Keynote Speaker Abstracts

We are delighted to confirm the first of our keynote speakers for the ESFR conference:

Daniela Grunow

Keynote title: Gender, Families and Social Cohesion in Times of Change

Families are important sites at which individuals exchange and transmit values and practices associated with social cohesion through day-to-day interaction. Family and gender relations, however, have been particularly affected by social change in recent decades while new social and cultural conflicts have surfaced and appear to divide contemporary societies, for example along issues of cultural openness and social solidarity. It is at present unclear how these social and cultural conflicts relate to political changes that have affected family lives. For example, across Europe, various political work-care models currently exist but we know little about how these changes have altered personal political preferences and their transmission within couples and families. Related to this, both egalitarian and essentialist gender ideologies and family ideals have spread unevenly across countries, with unclear consequences for political orientations and social cohesion.

In my key note talk I will address this research gap by presenting evidence from three ongoing research projects. A focus will be on how competing gender and family ideals are related to other values such as cultural openness or closure, solidarity and party preferences. Second, I will address potential mechanisms through which such values and preferences are transmitted within couples and families.

Bio

Daniela Grunow is a Full Professor of Sociology at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt am Main. Her research areas focus on the interactions between paid work, domestic work and gender relations in different welfare states. She focuses on social change through a life course perspective, applying different empirical methods, especially techniques for longitudinal data analysis. In 2019 she co-edited ‘New Parents in Europe Work-Care Practices, Gender Norms and Family Policies’ with Marie Evertsson, (published by Edward Elgar Publishing), this followed her 2016 publication ‘Couples' Transitions to ParenthoodAnalysing Gender and Work in Europe, also co-edited with Marie Evertsson, (published by Edward Elgar Publishing). These collections resulted form a major research project – The APPARENT project, which included an international and national study of norms and gender division in labour in the transition to Parenthood. It was funded by the ECR and included in-depth interviews with 334 parents-to-be in eight European countries.

Jane McCarthy

Keynote title: ‘Family’ meanings: a trope for relationality and connection, or a site for nurturing ‘individuals’.

The UK can be said to have contributed (at least) two major features of the contemporary world which are central to the history and current challenges of the climate and ecological emergency. One is what is generally referred to as the industrial revolution, and the other is a long-standing cultural emphasis on individuality. The latter is so deeply rooted that those of us steeped in this history struggle to comprehend the possibility of another way of being in the world, other than as the autonomous, agentic, individual decision-makers of neo-liberalism. This view of the world is particularly central to white, middle class experience, shaped by, and contributing to, strong economic and socio-historical patterns. Within Anglophone and Western European contexts, ‘family’ is perhaps the key trope for conveying something other than individuality. Nevertheless, this powerful word ‘family’ can indicate a variety of meanings, which vary considerably in terms of the extent to which the individual remains visible, perhaps centrally so. And it is notable that while ‘the family’ has been extensively critiqued and deconstructed as a term, ‘the individual’ has not received such attention. But in tackling the climate and ecological emergency, what is arguably centrally required is a deconstruction of ‘the individual’ and a recognition that we are all deeply connected. Starting from somewhere else – in this case, urban Senegal, and drawing on the African concept of ubuntu – may offer a route towards a different understanding of personhood i.e. as a deeply relational being, living in the world in connection with others. In this paper, I will offer some thoughts on the varied meanings of ‘family’ and how far they depend on understandings of individuality or connection.

Bio

Jane McCarthy is an Honorary Associate at the Open University and a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading. She is a sociologist with a long-standing focus on families, relationships and children, having published extensively in these areas over the last thirty years. Her work draws on feminist and phenomenological traditions, with particular concerns with themes of individuality and relationality, and everyday understandings of 'family'. In recent years her interests have centred on the theme of Family Troubles and Troubling Families with various edited publications (Family Troubles, edited with Carol-Ann Hooper and Val Gillies, Sage, 2013, and special journal issues with Sociological Research Online 2018, 23:1, Children's Geographies 2019, 17:5, and J of Family Issues 2019, 40:16). Recent publications include a focus on inter-cultural dialogue ('Troubling children's families: who is troubled and why? Approaches to inter-cultural dialogue', Ribbens McCarthy and Gillies, SRO, 2018, and 'The (cross-cultural) problem of categories', Ribbens McCarthy and Evans, in Frankel and McNamee, eds, 2020), which draws on her work on children's family lives in China (including 'The institutionalisation of 'TongNian' and 'childhood' in China and Britain', Ribbens McCarthy et al, Children and Society, 2017), and family deaths in Senegal (including 'Making sense of family deaths in Senegal', Ribbens McCarthy et al, Omega, 2019).

http://www.open.ac.uk/people/jcrm2#tab2

Ann Phoenix

Keynote title: Sustainable relationships, intersectionality and home

The unexpected transformational conjunctions that include COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, climate change activism and global evidence of climate change make this a particularly appropriate time for raising questions about sustainable relationships. The ambiguity of the term ‘sustainable’ is fruitful in drawing attention to the inextricable linking of the relational, social, economic and environmental. This inextricable linking focuses attention on both the micro and macro-levels of analysis and on the differentiation and inequalities highlighted and exacerbated by COVID-19, Black Lives Matter and climate change.

This talk brings together a consideration of theorisations of home, climate change activism and a study of family members’ constructions of environment in order to illuminate the ways in which sustainable relationships of all kinds are necessarily intersectional. It argues that these are produced through the dynamic intersection of the social categories and identities to which different family members belong, the personal and social histories.

Bio

Ann Phoenix is a Professor of Psychosocial Studies at the Institute of Education, UCL. Her research interests are psychosocial, including motherhood, social identities, young people, racialisation and gender. Recent funded research project areas include: boys and masculinities, young people and consumption and adult re-conceptualisations of 'non-normative' childhoods', particularly of serial migration, visibly ethnically mixed households and language brokering in transnational families. Professor Phoenix works with research colleagues in a number of international settings, including Denmark (childhood and gender), Germany (boys and masculinities), Netherlands (racialisation; research methodology) and Sweden (gender; narrative methods). Recent publications include; Phoenix, A. (2019). Situating Children’s Family Troubles: Poverty and Serial Migration. Journal of Family Issues. doi:10.1177/0192513X19846180 and Solem, M., B., Helgeland, I. M., Brannen, J., & Phoenix, A. (2020). Transitions to Adulthood of 'At Risk' Young Men: New Analysis from Two Norwegian Qualitative Longitudinal Studies. Children & Society. doi:10.1111/chso.12369