Geographies Of Families Research Articles

Mail art methods and the social and cultural geographies of families affected by rare disease

ABSTRACT Building on geographic scholarship around disability and drawing on a programme of arts-based research, we bring attention to the social and cultural geographies of families affected by rare disease. Seeking creative methodological opportunities, we invited families to send us postcards as a means of sharing experiences and reflections. We contextualize the emergence of the postcard as a modality of communication, situating our work within a wider epistolary and artistic tradition, before examining the opportunities postcarding might produce for geographic and broader qualitative research, noting the forms conduciveness to multimodality and recent calls for more engagement with the medium. We detail our own practices of participatory postcarding and the questions, challenges, and hopes such raised. Analysing the postcards received, we discuss how such helps understand the shifting social and cultural geographies of rare disease, reflecting on themes of (in)accessibility and exclusion, changing domestic geographies, and the importance of, and challenges associated with, family-based identities and communities in the context of rare disease. Such highlights opportunities for disability geography to engage in cross-cutting conversations and agenda-building with the nascent area of family geographies, along with further geographic inquiry into the spaces and worlds of rare disease.

Digital geographies of home: parenting practices in the space between gaming and gambling

ABSTRACT This paper advances debates at the intersection of geographies of children, youth and families, digital geographies, and geographies of home. We argue that social, seasonal and limited time are vitally important for understanding the new landscape between gaming and gambling and have wider analytical purchase for geographers. This paper reveals parenting practices connected to the multi-billion-dollar industry of paid-for currency in digital games used to access gambling style systems and chance-based mechanisms such as loot boxes. We use this timely example to develop new digital geographies of home from original interviews with families based in England on their everyday lived experiences of gambling-style systems in digital games as well as data from video ethnographies with children and young people and interviews with international game designers. This paper challenges current understandings by examining how parents make sense of gambling-related harms and demonstrates the spatial and temporal dynamics of purchasing decisions, rules, and associated conflicts in domestic space. We argue these systems in digital games shape and are shaped by family geographies. This paper concludes by outlining its relevance for the social and health sciences at a time of intense legislative interest in the increasingly blurred space between gaming and gambling.

Coyote Killing: Where Species and Identities Collide

Abstract Although predator killing is a global phenomenon, few studies interrogate the individual and societal drivers of choosing lethal versus non-lethal actions towards coyotes. Results here derive from 48 in situ, semi-structured interviews conducted during 2015–2017 with rural residential and agricultural landowners in the Foothills Parkland Region of Alberta, Canada. Interviews recorded landowner experiences with coyotes, and their perceptions, values, beliefs, animal husbandry practices, and actions towards coyotes. Invoking a critical geography perspective and grounded theory methods, we found the practice of coyote killing and anti-coyote sentiments to be deeply entangled with and mutually reconstituted by constructs of “masculinity,” “rurality,” and colonial settler identity. Coyote killing also appeared as a form of discursive power, arising from urban-rural tensions. Finally, geographies of local history, family, and community intersected with identity, gendered-labor, and power – placing coyotes in a vicious and ongoing cycle of oppression and violence.

Visiting here, there, and somewhere: Multi‐locality and the geographies of transnational family visiting

AbstractFor transnational families, visits represent an opportunity to temporarily punctuate the geographical distance that separates them from significant others in everyday life. Drawing on data from mapping‐interviews conducted with older skilled migrants in Abu Dhabi, the UAE, this paper is concerned with how transnational visiting is harnessed to sustain a sense of family togetherness at a later stage of the life course. The discussion contributes to migration scholarship on return visits and visits by relatives to the migration destination but also draws attention to a third dimension of visiting; family meet‐ups in a third space—a location that is neither the country of origin nor the migration destination. Hence, I propose an explicitly spatial, relational conceptualization of transnational family visits, arranged around a multi‐local framework: the return visit (‘there’); the receiving of visits in the migration destination (‘here’); and visits in an in‐between geographical space (‘somewhere’). In so doing, this paper places the spotlight on the geographies of visiting, drawing attention to the dynamic way in which the practice of transnational family visiting in enacted in later life.

