Each Word Shows How You Love Me : The Social Literacy Practice of Children\u27s Letter Writing (1780-1860)

This article draws on hundreds of letters that formed German children’s correspondence with their parents, other relatives, teachers and friends, written mostly between the 1780s and 1850s. Through this study, we see the part literacy played in transformations of bourgeois childhood in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The article further investigates how children used letters as a means of learning sociability and building relationships within kinship networks. Historians of education have sometimes treated children’s writing as secondary to more authoritative records. Yet we miss something important about the history of literacy education if we disregard children’s writing or use it only superficially. This article considers the genre of children’s letter writing, exploring the conventions and typical subjects which contributed to the social purpose of correspondence. Letter writing is examined as a paedagogic exercise, including the preoccupation with the medium which filled children’s letters and evidence of instruction in letter writing. It demonstrates that letters fostered the participation of middle- and upper-class children in household affairs, kinship networks and cultural spheres connected through school friends and parents’ acquaintances from very young ages. Children’s correspondence documents a lifelong process in the making of class cultures and forging of social ties

Sources of Entrepreneurial Discretion in Kinship Systems

Entrepreneurs may wish to be selective about which relatives to include or exclude in their businesses. For example, their child might be inept but their niece might be outstanding. What aspects of kinship systems affect their ability to make these sorts of choices? What enables them to bend their ties of kinship and marriage to the interests of their business? Most broadly, what dimensions of kinship lend themselves to tactical or instrumental actions? This question is sweeping just as my meaning of “entrepreneurs” is very broad: those who take actions with the goal of growing their capital (Stewart, 1991). This capital may take the form of newly started ventures, dynastic firms, or even in precapitalist systems other social forms, for example, rural estates farmed by followers

Communication Structures of Supplemental Voluntary Kin Relationships

Although scholars have constructed typologies of voluntary (fictive) kin, few have considered challenges and opportunities of interaction and relationships between biolegal and voluntary kin. This study focused on one type of voluntary kin, supplemental voluntary kin, relationships that often arise because of differing values, underperformed roles, or physical distance from the biolegal family, and wherein relationships are maintained with biolegal and voluntary kin. We examined how these family systems are constructed via interactions in relational triads of “linchpin” persons between biolegal family and voluntary kin. From in-depth interviews with 36 supplemental voluntary kin, we examined themes in the linchpins’ discourse surrounding the interaction, rituals, and ideal relationship between biolegal family and voluntary kin. We constructed a typology of four relational triads representing these relationships: intertwined, limited, separate, and hostile. We describe the structure and communication within each type, and implications for helping families with these triangulated voluntary kin relationships

Communication Structures of Supplemental Voluntary Kin Relationships

Although scholars have constructed typologies of voluntary (fictive) kin, few have considered challenges and opportunities of interaction and relationships between biolegal and voluntary kin. This study focused on one type of voluntary kin, supplemental voluntary kin, relationships that often arise because of differing values, underperformed roles, or physical distance from the biolegal family, and wherein relationships are maintained with biolegal and voluntary kin. We examined how these family systems are constructed via interactions in relational triads of “linchpin” persons between biolegal family and voluntary kin. From in-depth interviews with 36 supplemental voluntary kin, we examined themes in the linchpins’ discourse surrounding the interaction, rituals, and ideal relationship between biolegal family and voluntary kin. We constructed a typology of four relational triads representing these relationships: intertwined, limited, separate, and hostile. We describe the structure and communication within each type, and implications for helping families with these triangulated voluntary kin relationships

'But I thought we were friends?' Life cycles and research relationships

This chapter is concerned with a relatively under-explored aspect of ‘engaged research’ – the nature of friendship relations between researchers and practitioners, and the ethical dilemmas that arise in such relationships. Attention has been paid to the relational aspects of research in the methodology literature, but this chapter focuses more closely on friendship in particular. The chapter is framed around two guiding concerns: how do friendships, formed in and around research, change over time; and in view of friendship conceived in this dynamic fashion, what ethical questions and dilemmas arise for the ‘friends’

Net-Work: Weaving Human-Nature Connection

My impetus as an artist is to promote a sense of nature connectedness in the public consciousness, with the understanding that this leads to more pro-environmental attitudes. I gain insights from Indigenous ecological perspectives, the science of plant intelligence, environmental activist movements, and artists whose work facilitates reflection on biocentric values. My methodology includes on site fieldwork to investigate ways to express the language of trees. Dr. Suzanne Simard’s research on the underground network of roots and mycorrhizal fungi enabling communication between trees, and Indigenous philosophies of animism and interspecies connection all support my work. To address these concepts in my thesis project, I initiated a collaborative art installation, “Net-Work”, utilizing handcrafted yarn work — knitting, weaving, and crochet — as my medium, a significant shift for me in materiality and methodology. Although the use of marginalized “women’s craft” carries post-feminist stigma, third-wave feminists are embracing that challenge using craft activism, or “craftism”, as an alternative form of protest. Despite my initial concerns regarding initiating a craft-based socially engaged art project, the numerous and enthusiastic responses I received from participants worldwide is evidence of a resurgence in traditional hand crafts, while demonstrating how social activism can stimulate dialogue and raise awareness of issues, in this case facilitating a tangible response to the effects of human activity on non-human kin. Reliance on the internet for connection and dissemination of information to participants has introduced an unforeseen correlation between online social networking and the underground web of tree connection. While I have now received a sufficient number of fibre works to create the installation, this project continues to evolve, supported by future exhibition opportunities and widening public interest

Theorizing belonging of migrant children and youth at a meso-level

This article offers a two-fold contribution. On the one hand, it includes a review of the key junctions in the research landscape related to migrant children and youth by bringing together youth studies, migration studies and a child-centered paradigm with the focus on the meso-level and the concept of belonging. On the other hand, by seeing belonging as a valuable analytical framework for the integration of approaches at the tripartite analysis favoring the meso-level, the paper encourages studies to dynamically overcome the dichotomy, incompleteness and a static nature of the research conducted separately on either macro or micro levels

Sociotype and cultural evolution the acceleration of cultural change alongside industrial revolutions

The present work explores, from the vantage point of the sociotype, the dramatic acceleration of cultural change alongside the successive industrial revolutions, particularly in the ongoing information era. Developed within the genotype-phenotype-sociotype conceptual triad, the sociotype means the average social environment that is adaptively demanded by the “social brain” of each individual. For there is a regularity of social interaction, centered on social bonding and talking time, which has been developed as an adaptive trait, evolutionarily rooted, related to the substantial size increase of human groups. A quantitative approach to the sociotype basic traits shows fundamental competitive interrelationships taking place within an overall “attention economy.” Approaching these figures via the Planckian Distribution Equation, they can be connected with many other competitive processes taking place in the biological, economic, and cultural realms. Concerning culture, the cognitive limits of the individual, which we consider commensurate with the sociotype general limitations, impose by themselves a strict boundary on the cultural items effectively handled by each individual, fostering the overall competition and decay. Further, the emergence of differentiated generations with ample discrepancy in styles of life, social aspirations, and dominant technologies would represent a systematic bias in the competition and replacement of cultural items. Intriguingly, the cultural acceleration detected in modern societies alongside the successive industrial revolutions, with an ostensible climax in the ongoing fourth industrial revolution –the information era– might be itself a paradoxical consequence of the sociotype''s dynamic constancy