Everyday Relationship Research Articles

Navigating Silences: The Everyday Relationship Between Chilean Mothers and the State

Navigating Silences: The Everyday Relationship Between Chilean Mothers and the State

Women’s search for public space and leisure in Agra: cots, courtyards, and riverbank

ABSTRACT Historians have often highlighted the centrality of bazaars and the streets in urban public life in India as a space for politics and mobilisation. Historically, these bazaars and streets have been the domain of men, while spaces created by dominant urban planning logics like sequestered parks and enclosed marketplaces are marked by exclusion across various axes. Where do women then find opportunities for leisure, solidarity, chance encounter, or discursive politics? The paper explores this question through a case study of a low-income riverside settlement in Agra using ethnographic field work conducted in 2019. This included observations, interviews, and group discussions with residents, community leaders, and police officials, and a systematic review of local and national news reports. The paper finds that for women, public spaces like riverbanks, streets, and large parks are characterised by a ‘mahaul’ (translated here as affective environment) that is risky and ‘kharab’ (immoral or corrupt) due to their sticky affective association with harassment, transgression, romance, and the risk of elopements. Instead, women find opportunities for leisure and sociality by coming together on cots in shared courtyards or rooftops within their neighbourhood – these form their ‘enclosed outside’ where they find opportunities for sociality, leisure (which exists simultaneously with work), and discussion. By centring women’s experiences, vocabularies, and everyday relationship with public spaces, and underscoring the register of ‘affect’ in these experiences, this paper makes an important contribution to the growing literature on gendering right to the city and the feminist argument for women’s right to leisure spaces. The paper also centres the importance of local built elements like shared courtyards within a neighbourhood especially for women, with implications for urban planning and design.

Configuring the digital relationship landscape: a feminist new materialist analysis of a couple relationship app

Digital technologies play an increasing role in intimate couple relationships, prompting new approaches to better understand the contemporary digital relationship landscape. This article uses feminist new materialist assemblage thinking to explore the functioning and processes of a relationship support app, Paired. Deploying diffractive analysis, it presents three composite narratives that explore the temporality of couple relationships, relationship work and situated practices of coupledom. Composite narratives retain the emotional truth of original accounts through combined participant voices, enabling attention to be focused on the user–relationship–app assemblage. Findings suggest that routinised app notifications prompt meaningful everyday relationship maintenance behaviours. Human–technology intra-actions thus generate positive relationship health and wellbeing behaviours which may have lasting benefits. This article’s contributions are therefore largely methodological and conceptual, with analysis of supplementary primary interview data (n=20) derived from a mixed-methods evaluation, including brief longitudinal surveys over three months (n=440) and a detailed survey (n=745).

Death and Mourning in a United Nations Protection of Civilians Site in South Sudan

ABSTRACT This article investigates the conduct of burial and funerals in a Protection of Civilians (PoC) site in Juba, South Sudan. Focusing on the experiences of internally displaced people, it shows how burial and funerary practice were disordered in the PoC site. It argues that death exposed competing temporalities in the protection of civilians: between the crisis temporality of the humanitarian intervention, and the long-term concerns of the internally displaced. These circumstances were part of a complex everyday relationship between PoC residents and humanitarians, as displaced people sought to ensure future survival of their kinship networks and wider community.

Expect and you shall perceive: People who expect better in turn perceive better behaviors from their romantic partners.

People who are happy with their romantic relationships report that their partners are particularly effective at meeting their everyday relational needs. However, the literature invites competing predictions about how people arrive at those evaluations. In pilot research, we validated a scale of concrete, specific relationship behaviors that can be performed by a romantic partner day-to-day. In Study 1, cross-lagged panel models examined how expectations of positive behaviors, perceptions of positive behaviors, and relationship quality predict changes in one another from week to week. People who expected more positive behaviors in turn perceived more positive behaviors from their partners 1 week later. Key effects extended to negative relationship behaviors (Study 2). In Study 3, the same pattern emerged in a dyadic sample, with expected behaviors predicting changes in perceived behaviors independent of the partner's own reports. Truth and bias analyses revealed that people with lower expectations had more negatively biased perceptions of their partners' behaviors, whereas high expectations were associated with better accuracy. We obtained these results in the context of specific, verifiable behaviors reported on over relatively short periods, underscoring how powerfully people's everyday relationship perceptions may be shaped by their more global perceptions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

