What's in a name? An exploration of the significance of personal naming of ‘mixed’ children for parents from different racial,ethnic and faith backgrounds

This article is concerned with how and why parent couples from different racial, ethnic and faith backgrounds choose their children's personal names? The limited literature on the topic of names often focuses on outcomes, using birth name registration data sets, rather than process. In particular, we consider the extent to which the personal names that ‘mixed’ couples give their children represent an individualised taste, or reflect a form of collective affiliation to family, race, ethnicity or faith. We place this discussion in the context of debates about the racial and faith affiliation of ‘mixed’ people, positing various forms of ‘pro’ or ‘post’ collective identity. We draw on in‐depth interview data to show that, in the case of ‘mixed’ couple parents, while most wanted names for their children that they liked, they also wanted names that symbolised their children's heritages. This could involve parents in complicated practices concerning who was involved in naming the children and what those names were. We conclude that, for a full understanding of naming practices and the extent to which these are individualised or affiliative it is important to address process, and that the processes we have identified for ‘mixed’ parents reveal the persistence of collective identity associated with race, ethnicity and faith alongside elements of individualised taste and transcendence, as well as some gendered features.     

A Pilot Study to Explore the Influence of the ‘Safety First Assessment Intervention’ on the Family Environment

The family environment is considered an important influence on a young person's well‐being. The ‘Safety First Assessment Intervention’ is a model of care that considers and incorporates the importance of family environment when assessing and managing distressed young people. This pilot study explores the influence of the ‘Safety First Assessment Intervention’ on the family environment of young people referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. A pre‐ and post‐design was used, with families completing the Family Survey before and after their assessment/intervention. The Family Survey was correlated with a validated measure of family function, the APGAR, and pre‐intervention. Significant changes in multiple dimensions of family environment, including reduced level of distress for the adult, increased level of distress for the young person, improved sense of how the family felt the adult was managing currently, and improved confidence in family communication were found. There was no significant change in how the adult understood their role in helping the young person manage their distress. A thematic analysis showed trends in the current concerns for young people and adults as well as the difficulty young people in distress have in identifying their strengths. This pilot study demonstrates that the ‘Safety First Assessment Intervention’ can influence the family environment in a positive way and highlights the importance of using a family‐based approach for distressed young people.     

Children's narratives of post-divorce family life: from individual experience to an ethical disposition

This article draws on interviews with 60 children and young people to explore how they construct narrative accounts of post‐divorce family life. Rather than seeking to describe children's experiences as if their accounts are simple factual recollections, the focus of the article is on how young people position themselves in their narratives and the ways in which they construct their past experiences. It is argued that these narratives are multi‐layered, often revealing ambivalence and contradictions. The conclusion turns to the question of whether these individual accounts can give rise to what might be referred to as an ethical disposition in which children's experiences can inform a broader social ethos on how to divorce ‘in the proper manner’.     

Interlopers in class: A duoethnography of working‐class women academics

This article introduces the concept of the interloper for examining classed and gendered dislocation. Focusing on academia, which we view as a classed and gendered field, we draw on Bourdieu and feminist standpoint theory to account for how we, as women of working‐class origin, have experienced ‘breaches' through which we have come to understand ourselves in classed and gendered terms. Coming from different cultural backgrounds, we also reflect on how understandings of class are context‐specific. We employ a duoethnographic method which emphasizes the value of subjective experiences for organizational and social analyses. The article shows how the concept of the interloper may shed light on the dynamic, relational character of constructions of class and gender; the maintenance work that is performed; and how a sense of permanent inbetweenness characterizes our ongoing movement between the fields of the family and academia.     

What people do with pictures

This article argues that there is no single ‘voice’ that picturing makes audible, nor any single image that it makes visible. It examines how members of two different groups – hospital in-patients and homeless people – talk about photographs they had taken using cameras supplied by the researcher. Examples of these photographs are used in the article to examine conventions of picturing, different ways of narrating content and production, and movement of pictures through space and time. The argument is made that these features are variously deployed in explanations of what photographs mean. This leads to the conclusion that what pictures portray and what stories narrate are better thought of as versions of our experience of the world than as constructions of the world that we experience.     