Intergenerational intimacy geopolitics: family interviewing and generations of memory in occupied Palestine

Critiquing the state-centrism of mainstream geopolitical scholarship, feminist geopolitics has long emphasized the need to attend to how embodied and emotional experiences of everyday life are also bound up within geopolitical processes such as conflict and displacement. Similarly, the subfield of geographies of children, youth, and families has emphasized the ways in which the everyday lives and spaces of young people are implicated within broader scale geopolitical and economic processes. In both of these interrelated strands of research, the intimacy of home and family have emerged as seemingly unlikely sites of geopolitics. Although the gendered power dynamics of the family have received attention, less often considered is the way that inter-generational interactions within and outwith the family are also intertwined within and constitute a form of geopolitics. This paper examines generational encounters, differences, and gaps, as sites of geopolitics, where resistance, resilience, and political subjectivities are formed, performed, and negotiated. To do so we draw upon two separate but related research projects examining the spaces of intergenerational memory in occupied Palestine, one examining Palestinian women’s intergenerational memories of the occupation and resistance, and the other exploring intergenerational memories of a contested religious heritage site. These empirical case studies demonstrate how intergenerational relations are constrained and enlivened by differences in life-course vis-à-vis historical geopolitical events. Examining how memory and meaning are negotiated across generations injects temporality into the concept of intimacy geopolitics, defined as a set of distant and proximate spatial relations, emotional attachments, and embodied encounters through which geopolitics is performed. Alongside this conceptual contribution, we seek to advance a secondary methodological contribution to the geographies of children, youth, and families by reflecting upon the benefits and challenges to conducting intergenerational interviews in family homes and elsewhere.

Geographies of welcome: Engagements with ‘ordinary’ hospitality

We explore the topic of welcome through a geographical lens, setting out the relationships between geographical perspectives and current approaches to welcome and hospitality. We argue that geographers are well positioned to develop engagements with the ‘prosaics’ of welcome that have recently been advocated by scholars in hospitality studies. To make this case, we identify a series of fruitful directions, offering a critical exploration of ‘ordinary’ welcomes via recent geographical insights into feminist geographies of intimacy, family and home, other-than-human relations and postcolonialism. The five articles that constitute this Special Issue build on this editorial to develop critical engagements that explore the geographies of welcome, with particular attention to migration and refugees.

Alcohol, drinking, drunkenness and everyday financial lives: Relational geographies of family and work in China

This paper explores common theoretical and empirical terrain across currently distinct bodies of geographical literature. Presenting ethnographic research undertaken in China we highlight the ways in which alcohol, drinking, drunkenness is bound up with everyday financial lives through relational connections between family and work times/spaces. Focusing on forms and intensities of intergenerational transmission of knowledges, practices, performances and imaginaries that (re)produce social hierarchies, respect, obligations, conflicts, stresses as well as mutuality, interdependence, belonging and reciprocity we begin to explore fruitful new avenues for research.

‘I don’t know where all the cutlery is’: exploring materiality and homemaking in post-separation families

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ways in which home is experienced by children within post-separation families, who spend time within more than one parental home. To do so it draws on semi-structured interviews with fifteen young adults looking back on their childhood experiences. It argues that for these young people, home is a complex achievement, created and constrained, in part, through emotional encounters with domestic objects, interiors and furnishings. Resonating with previous studies which have emphasised the entanglement of family and home(un)making practices, it finds that children’s family relationships are produced, communicated and undermined through the ‘stuff’ within their homes, creating feelings of inclusion and exclusion from their domestic environments. This paper, therefore, argues that domestic materialities are a significant means through which the (re)-and-(un)making of familial relationships in post-separation is performed; building on recent work within the emerging field of family geographies which has drawn attention to the importance of everyday materialities in the doing of family. Conclusions are thus drawn which suggest the value of such an approach to the interdisciplinary literature on post-separation and calls for more research into the various spatialities and materialities of the post-separation family are made.

