Negotiating Families and Personal Lives in the 21st Century

This book is a vital new resource in the sociological study of family life in the 21st century. The chapters in this volume explore a diverse range of family and intimate life experiences, such as personal choices about reproduction and how life choices and family forms are mediated by factors including geographical location, race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, income and government policy. Through a series of evidence-based chapters, leading sociologists explore a diverse range of family and intimate life experiences and the contexts within which they are lived and experienced. Each chapter delves into the lives and experiences of people whose choices in some way seem to disrupt normative and traditional ideas of family, parenting and childhood. Family patterns and experiences of living apart together, troubled families, children in care, culture, coupledom, same-sex families and digital technology are covered and examined innovatively through theoretical engagement. Chapters also incorporate innovative technologies and their use within family spaces that shape the nature of human relationships and interactions. These negotiations within the family are globally contextualised within the political and ideological frameworks of societies at any given moment in time. The work recognises the sensitivity of family and personal lives and incorporates the increasing need of the impact of emotionality that forms part of knowledge production. Additionally, innovative methods are showcased in chapters on researching the family through socially just methods, researcher emotionality and visual data. By bringing together thought-provoking research findings and innovative methodological and theoretical approaches, this collection of essays raises and articulates relevant, timely and future thinking for its readers. This book will therefore be indispensable for students and researchers as well as professionals and policymakers interested in understanding family life in the 21st century.

Sheila Quaid is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Gender at the University of Sunderland. She has been awarded a Senior Fellowship and a National Teaching Fellowship by Advance HE in recognition of her expertise in teaching and learning. Her research and teaching include critical pedagogies, gender, sexuality and family studies, discomforting pedagogies and teacher narratives of teaching diversity and difference, situated emotionality in research and professional practice. She is currently completing research on the lives and experiences of women who are not mothers. She has previously published work on domestic violence, lesbian motherhood, feminism, fatherhood and masculinity. Her PhD thesis was entitled Finding a Place: Negotiating Lesbian Parental Identities. Catriona Hugman is Lecturer in Social Sciences at Liverpool Hope University. Her PhD thesis, entitled 'What's the story? Sociological explorations of the life course narratives of care experienced adults', examined the biographical narratives of adults who spent time growing up in state care. Of particular interest to her are teaching and research activities relating to biographical methods, storytelling and narratives, family, critical theory and processes of marginalization. Catriona is committed to making research relevant outside the academy and has used her research expertise to support grassroots groups and a range of stakeholder professionals such as social workers, nurses, commissioners and police officers. Catriona is working to develop future research that examines forms of direct and in-direct discrimination experienced by children, young people and adults who have lived experience of state care provision in the UK. Angela Wilcock is an academic tutor and lecturer in Criminology at the University of Sunderland. She is both an academic researcher and a professional with vast experience in front line service provision. She has a passion for work into the inequalities experienced by women and marginalised groups and her research interests include feminist research methodologies, violence against women, domestic violence, coercive and controlling behaviour, help-seeking, gender inequalities within the criminal justice system and offender management. She is also planning future research into women's perceptions of domestic violence and the experiences of Thai women following migratory marriage. Her PhD thesis was entitled An Exploration of the Knowledge Women in Sunderland have of help-Seeking in Response to Domestic Violence. She has also worked with various initiatives including Rape Crisis Tyneside & Northumberland, children's services, and the City of Sunderland Digital Inclusion project.

1. Introduction: Negotiating families and personal lives in the 21st Century 2. Identity and kinship in lesbian parental families 3. Misrecognising 'complex' families: a social harm perspective 4. Understanding personal lives: after individualisation 5. Disrupting doxa about children in care: Research from England 6. Negotiating intimacy and family at distance: Living apart together (LAT) relationships in China 7. Of salsa and singlemuslim.com: ethnographic insights about identity shifts and changed self-concepts in middle aged women's post-separation/divorce transitions 8. Exploring understandings of domestic violence with women in Sunderland: Negotiating and positioning emotionality within sensitive research 9. Displaying family in a digital age: How parents negotiate technology, visibility and privacy 10. Situating visual stories using photo elicitation and biographical narrative methods: Visual representations of family life in South Africa 11. Socially just, authentic research with families in Jamaica, Australia and the UK 12. Looking ahead: What does this mean for the sociology of families and personal lives in the future?