Validating difference and counting the cost of exclusion in the lives of people who identify as on the autistic spectrum

This current issues piece will explore how autobiographies written by people with autism can help identify sensory processing differences that might be viewed as possible attributes in an enabling society, but for which ableist perceptions are often negative. In concrete terms, these constructions may be preventing people from entering employment and making an economic contribution. The first autobiography written by someone who identified as being on the autism spectrum was by David Eastham in 1985. Since then, over 50 such books have been published. The emergence of such autobiographies challenges assumptions about what it is to be on the autism spectrum. It was often assumed people with autism were incapable of such social communication, as autobiographies assume abilities such as self-awareness, imagination and the ability and desire to communicate. These were all traits that were thought to be absent in someone diagnosed with autism. Consequently, the presence of these autobiographies destabilises and questions the dichotomy that was set up between what constitutes ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ behaviour.     

‘It’s the way they do it’: Expressions of Agency in Child–Adult Relations at Home and School

This article examines children's (8–9 years) and young people’s (14–15 years) views about their own participation in decision‐making processes with adults, within the context of home and school in Norway. A difference‐centred theoretical perspective is used to identify children’s participation as expressions of agency embedded in intricate child–adult relations, in which children and adults are positioned differently. It is argued that children not necessarily ask for increased independence from adults, but rather to be recognised as ‘differently equal’ partners in shared decision‐making processes, where children are being treated with dignity and respect as valuable persons.     

Houses are a Necessary Illusion: Uncovering Family Process Through Asking Families to Draw a Plan of their Homes

The way families organise their living space is an indicator of family relationships. The physical shape and organisation of houses, flats and dwellings of all kinds are not ‘unchanging natural phenomena’, they are historical, cultural, economic and family constructions. Therapists, like families, ‘do not see that they do not see’ (von Foerster, 1994). They are partly ‘blind’. This becomes apparent when a therapist asks a family to draw the plan of their house. The therapeutic task illuminates the organisation of family bonds, and provides insight into the causes of family suffering. A clinical example is given.     

Invisible landscapes: students’ constructions of the social and the natural in an engineering course in South Africa

This paper examines the discourses that students draw on and propagate in a course on rural development in a first‐year engineering foundation programme. It looks at the way ‘rural’ is often constructed as ‘lack’ and therefore ‘other’, the dangers of constructing development as linear, the ways nostalgia and utopianism feed into discourses of development and how ‘propriety’ serves to maintain boundaries between nature and people, society and individuals. Different modes and media, coupled with the degree of regulation in the classroom, may enable alternate discourses to emerge or to be suppressed. This paper argues that the curriculum needs to engage with students’ views in order to understand, interrogate and critique the kinds of realities they feed into.     

Practising family history: ‘identity’ as a category of social practice

Research on family history argues it performs the task of anchoring a sense of ‘self’ through tracing ancestral connection and cultural belonging, seeing it as a form of storied ‘identity‐work’. This paper draws on a small‐scale qualitative study to think further on the identity‐work of family history. Using practice theory, and a disaggregated notion of ‘identity’, it explores how the storying of family histories relates to genealogy as a leisure hobby, a form of historical research, and an information‐processing activity; and examines the social organization of that narrativity, where various practical engagements render certain kinds of genealogical information more, or less, ‘storyable’. Key features of ‘identity‐work’ in family history, such as the construction of genealogy as a personal journey of discovery and identification with particular ancestors, emerge as a consequence of the procedures of family history, organized as a set of practical tasks. The paper explores ‘identity‐work’ as a consequence of people's engagement in specific social practices which provide an internal logic to their actions, with various components of ‘identity’ emerging as categories of practice shaped within, and for, use. Focusing on ‘identity’ as something produced when we are engaged in doing other things, the paper examines how the practical organization of ‘doing other things’ helps produce ‘identity’ in particular ways.     

Reflexivity and the Construction of Competing Discourses of Masculinity in a Female‐Dominated Profession

This paper contributes to the debates on reflexivity and change by extending our understanding of (non‐)reflexivity mechanisms in the discursive constructions of gender. Specifically, I explore how and why women persistently construct contradictory discursive accounts of men and masculinity in a female‐dominated profession of counselling psychology in Russia. Drawing on the concept of ‘interpretative repertoires’ I argue that female counsellors construct different kinds of masculinities based on three ‘repertoires’: psycho‐biological, structural and relational. I demonstrate how these constructions of masculinity are imbued with different meanings and are used to explain only certain contexts, which precludes women's ability to reflect on their contradictory nature. I conclude by discussing how an exploration of discursive (non‐)reflexivity extends our understanding of the conditions for gender transformations.     