From the Editors-in-Chief: The Right to a Safe, Clean, Healthy, and Sustainable Environment

The discipline of international environmental law is about to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. We, at the Yearbook of International Environmental Law, have just celebrated our thirty years of contributing to the discipline of, and academic research on, the field. As already stated, in these three decades, we have watched environmental matters move slowly but emphatically towards the core of economic and social development and occupy an increasing portion of the political discourse, both at the international scene and on the domestic level. It seems incongruous in this context to celebrate the first panegyric declaration of a right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, initially by the Human Rights Council in Resolution 48/13 (8 October 2021) and later by the UN General Assembly Resolution 76/300 (1 August 2022). One would have presumed that the impressive body of environmental regulation both at the international and national levels would have been safely constructed on a solid principle of law. Instead, reality has worked in the reverse order. Pau de Vilchez and Annalisa Savaresi have produced an impressive piece in which they delve into the specifics of its content with a view to ensuring the full enjoyment of the right. In addition, and perhaps even more important, they delineate and discuss the repercussions of its existence on the increasing use of litigation before domestic courts and international adjudicatory bodies in matters pertaining to climate change. In doing so, climate change moves away from the exclusive government-to-government domain of high politics and descends into the everyday relationship of citizen to state, with all the consequent emphasis on immediacy, effectiveness, and, ultimately, democratic accountability.

When Governing Urban Waters Differently: Five Tenets for Socio-Environmental Justice in Urban Climate Adaptation Interventions

Municipalities, their utilities and resource managers are designing and implementing policies and programs toward climate adaptation, which means governing urban water resources differently. Urban water managers are thus expanding their roles and responsibilities through the installation and maintenance of green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) systems. This system expansion is perhaps more striking for water utilities administering GSI-related programs because they acquire a role that has an impact on how residents and neighborhoods will differentially experience the effects of climate change. Through an in-depth qualitative study of a GSI program in Tucson, Arizona, USA, we contribute to the socio-environmental justice framework with specific attention to distributive, procedural, recognition, interactional, and mobility justice. We highlight that a socio-environmental justice approach requires resource managers and decision-makers to recognize and respect the ways in which people’s everyday relationship to water and water infrastructure is impacted by culturally mediated social norms and values, as well as legacies of exclusion and inclusion in urban development and resource governance. Thus, we argue that discussions around water equity in urban water governance need to be placed within a socio-environmental justice framework to address historical inequalities and ensure these are not reproduced through GSI.

Territories of Fire : Indigenous Communities, Land, and Anarchy Among a Highland People in Mindoro

Abstract The article challenges the assumption that land tenure is contingent on acquiring a land title. It argues that for Indigenous peoples a land may be delineated, occupied, utilised, and collectively owned through the concept of territoriality. Through a combined ‘anarchist anthropology’ and political ecology the article provides ethnographic evidence from among the Tau-Buhid as a case in point to show that through their everyday relationship with fire and ignition practices territoriality is reinforced among their communities as a basis of land tenure. Thus, despite efforts of the Philippine state to phase out all kinds of fire practice on their land, a portion of which is a declared protected area, ignition continues as a way of orchestrating territorial autonomy against state sovereignty in the highlands. Ultimately, through such practices Indigenous lands have metaphorically transformed into ‘territories of fire’, a frontier where the state is irrelevant to Indigenous life and where state-control apparatuses are inoperable.

