Parental caringscapes – the analyses of mothering practices in local community contexts

During the last two decades of Family Sociology there is a growing interest toward understanding the complex phenomenon of parental experience. According to the changing perspective of the field, parental experience is embracing three different but interrelated aspects: the parenthood as a social institution, practices and agency of parenting and the intimate relationship between a particular child and her/his parent. This approach reflects to the changing social interpretations of parenthood and the growing emphasize on the “good parenting” in lay and professional discourses, and diversification of institutional and informal contexts of parental care. As a part of this process the status that parents occupy in different social fields shows diversity as well, and sometimes parents experience distance between the value of their parental status in varying contexts. Becoming a new mother can lead to central position in the family, while on the societal level it may goes together with a kind of isolation and the feeling of periphery. This gap has an effect on evaluation of parental competencies, autonomy and parental interpretations of care. In our study implementing a human geographic approach we suggest that parental care and the relating experiences cannot be separated from the wider and narrower space, place and time where the actual caring work is occurring.

Incorporating children’s perspectives into family sociology: dilemmas and potentialities

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Family sociology in Japan: Recent developments and the current state of the field

Although family sociology in Japan has a long history, sociological family studies in Japan have undergone major changes since the 1990s. This article recounts the ways in which family sociology in Japan has developed and its current state, with a special focus on the developments in the last three decades. The 1990s marked a turning point in the history of Japanese family sociology in terms of the establishment of new academic societies and a paradigmatic shift in theoretical orientations. The trends in family research articles indicate the continuing importance of quantitative research, with the role of qualitative research on the rise over the last two decades. In reviewing the literature over the last three decades, the author summarizes four major strands of empirical research: (a) care and families, (b) social inequality and families, (c) comparative research, and (d) diversity of families.

FAMILY INSTITUTE IN THE SYSTEM OF FORMATION AND REPRODUCTION OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY

The article reveals methodological guidelines of the scientific study of family relations as a space for the formation and reproduction of social inequality in society. It is proved that the family, despite the nominal transparency of social mobility channels in societies with an open system of social stratification, continues to have a decisive influence on the distribution of status positions. The limitation of the modern concepts of family institute’ role in social differentiation is connected with the reduction of social inequality to objective factors, although it should rather be about the result of influence of the social situation or individual traits, social values, attitudes and cultural predispositions. It is shown that there is a methodological turn from quantitative sociological assessments of socio-economic and educational differences to qualitative interpretive practices in familistic studies that allow revealing the deep socio-cultural factors of inequality. The author comes to conclusion about the methodological pluralism in family sociology as a potential source of ambivalence of the state family policy on eliminate excessive social inequality.

Alternating Homes – A New Family Form – The Family Sociology Perspective

In this chapter, we identify structural features of families with shared physical custody that differ from those of nuclear families or those of families where one parent has sole physical custody, and discuss the implications for family and kin relationships. We pay particular attention to the ways in which shared physical custody alters the gendered nature of parenting and kinship. We argue that the structural features of shared physical custody create distinct contexts for parent-child and sibling relationships and produce differences in shared understandings of obligations between family members. The unique context for relationships and obligations together constitute a new family form. Our analysis generates an agenda for future research on the nature and consequences of shared physical custody.

What does Rachel Carson have to do with family sociology and family policies? Ecological imaginaries, relational ontologies, and crossing social imaginaries

In the past decade, multiple compounding crises – ecological, racial injustices, ‘care crises’ and multiple recent crises related to the COVID-19 pandemic – have reinforced the powerful role of critical and social policy researchers to push back against ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, and a post-truth era that denigrates science and evidence-based research. These new realities can pose challenges for social scientists who work within relational, ontological, non-representational, new materialist, performative, decolonising, or ecological ‘turns’ in social theory and epistemologies. This article’s overarching question is: How does one work within non-representational research paradigms while also attempting to hold onto representational, authoritative and convincing versions of truth, evidence, facts and data? Informed by my research on feminist philosopher and epistemologist Lorraine Code’s 40-year trajectory of writing about knowledge making and ecological social imaginaries, I navigate these dilemmas by calling on an unexpected ally to family sociology and family policy: the late American environmentalist Rachel Carson. Extending Code’s case study of Carson, I argue for an approach that combines (1) ecological relational ontologies, (2) the ethics and politics of knowledge making, (3) crossing social imaginaries of knowledge making and (4) a reconfigured view of knowledge makers as working towards just and cohabitable worlds.