‘Scarier than another storm’: values at risk in the mapping and insuring of US floodplains

How do people respond to the ways in which insurance mediates environmental risks? Socio‐cultural risk research has characterized and analyzed the experiential dimension of risk, but has yet to focus on insurance, which is a key institution shaping how people understand and relate to risk. Insurance not only assesses and communicates risk; it also economizes it, making the problem on the ground not just one of risk, but also of value. This article addresses these issues with an investigation of the social life of the flood insurance rate map, the central technology of the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), as it grafts a new landscape of ‘value at risk’ onto the physical and social world of New York City in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Like other risk technologies, ubiquitous in modern societies as decision‐making and planning tools, the map disseminates information about value and risk in order to tame uncertainty and enable prudent action oriented toward the future. However, drawing together interview, ethnographic, and documentary data, I find that for its users on the ground, the map does not simply measure ‘value at risk’ in ways that produce clear strategies for protecting property values from flooding. Instead, it puts values‐beyond simply the financial worth of places‐at risk, as well as implicates past, present, and future risks beyond simply flooding. By informing and enlarging the stakes of what needs protecting, and from what, I argue that plural and interacting ‘values at risk’ shape how people live with and respond to environmental risks that are mediated by insurance technologies.     

Sexy and sovereign? Aboriginal models hit the ‘multicultural mainstream’

Long argued by post-colonial scholarship, Indigenous sexualities have been variously cast as pathological and abject, or fetishized and exotiziced. In the Australian context, Aboriginal sexualities have never been granted a normalized, agentic visibility in the white Australian imaginary. Since the 1990s, however, there has been an increase of ‘sexy’ Aboriginal ‘stars’ in the Australian media. This newfound visibility invites fresh questions about race, beauty, appropriation and resistance, most particularly in ways that centres Aboriginal narratives: What does it mean to be visible and ‘mainstreamed’ in a media that ‘values diversity’, whilst denying sovereignty for Indigenous people? This question is significant in the Australian context, but also has relevance for rethinking race, sexuality and media representations in colonial contexts internationally. The paper explores this newfound exposure through the voices of two Australian Aboriginal women, Samantha Harris and Magnolia Maymaru. These women have come to national and international fame as celebrated models in a fashion industry priding itself on becoming more inclusive and multicultural. It focuses on their responses to journalists over the course of their careers, as well as how the stories construct beauty and Aboriginality. I draw on Indigenous feminist scholars, particularly the work of Irene Watson, who foreground the subject of sovereignty and remind us that discourses of multiculturalism have a charged meaning for Indigenous people. I also draw on the insights of Elizabeth Povinelli who considers how sexuality intersects with discourses of empire, and how Indigenous people employ ‘creative engagements’ with liberal multiculturalism. Positioning sovereignty and multiculturalism side by side, I reflect on how Samantha and Magnolia enact a sovereign sexuality, and what this might look like. Rather than fix colonial alterity or reproduce multicultural ‘inclusions’, their narratives skirt, sidestep and ‘dance’ with the discourses constructing their lives, attending to race while transcending its colonial limits.     

Habits and orders of everyday life: commensal adjustment in Anglo‐French couples

This paper examines processes of habit reshuffling and change in different contexts of household formation, looking specifically at habits regarding eating and commensality. It is based on a study of 14 couples, each with one English and one French partner, half of whom live in France, half in England. We examine the interplay between partners, their determination to eat together as a couple, and the various ‘orders’ associated with their commensal pact (diets, routines, extra‐marital commensality), both when they start as couples and as parents of young children. We draw on the specificity of cross‐national couple experience to cast light on processes of adjustment – to one another, and to the new country of residence for the migrant partner. In particular, we explore the potential of notions of ‘split’ and ‘solid’ ‘patrimonies of incorporated habits’, ‘re‐shuffling’ of habits and dispositions, and ‘habit memory’, to characterize the dynamics of habits at play in each of the orders under scrutiny. Overall, the paper contributes to the analysis of habit as the ‘stuff’ of orders of everyday life.     

