Suchergebnisse

Drawing on the 2008 Mass Observation Directive 'Doing Family Research', this article explores the role of genealogy in personal lives from the perspective of genealogists and non-genealogists in the UK. Analysing the ends to which genealogy is put, it finds that genealogy is a key kinship practice, mapping connectedness, offering a resource for identity-work, and allowing belonging in time. Engaging with anthropological work on kinship, relatedness and remembrance and with recent sociological work on identity and affinity, this article explores how family history as a creative and imaginative memory and kinship practice is simultaneously used to map affinities and connectedness, enact relatedness, and produce self-identity. It argues that examining the role of genealogy and the genealogical imaginary reveals that conventional as well as non-conventional kinship produces partial and insecure identities. This compels everyday personal engagement with the meaning and legacy of inheritance for collective and individual identification and identity.

This article reports findings from an ESRC-funded investigation into the interface between Sex and Relationship Education (hereafter SRE) and young people's experiences as mediated by the interconnections of class, gender and heterosexuality. The article focuses on how young women's gendered heterosexual practices, alongside educational aspirations, are given meaning by the values embedded in classed circumstances, social networks and relationships. Developing a 'relational' approach, the conceptual framework combines different levels of analysis and complicates the idea of a simple workingclass/middle-class dichotomy. The empirical data are drawn from one-to-one interviews and focus groups with 69 young people, aged 15 to 21 years old, although only women's narratives are presented. I argue that understanding how young people draw on normative discourses about gendered heterosexuality, as well as class-related practices and aspirations as embedded in particular social networks, provides greater insight into theorizing the regulation of sexual identities as linked to SRE messages.

The article presents an analysis of new empirical evidence on parenting values and orientations to children's education and social class. A survey of parents with children involved in organized activities was undertaken, followed by a series of semi-structured interviews with a sample strategically identified with reference to both social class and subjective orientations to education. We argue that within recent literature there has been a tendency towards overstating the internal homogeneity of middle-class and working-class experiences. Our data reveal diverse parental orientations to their children's education within, as well as across, classes. We analyse this diversity in relation to varied circumstances, and draw out some implications for theories of inequality.

Using participant observation and content analysis of musicians' internet newsgroups and bulletin boards, my research examines the creation of a new socio-historic subject ('the prosumer') and space of production ('the project studio'). Prosumers' practices illustrate a nondeterministic form of structural causation that both supports and refutes Bourdieu's theory of cultural/social (re)production. In support of Bourdieu, my empirical research illustrates the relative autonomy of the habitus and shows that cultural production can foster social change. Although Bourdieu repeatedly made such theoretical claims, his struggle to empirically support them led critics to characterize his work as a synchronously reproductive form of economic reductionism. While I reject these critiques, my work does problematize Bourdieu's understanding of 'capital conversion' and complicates his somewhat 'straightforward' relation of cultural practice to economic class. Such 'relations and conversions' presuppose clearly separated economic/cultural and productive/ consumptive social spheres. Since 'prosumption' blurs these demarcations, we must subsequently reassess aspects of Bourdieu's work.

This article proposes the notion of moral economy as a useful lens for the analysis of migrant domestic and care work. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Naples, Southern Italy, it argues that paid domestic and care work relationships are based on a moral economy, i.e. on notions of good/bad, just/unjust rather than merely economic profit maximization. There is a tendency to transform labour relationships into family-like relationships due to the locus of domestic work within the privacy of households and the nature of domestic labour relationships as highly personalized. However, in contrast to the existing research literature, many migrant workers feel that being treated like part of the family characterizes the best possible work relationship.