The rise and increasingly important role of companion animals in our families From homemade meals for our dogs to high-end feline veterinary care, pets are a growing multi-billion-dollar industry in the United States. In Just Like Family, Andrea Laurent-Simpson explores the expanding role of animals in what she calls "the multi-species family," providing a window into a world where almost 95 percent of adults who share their homes with dogs and cats identify-and ultimately treat-their animal companions as legitimate members of their families. With an insightful eye, Laurent-Simpson examines why and how these animals have increasingly become an important part of our households. She highlights their various roles in our lives, including as siblings to our existing children, as animal children themselves, and in some cases, even as grandchildren, particularly as fertility rates decline and a growing number of younger couples choose to live a childfree lifestyle. Ultimately, Laurent-Simpson highlights how animals-and their place in our lives-have changed the structure of the American family in surprising ways. Just Like Family provides a fascinating inside look at our complex relationships with our beloved animal companions in the twenty-first century.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

This edited volume offers a contemporary rethinking of the relationship between love and care in the context of neoliberal practices of professionalization and work. Each of the book's three sections interrogates a particular site of care, where the affective, political, legal, and economic dimensions of care intersect in challenging ways. These sites are located within a variety of institutionally managed contexts such as the contemporary university, the theatre hall, the prison complex, the family home, the urban landscape, and the care industry. The geographical spread of the case studies stretches across India, Vietnam, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, the UK and the US and provides broad coverage that crosses the divide between the Global North and the Global South. To address this transnational interdisciplinary field of study, the collection utilises insights from across the humanities and social sciences and includes contributions from literature, sociology, cultural and media studies, philosophy, feminist theory, theatre, art history, and education. These inquiries build on a variety of conceptual tools and research methods, from data analysis to psychoanalytic reading. Love and the Politics of Care delivers an attentive and widely relevant examination of the politics of care and makes a compelling case for an urgent reconsideration of the methods that currently structure and regulate it.

Many young professionals seek egalitarian partnerships in which both partners work for pay and share unpaid housework and childcare. Yet working couples' realities often deviate from this ideal, with women trading off employment for family care. Will contemporary young adults repeat this pattern, or will they come closer to achieving equality in work and family? Equal Partners? seeks to explore this question. Drawing on six years of interviews with the partners in twenty-one different-gender couples, Jaclyn S. Wong documents how supportive workplaces, partners' steadfast gender-egalitarian attitudes, and partners' jointly coordinated actions all need to come together for couples to experience gender equality in work and family. This book offers a compelling study of the dynamics of couples in ambitious partnerships who aspire to equality as they navigate the external pressures that come with life planning.

Changing practices and perceptions of parenthood and family life have long been the subject of intense public, political and academic attention. Recent years have seen growing interest in the role digital media and technologies can play in these shifts, yet this topic has been under-explored from a discourse analytical perspective. In response, this book's investigation of everyday parenting, family practices and digital media offers a new and innovative exploration of the relationship between parenting, family practices, and digitally mediated connection. This investigation is based on extensive digital and interview data from research with nine UK-based single and/or lesbian, gay or bisexual parents who brought children into their lives in non-traditional ways, for example through donor conception, surrogacy or adoption. Through a novel approach that combines constructivist grounded theory with mediated discourse analysis, this book examines connected family lives and practices in a way that transcends the limiting social, biological and legal structures that still dominate concepts of family in contemporary society.

National strategies with the aim of facilitating a better work-family balance have increased pressure on work organizations to offer arrangements that are more family-friendly. Flexible work, such as telework or flexitime, has been argued to facilitate a better integration of work and family responsibilities, and to provide protections from career penalties to care. The spread of digital technologies has further facilitated the flexible execution of work tasks, a phenomenon that has escalated more recently due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Within this context, where flexible work has become more widespread than ever before, Flexible Work and the Family provides a wide range of insights into current developments in the study of flexible work. Demonstrating both the facilitators and the barriers to a positive work-home environment, chapters delve into the relationship between working from home and family in light of the pandemic, as well as gender, parenthood, and status-specific patterns of the interrelation between flexible work and the family. Finally, studies from a linked-lives perspective show how flexible work impacts employees' partners and parenting behaviour. Building upon the recent global escalation of the remote work phenomenon, Flexible Work and the Family provides timely insights into flexible work's implications for the increasingly blurred work-life divide.

In this accessible, engaging, and up-to-date course book, Susan L. Brown employs ethnographic vignettes and demographic data to introduce students to twenty-first century perspectives on contemporary families. Appropriate as a primary or secondary text in classes on family and marriage, this book probes momentous shifts in the definition of family, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage and policy debates on welfare reform and work-family issues. Brown also explores the rise in nonmarital childbearing and single-mother families and the decline of "traditional" marriage by delving into the historical roots of family change, current trends of family formation and dissolution, and the implications of family change for the well-being of adults and children. With a lens toward socioeconomic inequality and racial-ethnic variation in family patterns, Families in America illustrates how family diversity is now the norm. The Sociology in the Twenty-First Century series introduces students to a range of sociological issues of broad interest in the United States today, with each volume addressing topics such as family, race, immigration, gender, education, and social inequality. These books-intended for classroom use-will highlight findings from current, rigorous research and demographic data while including stories about people's experiences to illustrate major themes in an accessible manner. Learn more at www.ucpress.edu/go/sociologyinthe21stcentury.

