SI Aims and Focus:
The main aim of Special Issue is to revisit how social researchers frame family and families when conducting various studies in social reality marked by abundant and constantly evolving family forms. Hence, this SI focuses on reconstructing and analyzing definitions of families in postmodern societies, with the broader aim of offering an up-to-date range of papers that answer various definitional questions and can be used by scholars in family studies and beyond. To foster interdisciplinary reflection, we invite authors from the fields of sociology, anthropology, media studies, social policy, cultural studies etc.
For a comprehensive SI on family definitions, we intend to combine papers from three perspectives:
- theoretical reflection on the evolution of family definition in the field of family studies, especially in relation to the plethora of the emerging and changing family forms, including: non-heteronormative families, migrant and transnational families, one-parent families, cohabitations, unmarried parents and patchwork families as well as growing social class inequalities in family lives;
- methodological innovations in investigating contemporary family life and intimacy;
- results of empirical explorations focused on social definitions of families in various countries, which highlight variability of sociocultural norms and practices pertaining to family and how it is defined.
Detailed Areas of Interest:
We invite submissions that cover – but are not limited to – these three areas, as further detailed below:
- Theoretical perspectives on family definitions:
- Family definitions responding to family superdiversity, understood as accounting for the growing proliferation of different family forms, which include, among other, non-heteronormative families, migrant and transnational families, one-parent families, cohabitations, unmarried parents and patchwork families, as well as growing social class inequalities in family lives;
- Evolution of family definitions, elements of definitions which are constant, alongside these other items being modified or abandoned;
- Leveraging sociological concepts, for instance acceleration, ambivalence, risk, to develop (re)definitions of family.
- Methodological perspective on reframing families:
- Established and innovative methods that facilitate researching and analyzing family life in search for new family definitions;
- Interdisciplinary inspirations and intradisciplinary shifts: family definitions in qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods approaches, insights on family framings originating from other fields relevant to social research and family studies;
- Exploring family definitions in public, social media and political discourses.
- Empirical perspectives on defining families:
- Social actors included in family research and their views on defining family; family definitions according to politicians, media and popular culture, school, church and other institutions;
- Family from a perspective of its members: meanings and boundary-making;
- Differences in family definitions across countries and around the world;
- An intersection of family and crisis, understood both in relation to the discourses and debates about the presumed “family in crisis”, and in terms of the actual effects of social crises - such as the COVID-19 pandemic, energy crisis, war in Ukraine - on the new perspectives on defining families.
