Böcker i Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life-serien

With reproductive medical technologies becoming more accessible, assisted donor conception is raising new and important questions about family life. Using in-depth interviews the authors explore the lived reality of donor conception and offer insights into the complexities of these new family relationships.

Drawing on interviews with UK couples in distance relationships, this book seeks to explain, evaluate and advance sociological debates about intimate life. It provides a rich and human perspective on how bodies, emotions and connections to others are key in maintaining intimate relationships.

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.

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.

Drawing on research from the Timescapes Study, this volume discusses the life chances and experiences of children and young people, parents and older generations. A unique qualitative longitudinal study forms the basis for the chapter contributions, delivering policy-relevant findings to address individual and family lives over time.

This book compares understandings and experiences of love and intimacy of one distinct cultural group - Gujarati Indians - born and brought up in two different countries. In a rapidly globalizing world, this comparative ethnographic study explores how the context in which we are brought up shapes our most intimate attachments and family lives.

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.

Drawing on recent developments within the sociology of family life, this book examines family connection and solidarity within different stepfamily networks, focusing on relationships from a kinship perspective and using case studies of people's experiences to explore how family connection is constructed within different stepfamilies.

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.

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

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.

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.

This collection focuses on the real life experiences of conducting emprical research about families and relationships, with an emphasis on the actualities of doing research and the experiences of being a researcher.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 book examines common familial trends and differences throughout Europe from the 1960s onwards and discusses the most common theoretical explanations for convergence and divergence. Eriikka Oinonen reveals how structural factors such as the labour market, the welfare state and the EU affect Europeans' family related choices.

Despite the growing multi-faith and multi-ethnic nature of Britain, there is insufficient knowledge about diversity in family practices across ethno-religious groups. This book fills that gap, exploring family practices - values, roles, relationships, support systems and daily routines - among South Asian Muslim families in Britain.

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

An incisive engagement with the subject of intimacy and interpersonal relationships and the methods used to research families and personal life, this book introduces readers to contemporary conceptual and methodological frameworks for understanding intimacy and sexuality in families.

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 edited collection shows that good parenthood is neither fixed nor stable. The authors illustrate how different versions of parenthood coexist and how complex sets of actions are demanded to fulfil today's expectations of parenthood in Western societies.

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.

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 book is about friendships in public settings today. Wilkinson examines friendships in the public settings of neighbourhoods, civil society and at work. Identifying the unique relevance which public friendships have to contemporary social problems, the chapters cover a range of topics, including work-life balance, women's 'double burden' and their leisure deficit, and contemporary neighbouring initiatives. Wilkinson shows how 'friendship time' at work provides solutions to new social problems including privacy: with the modern workplace being hyper-public and emphasizing visibility, monitoring and 24/7 availability, friendship's combination of voluntarism and trust enable a private refuge even in an open-plan office. The book also explores the way in which friendships in public settings like work and neighbourhood provide community to those in society who are more likely to be excluded from private familial intimacy.The Public Life of Friendship will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of social science disciplines with an interest in friendship and the sociology of personal life.

This book explores an online support group for women who are infertile.

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.