Written in 1954 and published here for the first time, The Social Background of Delinquency deals with the social climate in which juvenile delinquency crops up time after time. It examines ‘bad’ behaviour among people who could otherwise be classed as ‘normal’ members of ordinary English society. It attempts to explore certain aspects of the sub-cultures within respectable society which appear to breed behaviour officially classed as ‘delinquent’. The research is based on a working-class town in the Midlands with a high proportion of miners and observes a pair of similar streets in five areas of the town. Each pair of streets containing one delinquency-free and one with a history of trouble. Not content with a mere survey, the research design is multifaceted and includes ethnographic observations, key informant interviews, personal history analyses and 'the playroom method' explicitly designed to ascertain children's views. The findings are reported here and represent a snapshot of life in the 1950s.

"We have fun and we enjoy each other's company, so why shouldn't we just move in together?"-Lauren, from Cohabitation Nation Living together is a typical romantic rite of passage in the United States today. In fact, census data shows a 37 percent increase in couples who choose to commit to and live with one another, forgoing marriage. And yet we know very little about this new "normal" in romantic life. When do people decide to move in together, why do they do so, and what happens to them over time? Drawing on in-depth interviews, Sharon Sassler and Amanda Jayne Miller provide an inside view of how cohabiting relationships play out before and after couples move in together, using couples' stories to explore the he said/she said of romantic dynamics. Delving into hot-button issues, such as housework, birth control, finances, and expectations for the future, Sassler and Miller deliver surprising insights about the impact of class and education on how relationships unfold. Showcasing the words, thoughts, and conflicts of the couples themselves, Cohabitation Nation offers a riveting and sometimes counterintuitive look at the way we live now.

Child care environments have received extensive research attention by those interested in understanding how participating in nonparental child care might influence the children's development and learning. Throughout the United States (US Census Bureau, 2011) and Europe (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006) a large number of young children are cared for outside of the home by non-parental adults. Young children's nonparental care is commonly referred to as ""child care," and is provided to children whose ages range from birth to 12 years of age. The provision of child care services has become an increasingly important part of early childhood education. In fact, the United Nations Children's Fund (2019) states that a large majority of children worldwide spend at least some of their week in child care, such arrangements include center care, family child care, in-home child care, relative child care, and supplemental child care. Child care researchers have been conducting studies to understand how participating in nonparental child care might influence the children's development and learning outcomes. There are more than enough child care studies to make numerous major inferences. For example, research outcomes show that child care quality seems to be more influential than either the kind of child care or age of admission in determining the children's development and learning. The adults' child care affects the quality in child care. In the environment adults who are caring for the children have the opportunity to effectively assume both nurturing and instructional roles to help young children cultivate their social and cognitive abilities. The teachers' effectiveness is related to their individual characteristics, such as formal education, specialized training, and the classroom environment. However, the majority of the studies show that both family and quality of child care have the most significant effects on the children's development and learning. Therefore, the concept of child care has heavily influenced modern views. Researchers, scholars, and educators are beginning to understand the current foundations based on theoretical frameworks that contribute to the purposes of the child care in the United States and Europe. The contents of the child care volume reflect the major shifts in the views of these early childhood researchers, scholars, and educators in relation to research outcomes on child care, its historical roots, the role of child care in early childhood education, and its relationship to theory, research, and practice.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

Karen Tracy examines the identity-work of judges and attorneys in state supreme courts as they debated the legality of existing marriage laws. Exchanges in state appellate courts are juxtaposed with the talk that occurred between citizens and elected officials in legislative hearings considering whether to revise state marriage laws. The book's analysis spans ten years, beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of sodomy laws in 2003 and ending in 2013 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared the federal government's Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional, and it particularly focuses on how social change was accomplished through and reflected in these law-making and law-interpreting discourses. Focal materials are the eight cases about same-sex marriage and civil unions that were argued in state supreme courts between 2005 and 2009, and six of a larger number of hearings that occurred in state judicial committees considering bills regarding who should be able to marry. Tracy concludes with analysis of the 2011 Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on DOMA, comparing it to the initial 1996 hearing and to the 2013 Supreme Court oral argument about it. The book shows that social change occurred as the public discourse that treated sexual orientation as a "lifestyle " was replaced with a public discourse of gays and lesbians as a legitimate category of citizen.

The first decades of the twenty-first century have been beset by troubling social realities: coalition warfare, global terrorism and financial crisis, climate change, epidemics of family violence, violence toward women, addiction, neo-colonialism, continuing racial and religious conflict. While traumas involving large-scale or historical violence are widely represented in trauma theory, familial trauma is still largely considered a private matter, associated with personal failure. This book contributes to the emerging field of feminist trauma theory by bringing focus to works that contest this tendency, offering new understandings of the significance of the literary testimony and its relationship to broader society. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma adopts an interdisciplinary approach in examining how the literary testimony of familial transgenerational trauma, with its affective and relational contagion, illuminates transmissive cycles of trauma that have consequences across cultures and generations. It offers bold and insightful readings of works that explore those consequences in story-Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Helene Cixous's Hyperdream (2009), Marguerite Duras's The Lover (1992), Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy (1999), and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), concluding that such testimony constitutes a fundamentally feminist experiment and encounter. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma challenges the casting of familial trauma in ahistorical terms, and affirms both trauma and writing as social forces of political import.