculinity studies, together with sociology of families, cultural studies, social psychology and social policy.

This interdisciplinary book provides a sociological view of the contemporary experiences of children in Southern Europe. Focusing on regions deeply affected by the 2008 economic crisis, it offers a detailed investigation into the impact of economic downturn and austerity on the lives of children. Established childhood studies and sociology researchers unpack recent changes in the quality of children's lives and our understanding of children's rights in the modern world. Focusing first on contemporary changes to children's forms of living, the book then turns to the prevalence of poverty in Southern Europe, before scrutinising the experiences of migrant and highly mobile children. Illustrating these experiences with key case studies from across Southern Europe, this book presents a powerful critique of the promises and pitfalls of structural changes to children-centred public policy. This informative book is essential reading for academics and higher-level students of childhood studies. Policy makers and practitioners in education, law, health, social services and children's rights organizations in need of strong, empirical research into childhood experiences will appreciate the thorough case studies analysed in the book. Contributors include: G. Argento, R. Barn, E. Brey, R.T. Di Rosa, M. Dominguez-Serrano, N. Fernandes, L. Gaitan, A. Kiliari, F. Kougioumoutzaki, S. Mateus, L. del Moral-Espin, A. Nunes de Almeida, S. Pantazidis, Y. Pechtelidis, V. Ramos, M. Sanchez-Dominguez, M.J. Sarmento, C. Satta, T. Seabra, A.G. Stamou, M.T. Tagliaventi, C. Tomas, G. de Pina Trevisan

Pathways of Human Development uses theoretical perspectives from developmental, social, and behavioral sciences to examine the many ways that individuals, families, and communities intersect and interface. Focusing on the impact of change on human development, including its antecedents, processes, and consequences, the chapters examine a range of topics such as health and adaptation; social anxiety disorder; protective factors and risk behaviors; parent-child relationships; adolescent sexuality; intergenerational relationships; family stress and adaptation; and community resilience. By extending human development theorizing across these pivotal life-changing issues, this volume offers a comprehensive map of the trajectories of development among individuals, families, and communities.

This book examines the transformations in home lives arising in later life and resulting from global migrations. It provides insight into the ways in which contemporary demographic processes of aging and migration shape the meaning, experience and making of home for those in older age. Chapters explore how home is negotiated in relation to possibilities for return to the "homeland," family networks, aging and health, care cultures and belonging. The book deliberately crosses emerging sub-fields in transnationalism studies by offering case studies on aging labour migrants, retirement migrants, and return migrants, as well as older people affected by the movement of others including family members and migrant care workers. The diversity of people's experiences of home in later life is fully explored and the impact of social class, gender, and nationality, as well as the corporeal dimensions of older age, are all in evidence.

This book is about ageing in Bulgaria. How do Bulgaria's elderly-abandoned by the state and left behind by their adult children and grandchildren-adapt to their continuously shifting environment and a state of perpetual uncertainty? Drawing on dozens of interviews with older people in Bulgaria's capital Sofia as well as a village in the Bulgarian Balkans, Iossifova unravels how the dramatic socio-political transitions of the past eighty years have influenced the lifecourse of older people today. She carefully traces their patterns of everyday life in order to draw out the mechanisms through which older people cope with their meagre pensions, sustain their ailing bodies and make do in their tattered homes. Iossifova argues that 'ageing in place' as a popular paradigm underpinning neoliberal policy agendas has no place in Bulgaria and the wider Global East, where translocal ageing is the norm.