Bücher der Reihe Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life

This volume provides readers with recent sociological approaches to family understanding, theorising and practices within the context of continuities and change, both across generations and during individual life courses. The contributors uniquely investigate the friction between persisting family needs and changing circumstances, between holding on to traditional family norms and adapting to fast-changing demands. Authors from nine countries develop and apply innovative theoretical and methodological approaches for a more differentiated description of European family lives at the beginning of the 21st century, and show that family sociology has achieved significant commonalities across national borders in Europe, thus helping our understanding of complex family realities. The book will be essential reading for students and scholars with an interest in family and intimate life, family sociology and policy, sociology and gender studies.

This book examines the lives of children and young adults living in residential care systems in Zimbabwe and their unique conceptualization of family. While the importance of family for the development and wellbeing of children can't be overemphasized, the questions of what and who counts as family to orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) are under-researched. Gwenzi brings a social constructionist approach to study OVCs in institutional care as well as living with their families in Zimbabwe, finding that they do not have a single definition of family and that they use diverse characteristics to describe what family means to them. With the data suggesting a need for belonging, continuity of relationships, protection, and trust, this study makes recommendations for policy and practice with youth in alternative care in sub-Saharan Africa.

Exploring the growing global trend of solo living, this highly original study addresses core debates about contemporary social change in the context of globalization, including individualization and connection, the future of family formation, consumption and identities, belonging and 'community', living arrangements and sustainability.

Assembling Mass Observation Archive material with historiographies of family, house and nation from ancient-Greece to present-day Europe, China and America, this book contributes to current debates on identity, belonging, memory and material culture by exploring how power works in the small spaces of home.

It is now over 20 years since 'open adoption' was first introduced, but it remains a controversial and contested part of social work practice.

Leading family sociologist David Morgan revisits his highly influential 'family practices' approach in this new book. Exploring its impact, and how it has been critiqued, Morgan shows the continued relevance of the approach with reference to time and space, the body, emotions, ethics and work/life balance.

As intimate lives become more public, and discussions of gender and sexuality more complex, there is a need to rethink how we engage with our own perceptions and identifications with respect to intimacy. This book explores whether our intimate desires are limited by social norms and expectations, and if so what we might be able to do about it.

This book studies the growing number of lesbian women embarking on parenthood after coming out. Theoretical debates about lesbian motherhood often consider its assimilative or transgressive dimensions. This book offers a different approach, contextualising lesbian motherhood in relation to sexual citizenship and hegemonic discourses of kinship

Drawing on the writings of Foucault, this book explores the politics and power-dynamics of family life, examining how everyday obligations such as attending school, going to work and staying healthy are organized through the family. The book includes an essay by Foucault, Les desordres des familles , translated here in English for the first time.

This book conceptualises the lived experience of intimacy in a world in which the terms and conditions of love and friendship are increasingly unclear. It shows that the analysis of the 'small world' of dyads can give important clues about society and its gendered makeup.

Based on repeat interviews from a range of generational perspectives, this book explores the nature of contemporary British Chinese households and childhoods, examining the extent to which parents identify themselves as being Chinese and how decisions to uphold or move away from 'traditional' Chinese values impacts on their child-rearing methods.

In this book, Dimitra Hartas explores parenting and its influence on children's learning and wellbeing while examining the impact of social class amidst policy initiatives to eradicate child poverty in 21st Century Britain.

This book critically assesses the main features of the modernization of family life and personal relationships by examining and comparing three European countries with different social and political pathways: Portugal, Switzerland and Lithuania. Drawing on national surveys of family trajectories and social networks, the contributors highlight personal and family relationships through the lens of network and life course perspectives as well as gender and generational perspectives. Providing innovative, comparative findings on families and personal networks through the use of diverse methodologies, this edited collection will be of interest to scholars, students and policymakers across a range of social science disciplines.

This edited collection explores family relations in two types of 'migrant families' in Europe: mixed families and transnational families. Based on in-depth qualitative fieldwork and large surveys, the contributors analyse gender and intergenerational relations from a variety of standpoints and migratory flows. In their examination of family life in a migratory context, the authors develop theoretical approaches from the social sciences that go beyond migration studies, such as intersectionality, the solidarity paradigm, care circulation, reflexive modernization and gender convergence theory. Making Multicultural Families in Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including migration and transnationalism studies, family studies, intergenerational studies, gender studies, cultural studies, development studies, globalization studies, ethnic studies, gerontology studies, social network analysis and social work.

