Suchergebnisse

Podcasts can perform transdisciplinary cultural work in sonic form. Often, they are specific 'soundworks' which, though still emphasizing speech and words over sound and noise, still challenge the predominance of text and image by necessitating the 'social act' of listening. Not by Accident, 'a documentary series about choosing to become a single mother and coping with being one' (Harper), presents an example of how private and intimate stories, told to an (anonymous) audience can function as both scriptotherapy, and oral/aural (auto)biographical texts (here of mother and daughter), but also as self-help and awareness raising narratives for a community of listeners, a sound-based social network. By illustrating the private impact of public family policies and social discourses, Harper's podcast speaks against discrimination and denigration of single mothers, lesbian mothers and single mothers by choice, against patriarchal motherhood and the heteronormative model of the 'nuclear family' and for reproductive justice in families of choice.

Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin, Rosanna Hertz and Margaret K. Nelson (2019) 1st ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 296 pp., ISBN 978-0-19088-827-5, h/bk, $27.95; ISBN 978-0-19088-829-9, e/bk, $17.00
Connecting Families? Information & Communication Technologies, Generations, and the Life Course, Barbara Barbosa Neves and Cláudia Casimiro (eds) (2018) Bristol: Policy Press, 324 pp., ISBN 978-1-44733-994-6, h/bk, £60

Is the family in crisis? Or do crises crystallize in families' lived realities? Families as constitutive units of all social architectures are central to our democracies. In this book, scholars from cultural, gender, and media studies, lawyers, sociologists, and historians discuss how today's rainbow variety of families crosses borders and how cultural texts - sitcoms, films, novels, short stories, and political magazines from Europe (Germany, Italy, Spain) and the US - (de)construct, take part in, and mirror family discourses around topics such as fatherhoods, motherhoods, reproductive decisions, adoption, marriage, divorce, poverty, welfare, war, and the rhetoric of the nuclear family.

Long description: Is the family in crisis? Or do crises crystallize in families' lived realities? Families as constitutive units of all social architectures are central to our democracies. In this book, scholars from cultural, gender, and media studies, lawyers, sociologists, and historians discuss how today's rainbow variety of families crosses borders and how cultural texts - sitcoms, films, novels, short stories, and political magazines from Europe (Germany, Italy, Spain) and the US - (de-)construct, take part in, and mirror family discourses around topics such as fatherhoods, motherhoods, reproductive decisions, adoption, marriage, divorce, poverty, welfare, war, and the rhetoric of the nuclear family