Eliciting Short-Term Closeness in Couple Relationships With Ecological Momentary Interventions

Relationship closeness is considered an important psychological variable for studying couple relationships, and is often postulated as cause for important relationship outcomes. The current study evaluates four micro-interventions for their suitability to experimentally elicit feelings of closeness towards one’s partner. Using participants’ smartphones, and a combination of experience sampling, event sampling, and ecological momentary interventions, individuals reported for a week on their experiences of closeness before and after completing daily either a neutral task or a task meant to enhance relationship closeness. The closeness tasks included showing physical affection, sharing a childhood memory, looking each other in the eyes for five minutes, and discussing shared life achievements. Results of intention-to-treat analyses on a within-person level showed that closeness increased from pre- to post-measurement on average more strongly on days of any of the four examined closeness conditions than on days of the neutral control conditions. Interindividual variability of this effect was observed, emphasizing the relevance of using within-person designs to evaluate such interventions. Exploratory analyses showed that effect sizes declined across time within the day. This study provides instruments for research on causal effects of closeness in everyday relationship life, and an evidence basis for smartphone-delivered interventions in practitioner settings.

Theodore Roosevelt, Naturalist in the Arena ed. by Char Miller and Clay S. Jenkinson

Reviewed by: Theodore Roosevelt, Naturalist in the Arena ed. by Char Miller and Clay S. Jenkinson Julie Courtwright Theodore Roosevelt, Naturalist in the Arena. Edited by Char Miller and Clay S. Jenkinson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. vii + 264 pp. Illustrations, index. $24.95 paper. Theodore Roosevelt: Naturalist in the Arena, edited by Char Miller and Clay S. Jenkinson, is an anthology about Theodore Roosevelt (TR)'s enduring legacy as a conservationist and lover of nature. It is a familiar topic, but the writers attempt to add fresh perspectives by studying Roosevelt's "manifold encounters with the great outdoors" through an interdisciplinary lens (xiv). The result is an appealing and readable book that highlights both TR's familiar and less familiar connections with nature, as well as his quirky behavior and notable intellect. Some of the writers also explore Roosevelt's less laudable opinions, most notably his evolving attitudes toward race, and their connection to the president's "intellectual and affective response to the natural world" (xiv). The editors have divided the book into three sections. The first, "Field Notes," examines Roosevelt's lesser-known work as a "scientist and curator, observer and recorder" (xiv). Here, writers feature TR as a writer, bird-lover, and urban explorer. Melanie Choukas-Bradley's chapter about Roosevelt's love affair with Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, is a fascinating window into his everyday relationship with nature, independent of his famous trips to the American West. For Great Plains enthusiasts, Thomas Cullen Bailey and Katherine Joslin include an analysis of Roosevelt's writing, including Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885) and its relationship to the president's personal grief and the Great Plains landscape. The second section, "Outside Influences," explores TR's relationship with notable individuals such as George Bird Grinnell, Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, and William T. Hornaday. Jenkinson's chapter, "The Cowboy, the Crusader, and the Salvation of the American Buffalo," is the most Great Plains-centric chapter. It describes Roosevelt and Hornaday's separate hunting trips to the Northern Plains, taken at a time when the number of bison in the region was negligible and declining fast. Hornaday, chief taxidermist at the National Museum of Natural History, collected bison specimens for preservation at his museum. Both men had "conversion experiences" (xix) regarding the bison, although Roosevelt initially viewed their extermination as an unfortunate consequence of white conquest of the West. Hornaday, after personally killing some of the last wild bison in the Plains, worked to save the animals from extinction. Eventually the two men met and joined forces as prominent members of the American Bison Society, a group charged with preservation. After multiple chapters focused on details surrounding Roosevelt's relationship with nature, section 3 widens the scope to place Roosevelt as a naturalist within the context of history and the world. Elliott West connects Roosevelt's thoughts and actions about big business, immigration, and conservation to the American West and its place within the American story, while Ian Tyrrell looks at Roosevelt's influence on the world stage and his impact on conservation beyond the United States. There are occasional errors in the book. The University of Iowa is not at Ames (138), for example, and at least one author presents an ahistorical interpretation of the near-extinction of the bison (127). At other times, the book would have benefited from closer [End Page 267] editing. Jenkinson is unclear about whether Roosevelt and Hornaday were true friends or just professional acquaintances, for example. There are also virtually no historical women in the entire book. Inconsistencies and omissions aside, Theodore Roosevelt: Naturalist in the Arena is a welcome addition to the Roosevelt historiography. Its interdisciplinary approach allows for diverse topics and points of view, grounded by their shared connection to the natural world and Roosevelt's place within it. Julie Courtwright Department of History Iowa State University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Diasporas as Actors in Urban Diplomacy