This book presents an incisive and engaging account of love, intimacy and personal life in contemporary Western society. The authors draw on rich qualitative and large-scale survey data to explore how couples communicate with each other, negotiate the pressures and pleasures of parenthood, and the vagaries of sexual desire and intimacy across life course. Focusing on ΓÇÿthe everydayΓÇÖ, Couple Relationships in the 21st Century unpicks the ordinary and often mundane relationship work that goes into sustaining a relationship over time, breaking down the dichotomy between enduring relationships of quality and good enough or endured relationships. It contests the separation of couples into distinct relationship types ΓÇô defined through age, parenthood or sexuality. Looking through the lens of relationship practices it is clear that there is no ΓÇÿnormal coupleΓÇÖ: couples are what couples do. With a foreword by Dr Reenee Singh, Director, London Intercultural Couples Centre and Co-Director, Tavistock Family Therapy and Systemic Research Centre, this new extended edition provides an invaluable critical insight on contemporary experiences of coupledom and will be essential reading for scholars and students, clinicians working in couple and family therapy, and those involved in relationship support services.

This book offers a comparative study of the lives of young adult women and their mothers in Hong Kong and Britain. Set against the backdrop of debates regarding the consequences of late modern social change for family and intimate life, the authors consider the challenges of exploring these issues across differing cultures.

This book looks at the simultaneous processes of making and un-making of families that are part of the adoption practice. Global Families, Inequality and Transnational Adoption will be of interest to students and scholars of adoption studies, family and kinship, sociology, anthropology, social work and development.

This book examines connections between personal, relational and material matters in everyday life in the context of broader and long standing social problems. It explores the connections between mundane practices in the reproduction of our bodies and our relations with those we live with, and the technological practices that inform daily life.

This collection explores sexualities, families, caring practices, and the ways in which people practice intimacy in an ever-changing social and political landscape. Authors map desires, struggles and reconfigurations, thereby broadening current understandings of what contemporary intimate life looks like.

Everyday foodways are a powerful means of drawing boundaries between social groups and defining who we are and where we belong. This book draws upon auto/biographical food narratives and emphasises the power of everyday foodways in maintaining and reinforcing social divisions along the lines of gender and class.

Exploring how feelings about gender have changed over three interrelated generations of women and men during the 20th century, this book explores how experiences are connected, what is continued, what triggers changes. It looks at how new feelings of gender gradually change gender norms from within, and how they contribute to new social practices.

This book addresses the nature of intimacy and relationships in a time of what Eva Illouz characterizes as ΓÇÿcold intimaciesΓÇÖ. The contributors to this collection highlight the ambivalence and tensions contained in ΓÇÿintimacyΓÇÖ by uncovering a nuanced and complex dynamic, in which interpersonal relations and the public sphere are mutually constituted. A range of topics areexplored, including the new conditions of ΓÇÿchoiceΓÇÖ, the abundance of partners, class and emotional competence, rational decision-making and the specific forms of ΓÇÿlove painΓÇÖ which can emerge from cooled intimacy. The chapters also shed light on the limits of this theoretical contribution, highlighting the importance of parenting, violence, poverty, and other material constraints that continue to limit and frame individualsΓÇÖ romantic choices. Overall this volume presents an interpretation of intimacy that is not just ΓÇÿcoldΓÇÖ but includes practices, desires and feelings that are safe and dangerous, that bring solace or erupt in violence, that lead to salvation or condemnation, and where virtual encounters and increased internal and crossborder mobility have altered the relationship between intimacy and (physical/emotional) distance.Romantic Relationships in a Time of ΓÇÿCold IntimaciesΓÇÖ will be of interest to scholars and students across a range of disciplines, including sociology, social work, social policy and demography, as well as practitioners and policy-makers with an interest in couple relationships.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with forty middle-class mothers living in Northern Ireland and the US, this book explores the strategies women adopt, as they take on and creatively re-make motherhood in ways which allow them to cope.

This book explores how digital communication generates new intimacies and meanings of friendship in a networked society, developing a theory of mediated intimacies to explain how social media contributes to dramatic changes in our ideas about personal relationships, through themes of self, youth, families, digital dating and online social capital.

Instead of seeing the family as a 'monolithic' entity, as though separate from its surroundings, this new approach draws attention to assemblages of various types that in different constellations and through different transactions relate people to each other as families and kin.

While many worry about population overload, this book highlights the dramatic fall in fertility rates globally exploring questions such as why are parents having fewer babies? Will this lead to population decline? What will be the impact of a world with fewer children and can social policy reverse fertility decline?

This study is based upon original research carried out with lesbian, gay and queer parents and explores how genealogy, kinship, family, everyday life, gender, race, state welfare and intimacy are theorized and lived out, drawing upon interactionist, feminist, discursive and queer sociologies.

Recent theorizing tends to position ordinary relationships as something we have lost, yet the nature of these relationships is not seriously engaged with. Drawing on rich empirical data, this book questions epochal claims about contemporary emotional lives, setting out to be explicit about the nature of ordinary relationships.