Regrounding Youth Cultural Theory (in Post‐Socialist Youth Cultural Practice)

This article considers how the study of youth cultural practice in Eastern Europe informs theoretical and empirical debate about youth culture. It charts the trajectory of academic writing on East European youth cultures and suggests the region’s state socialist past (which made social inequalities relatively insignificant at a time when, elsewhere, youth cultural studies were dominated by class‐based readings) combined with the explosion of inequality in the post‐socialist period (by which time class‐resistant post‐subcultural theories led anglophone academic discussion), makes it an interesting vantage point from which to reconsider academic paradigms. Drawing on empirical examples of youth cultural practice in (post)‐socialist Eastern Europe, it argues for a perspective that integrates structural and cultural factors shaping young people’s lives. It suggests moving forward western theoretical debates – often stymied in arguments over nomenclature (‘subculture’, ‘postsubculture’, ‘neo‐tribe’) – by shifting the focus of study from ‘form’ (‘subculture’ etc.) to ‘substance’ (concrete cultural practices) and attending to everyday communicative, musical, sporting, educational, informal economy, and territorial practices. Since such practices are embedded in the ‘whole’ rather than ‘subcultural’ lives of young people, this renders visible how cultural practices are enabled and constrained by the same social divisions and inequalities that structure society at large.     

‘To Do Or Not To Do (Gender)’ and Changing the Sex‐Typing of British Theatre

Concepts of doing, and undoing, gender have become increasingly prevalent within studies of sex‐typed work. However, these concepts, as currently figured and applied, contain a significant analytical lacuna: they tend not to register changes in the sex‐typing of work. In this study we engage this research gap by addressing the changing sex‐typing of British theatre — specifically, the shift from female‐dominated amateur to male‐dominated professional theatre work. We draw upon and develop concepts of doing and undoing gender to understand changes in the sex‐typing of work. In so doing, we explain how spatially and temporally differentiated ways of doing ‘male’ and ‘female’ become implicated in how people make sense of, and enact, the changing spaces and times of ‘amateur/female’ ‘professional/male’ work. Our analysis of theatre work suggests that, despite recent criticisms of their wider significance, concepts of un/doing gender are useful to understand broader changes in the sex‐typing of work. Thus, it also appears possible to (un)change such sex‐typings by undoing gender. However, our analysis suggests that such subversive acts remain ineffective, unless those involved in such gendered undoings engage with, rather than renounce, the gendered doings that help enact the changing sex‐typing of work.     

Drawing Family Boundaries: Children's Perspectives on Family Relationships in Rural and Urban Ethiopia

This article explores how children conceptualise and practice family relationships in two social settings in Ethiopia. Based on ethnographic data, it discusses (i) how urban and rural children construct family; (ii) what family activities children do and which social positions they assume; and (iii) the convergence and divergence of meanings and practices of family relationships between urban and rural Ethiopia. The analysis demonstrates how ‘normative family’ and actual ‘family practices’ are shaped by socio‐cultural, material and spatial contexts. Insights drawn also reveal the complex ways in which access to material resources, geographical distance, rural‐urban locations and cultural traits such as patterns of marriage and child relocation practices shape family relationships.     

Social Constructions of Young Children in ‘Special’, ‘Inclusive’ and Home Environments

The paper tells of the social constructs surrounding young children with learning difficulties in their home, ‘special’ early education setting and ‘inclusive’ or mainstream early education setting in England. The exploratory study focused on how three‐ to four‐year‐old children made sense of their environments and how their identities were constructed by different parties in the different contexts. Ethnographic case studies were conducted using semi‐structured and informal interviews with parents and practitioners, documentary analysis, fieldnotes, and live and video observations. Shared constructions across the contexts for each child were common, with constructions of them being happy and making progress pervasive across the children and settings. Differences in constructions across settings indicated that qualities could shine or negative constructions be tempered, thus showing the role of the environment and the culture of inclusion in socially constructing children with special needs.     

The use,role and application of advanced technology in the lives of disabled people in the UK

Disabled people are excited by the potential benefits of using advanced technologies at home. However, many devices are abandoned early and lie unused. This research project aimed to explore why this happens, what the users of such technologies require, how advanced technologies can rise to the challenges of flexibility and user choice, which applications enhance independence and improve quality of life and what the barriers are to take‐up and future utilization. It was found that disabled people wish to use advanced technology to increase independence in and beyond home but the cost of both mainstream and ‘specialist’ devices are prohibitive. The role of advanced technology should be to enhance independence and provide mainstream solutions that disabled people request, rather than designing and engineering ‘specialist’ expensive products. Furthermore, the application of advanced technology for use in the home should be directed by disabled people, collectively and individually.