Summary Cities are becoming critical in governing global challenges, and urban policies are not seen as purely local realities. From critical diplomatic studies, this essay states that the notion of urban diplomacy has the possibility to distinguish itself by avoiding being a mere imitation of state/traditional diplomacy, and it allows an analytical path to identify a more inclusive perspective to involve resident foreigners in the design and implementation of a city’s foreign policy. This essay discusses the role of global human mobility in urban diplomacy and the foreign policy of cities from a deterritorialised perspective. The essay argues that diaspora organisations are relevant actors in designing and implementing cities’ foreign policy as part of inclusive urban diplomacy through their trans-local dynamics. Following a qualitative approach, the essay’s empirical bases are four socio-political experiences that show how Mexico City’s diaspora feeds trans-locally the everyday relationship between Mexico City and Chicago.

A Hotchpotch Series of Ad Hoc Solutions: Encountering Theo Crosby’s Hammersmith House

This article tells the story of the New Brutalist house that Theo Crosby designed in Hammersmith, London. This act of storytelling uses historical and architectural methods (archives, measured drawings and models, oral histories, interviews) to document and understand the house’s development from its original conversion from a stable in 1956 to when Crosby’s first wife, Anne, moved out in 2019. By describing how the house responded to changes in the family’s circumstances over the years, I emphasise the everyday relationship between the family and the house: the role that the house played as a proxy and mediator for the unsaid and unsayable, as well as the role that the family played in its ongoing design and production. In this way, the essay situates the house within architectural history and argues that when New Brutalism — a movement that Crosby helped launch in the 1950s — is considered ‘the direct result of a way of life’ (Smithson, Smithson, and Crosby 1955: 1), it continues to offer lessons to understanding architecture beyond the aesthetic, without denying the potency of the aesthetic itself. The contribution is therefore a more nuanced understanding of New Brutalism and the enigmatic behind-the-scenes architect Theo Crosby, as well as a detailed analysis and documentation of this early example of the movement through a personal encounter.

Suicide-memes as exemplars of the everyday inauthentic relationship with death

ABSTRACT Depictions of death in media produced for young audiences are not limited to melodramas or action films; there are frequent depictions of death in new media, often produced not only for, but also by, young adults. Despite the fact that new media in general, and memes in particular, are standard means of communication and expression for young people, memes about suicide (hereafter suicide-memes) are not thoroughly studied in their own right. This article presents a phenomenological analysis of contemporary suicide-memes. Although suicide-memes seem, on the surface, to be just gallows humour or hyperbole that has little to do with death, we argue that this is deceptive. We contend that suicide-memes are characteristic of what Heidegger calls our everyday, inauthentic relationship with death. This relationship is one of trivialisation and avoidance, which obscures the personal reality, and inevitability, of one’s own death.

Class conditioning and class positioning in young people's everyday life with digital media: Exploring new forms of class-making in the Swedish media welfare state

Abstract In this article, I explore how social class shapes the conditions and configurations of digital media practice in the everyday life of young people in Sweden. Drawing on Bourdieusian theory and qualitative interview data from two research projects, I complicate the notion of Sweden as a universally wired media welfare state by showing how economic and cultural forces are structuring Internet access and digital media practice along the lines of preexisting social divisions. Invoking Bourdieu's conceptualisation of social classes as defined both intrinsically and relationally, I identify and exemplify two different but interrelated processes whereby class makes a difference in young people's everyday relationship to digital media: class conditioning and class positioning. I conclude the article by arguing that distinguishing between these processes might offer a better understanding of the relationship between class and everyday media practice. The complexities of advancing a welfare-oriented media policy in the age of digital media are also discussed.

Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer by Ceri Sullivan

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer by Ceri Sullivan Grace Kimball Ceri Sullivan, Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), xvi + 247 pp., 7 ills. Ceri Sullivan's monograph analyzes English private prayers within the early modern period by emphasizing specific qualities of prayer-related publications and how those features influenced Shakespeare's history plays. This book specifically identifies the ways Shakespeare's work is enhanced through historically relevant religious publications. Sullivan highlights Shakespeare's tendency to use self-composed prayer and private devotion in his plays over public sermons and extracts from prewritten documents, although this is not to say that Shakespeare entirely ignored the Book of Common Prayer. Sullivan's monograph is an example of how scholars of early modernity may gain new insight by incorporating more detailed studies of Protestant devotion into their works, something that Sullivan notes has been underemphasized thus far. In general terms, Sullivan's monograph investigates "the narrative and dramatic skills shown in early modern private prayers" and the ways that the literature of the period displays how "prayer is valued as a powerful agent of change as well as an expression of emotion" (2). Sullivan navigates these archival documents by emphasizing patterns that encouraged early modern readers to have conversations with God, whose perceived identity was shaped through both textual and less formal methods in the period. The work moves away from the binary that "devotion was ideally a matter of self- torment or ecstasy" outlined in previous texts and highlights "less zealous, more down-to-earth responses" that represent a more everyday relationship with prayers and praying (14). To cover this material in further detail, Sullivan thoroughly cultivates an arc of reasoning that moves from the foundational elements of advice texts and performances of prayer and into more specific characteristics regarding the various debates centered around the technicalities of prayer, language, and relationships with God. In doing so, Sullivan provides the framework for what private prayer means [End Page 288] within the early modern era and actively moves against assumptions that private prayer needed to be solitary, an aspect illustrated by the author's later analysis of plays like 2 Henry VI. This argument, reemphasized through the Shakespearean case studies after the second chapter, points toward an individualized relationship with God manifested through intentionality and focus, even if others listened to the prayer. As Sullivan also highlights, what is unique about the development of personalized devotions in the early modern period are the elements of creativity, encouraged by the importance placed on accessibility so all people could have a consistent relationship with God. Sullivan further underlines the debates between premeditated and improvised prayer and contention about repetition, prayer length, and the speaker's identity. However, despite these points of controversy, the primary goal for advice texts was to teach individuals to speak to God skillfully with sincerity, ingenuity, and forethought. As Sullivan indicates throughout the rest of the text, Shakespeare's characters showcase varying degrees of ability—or a lack of skill entirely—to cultivate a productive, conversational relationship with God fostered by these approaches to private prayer. Sullivan's analysis of model prayers emphasizes considerations of performance quality, emotion, and alternative perspectives through compassion for others. The work examines how these ideas are translated into 2 and 3 Henry VI through a dramatist's historiographic components, as shown through the analysis of Henry VI's empathetic consultations with God compared to the insincere prayers of politicians. Therefore, Sullivan's monograph highlights how private prayer in historical plays can offer in-depth commentary inside the narrative itself. Sullivan also underlines the beliefs about the power of individualized devotion by perceiving God's role in both the origins and outcomes of events. Although many sought a response from God through methods of private prayer, particularly in dire moments, it becomes apparent that all individuals do not necessarily achieve God's favor. Sullivan's focus on Richard III and Henry V reinforces this perspective, where characters attempt to manipulate God through prayer as vengeful cursing and fortification of militaristic strength. The characters exhibit self-certainty that allows them to link requests through prayer...

