The ambivalence of adoption : adoptive families’ stories

The making of family through adoption is an emotionally and politically charged legal and social process. Both its historical and contemporary manifestations are characterised by ambivalence. Contemporary domestic adoption in the UK is at a point of profound reflection, as many of its ambivalent features are articulated at the levels of national policy making as well as within the micro political sphere of family life. Drawing on an online archive of adoption stories, in particular blogs written by adoptive parents, this article attends to the affective ways in which this ambivalence manifests within adoptive families. Queer theoretical resources are used to engage with themes of haunting, absence and loss, the strange temporalities of adoptive kinship and the complex politics of undoing at the heart of adoption

Introduction: Affective intimacies

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Affective Intimacies

The introduction of Affective intimacies lays out a novel terrain for rethinking intimacies through the lens of affect theories. The questions posed at the outset are set to promote an inquiry into the ways affect studies enrich contemporary theorisations of intimacy. Affective intimacies thus makes an effort to renew the prevailing scholarship and the imaginings of affective intimacies. By doing so, it points to an interdisciplinary lacuna and argues that the social sciences and humanities have yet to recognise affect and intimacy as conjoined processes. More specifically, it is suggested that instead of foregrounding affects and intimacies as pre-defined categories, scholarship would benefit from seeing affect and intimacy as entangled and meshed together. This line of inquiry includes encounters between humans as well as between human and non-human bodies. It thus provides key signposts for comprehending affective intimacies in new ways. The open-ended use of intimacy offers a situated analysis of affective intimacies. From this vantage point, proximity and closeness are not neutral practices but can be imbued with power. Rather than pointing to intimacy as an always positive and desirable closeness, the affective prism prompts us to consider new perspectives on the intimate as it is sensed, lived and entangled across human and non-human bodies. Lastly, the introduction closes with presenting the three sections of the book: the importance of re-imagining affective intimacies, the politics of affect and the queering of intimacies.</p

LGBTQ parenting post heterosexual relationship dissolution

The chapter examines parenting among sexual and gender minorities post heterosexual relationship dissolution (PHRD). Reviewing the literature around intersecting identities of LGBTQ parents, we consider how religion, race, and socioeconomic status are associated with routes into and out of heterosexual relationships and variation in the lived experience of sexual and gender identity minorities, in particular how LGBTQ parents PHRD feel about being out. Further consideration is given to examining how family relationships change and develop as parental sexual and/or gender identity changes. We also explore the impact of PHRD identity and parenthood on new partnerships and stepfamily experiences. The chapter addresses the reciprocal relationship between research on LGBTQ parenting and policy and legal influences that impact upon the experience of LGBTQ parenting PHRD when custody and access are disputed. Finally, the chapter includes future research directions and implications for practice in an area that has been revitalized in recent years

The Doubters Dilemma

This book explores the extent and causes of attrition and retention in university Language & Culture (L&C) programs through a detailed analysis of an institutional case study at The Australian National University (ANU). Using extensive data collected through student surveys, coupled with data mining of university-wide enrolment data, the authors explore the enrolment and progress of students in all ANU L&C programs. Through their detailed statistical analysis of attrition and retention outcomes, the authors reveal serious inadequacies in the traditional, and common, methodology for determining the extent of student attrition and retention in tertiary L&C programs. Readers are shown why a year-to-year comparison of students who continue or discontinue language studies using traditional statistical methodology cannot provide data that is sufficiently meaningful to allow for sound policy- and decision-making. The authors instead suggest a more valid, replicable methodology that provides a new approach potentially applicable to all disciplines and all student retention measures. The authors also demonstrate that the empirical data supports a new hypothesis for the reasons for attrition, based on students’ relative belief or doubt in their capacity to complete their studies successfully. By highlighting the importance of language capital as a factor in students’ concerns about their capacity for success, and hence in their decisions to stay in, or leave, a university language program, the authors show the importance of the ‘doubters’ dilemma’. By taking a rigorous approach to hypothesis building and testing around enrolment and attrition data, the authors provide valuable insights into attrition issues, and potential retention strategies, in L&C programs, which will be relevant to institutions, policy-makers and teaching academics

Affective intimacies

This volume provides a novel platform to re-evaluate the notion of open-ended intimacies through the lens of affect theories. Contributors address the embodied, affective and psychic, sensorial and embodied aspects of their ongoing intimate entanglements across various timely phenomena. This fascinating collection asks how the study of affect enables us to rethink intimacies, what affect theories can do to the prevailing notion of intimacy and how they renew and enrich theories of intimacy in a manner which also considers its normative and violent forms. This collection brings together a selection of original chapters which invite readers to rethink such concepts as care, closeness and connectivity through the notion of affective intimacies. Based on rigorous research, it offers novel insights on a variety of themes from austerity culture to online discussions on regretting motherhood, from anti-ableist notions of health to teletherapies in the era of COVID-19, and from queer intimacies to critiques of empathy. Lively and thought-provoking, this collection contributes to timely topics across the social sciences, representing multiple disciplines from gender studies, sociology and cultural studies to anthropology and queer studies. By so doing, it advances the value of interdisciplinary perspectives and creative methodologies for understanding affective intimacies

‘A little bit patronising if I’m being honest’: working-class mothering and expert discourses.

Recent early years policy interventions have focussed on the Home Learning Environment. The ‘Home Learning Environment’ relates to the parenting children receive at home, rather than the physical environment in which they live, enabling a focus on individual behaviour. Family and parenting relations have been a target of state intervention for the last century, positioning working-class mothers as deficient and requiring correction. Little is known about how these discourses impact and shape working-class mothering. I explore how intensive parenting and attendant policy and dominant discourses impact on the day-to-day lives of working-class mothers. To do this, I draw on a critical discourse analysis of the BBC’s Tiny Happy People website to discern current ‘good’ mothering discourses being promoted and narrative analysis of twenty biographical interviews with working-class mothers. The interviews revealed a huge gulf between Tiny Happy People’s ‘good’ mother and the women’s lived realities. Absent and ignored were the significant material constraints faced by many of the women and the time burden created by the intensive mothering model being promoted. Working-class mothering values based on relationships and protecting their children from the effects of growing up working-class mean that Tiny Happy People’s good mothering ideals were mainly rejected as unnecessary or unrealistic by the women interviewed. Policy and other initiatives aimed at working-class people must acknowledge the reality of their lives and target improvements to inadequate housing provision and a labour market which creates low-paid, precarious employment; these initiatives would dramatically transform family life. This research provides the first academic analysis of the BBC’s Tiny Happy People. It highlights the gulf between those in positions of power (whether within government or the media) and the working-class women interviewed

The Collegian: September 21, 2016

Volume 132Issue 5https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/collegian_2016-17/1004/thumbnail.jp