It's all in that plate of food: An Interview with Carolyn Steel

Although it might seem that the problem of feeding big cities has been solved, it has come at a heavy cost — ecological destruction, climate crisis, resource depletion, record obesity rates and rising hunger — jeopardizing sustainable development. Furthermore, despite interacting with a number of urban systems, food systems have been disregarded by urban planners until recently, while the distance between consumers and producers increases. Food, however, holds great potential to become the medium through which we pursue a better life and more sustainable cities. In this interview, the British architect Carolyn Steel explores the historical and future connections between humans, cities and food, the current challenges we face in this realm and the possible solutions embedded in her idea of Sitopia — from the Greek words for ‘food’ (sitos) and ‘place’ (topos) — as an approach that could be used to retrofit existing cities, design new ones, and rethink our everyday relationship with the food on our plates.

A AFETIVIDADE NAS RELAÇÕES ENTRE PROFESSORAS E COORDENADORA EM UM CENTRO DE EDUCAÇÃO INFANTIL DA CIDADE DE SÃO PAULO

The questions that guided the study were: How do Early Childhood Education teachers notice affectivity? How does affectivity occur in everyday relationship between teachers and the coordinatorat a Child Education Center? The objectiveof this paperwas to map how affectivity, in the relationship between teachers and the coordinator, occurs in a public CEC, in São Paulocity. The research subjects were five teachers and one coordinator. The methodology used in this study involved a qualitative approach. Data-collection instruments consistedof observation in the CEC premises and semi-structured interviews with the teachers and thecoordinator. The results show that affectivity, in the studied CEC, is little recognized in the relationships between the teachers and the coordinator, a fact that has implications for the development of the joint work of the school unit. According to the interviewed teachers, the pedagogical coordination isa support for all the work developed at the CEC and, therefore, they emphasize the importance of the professional who assumes this role.

Feelings of Annoyance and Spoken Anger Words in Couples’ Everyday Lives: The Role of Family-of-Origin Aggression

Little is known about the words that romantic couples use during emotionally heightened moments such as when feeling annoyed with their partner. In the present study, young adult couples received mobile phones that audio-recorded 50% of their day and prompted hourly self-reports of partner-related annoyance. Actor–partner models tested within-person (hourly) and between-person (across the day) associations between feelings of annoyance and spoken anger words; furthermore, exposure to retrospectively assessed parent-to-child aggression (PCA) was examined as a moderator of these links. Men reporting more annoyance across the day as well as greater PCA used more overall anger words. For women, hourly anger words fluctuated in relation to men’s annoyance; moreover, greater PCA strengthened the link between women’s own hourly reported annoyance and anger words. Our findings highlight nuances in couples’ communication of everyday relationship distress and point to the role of PCA in next-generation romantic relationships.

Reconfiguring child–adult relationships in foster care with implications for childhood studies

ABSTRACT Following the increasing interest within childhood studies towards critically reconsidering fundamental categories such as ‘child-actor’ and ‘context’, this paper explores what happens when the aspects of space and time are explicitly included in an analysis of enduring relationships between children and adults in foster care. With the help of the conceptual tool-set of agential realism the paper explores the potential of an ‘relational ontological’ analytical framework as a methodological contribution to childhood studies and particularly foster care research. This is illustrated by working analytically with two interview excerpts from a larger study about everyday relationship practices, defined as ‘kinning’, between children and adults within foster care. In engaging child–adult relationships as mutually constituted with elements such as space and time, multiple kinship practices within foster care are unfolded.

Legalism and creativity: tax non-compliance in the eyes of the economic elite

ABSTRACTThis paper analyzes elite tax compliance from a sociological perspective in order to examine how different tax behaviors are justified or how they embody different taxpayers’ subjectivities. Drawing from the case of Chile and using a qualitative approach based on 32 interviews conducted with members of the economic elite, it is argued that forms of non-compliance -such as evasion and avoidance- are grounded in different ‘repertoires of evaluation’ while denoting a plurality of distinctions and criteria of evaluation which relate to the legal culture in which the tax system operates. Findings show that legalism -a literal conception of the rules- does not always favor tax compliance and that it may even go against the purpose of tax collection when a creative use of the law prevails. Furthermore, legalism and creativity allow for the main justifications for challenging tax payment as well as the perceptions and beliefs that underlie the everyday relationship between taxpayers and the state to be understood.