Connections and disconnections between family and religion: A family geography of Guangzhou Muslim immigrants

This paper explores how Muslim immigrants negotiate their family practices and religious identities in secular Guangzhou, a global city in south China, drawing on an in‐depth qualitative analysis. It provides a lens for better understanding the interrelationship between family practices, transnational mobility, and religious values spatially in the Chinese context. The key arguments of this research suggest that transnational mobility plays important roles in making, remaking, and unmaking of connections between family and religion. Moreover, both family spaces and religious spaces are dynamic and on the move. As an empirical study on family and religion in the Chinese context, this research can not only be read as a contribution to family and religious geographies in an everyday setting, but also one of the first everyday geography studies of Islam and Muslims in globalised China.

Factors Related to Early Recurrence of Idiopathic Clubfoot Post the Ponseti Method.

Introduction: Idiopathic clubfoot or congenital talipes equinovarus (CTEV) is managed by the Ponseti method worldwide; however, the recurrence of the deformity is a challenging problem. The purpose was to review the factors associated with early recurrence of CTEV post the Ponseti method.Materials and Methods: During 2011-2016, 34 infants with 52 CTEV, who underwent the Ponseti method and a minimum follow-up period of six months, were reviewed. Twenty-two infants (65%) were male, and 18 infants (53%) had bilateral CTEV. Recurrence of CTEV was defined as a reappearance of at least one of the four components of the deformity. The association between recurrence and factors, including age, gender, bilaterality, family geography, type of principal caregiver, severity at presentation, centre where the Ponseti method was initiated, compliance to foot abduction brace (FAB), practice of stretching exercise, type of FAB, and complications of casting, were evaluated using univariate logistic regression analysis.Results: The median age at initiation of the treatment was 3.4 (IQR; 2.1-12.6) weeks. A median of six (range; 3-12) casts were required. Tenotomy was performed in 32/34 (94%) of cases. Recurrence occurred in 14/52 feet (27%) at an average follow-up period of 2.3±1.1 years. Non-compliance to FAB protocol began at an average age of 11.2±6.5 months, and significantly increased the risk of recurrence during the weaning phase [OR (95%CI)=8.4 (1.2-92.4), p=0.03]. Other factors were not associated with the recurrence.Conclusion: Non-compliance to FAB occurred early during the treatment and related to a risk of recurrence of CTEV. Physicians should encourage the parents and/or guardians to follow the protocol to decrease the risk of recurrence.

Playing, parenting and family leisure in parks: exploring emotional geographies of families in Guangzhou Children’s Park, China

ABSTRACT Children’s leisure activities in parks have attracted increasing scholarly interest in recent decades. However, relatively little attention has been given to the emotional needs and responses of children to their activities within a park’s play spaces. Moreover, what parents perceive, and how they themselves engage within children’s playing spaces, is under-studied. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in the Guangzhou Children’s Park, China, this paper aims to explore the experiences of both children and parents within this particular playing space. Supplementing participant observations with interviews and analysis of reviews on the Internet, the paper finds that children obtain a sense of family and company from their parents’ presence, and parents recall memories of their own childhood and obtain emotional recovery by visiting parks with their children. The findings suggest that play spaces are not only places where children play, but also where family life and childhood are ‘built’. The paper contributes to the existing literature by highlighting and examining the ‘child–parent’ relationship within playing spaces. By conducting a case study of a non-Western society, the paper encourages researchers to examine ‘child–parent’ relationships in a family leisure context, and to explore the everyday and emotional geographies of family life in contemporary China.

Nexus thinking and the geographies of children, youth and families: towards an integrated research agenda

ABSTRACTThis paper argues for and demonstrates the value of integrating nexus thinking - a conceptual and policy framework for the multiple interdependencies between resources, most commonly food, water and energy – into the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families (GCYF). Through discussion of the two areas’ current limitations, a review of existing GCYF work on food, water, energy and materiality, and secondary auto-analysis of data generated on families’ situated environmental concerns in India and the UK, the paper identifies three key contributions of an integrated nexus thinking-GCYF research agenda. Firstly, nexus thinking can advance understandings of how children and young people negotiate multi-scalar social, political, economic and ecological processes; secondly, an integrated agenda can ‘embody’ nexus thinking by situating children and families in the nexus of interconnections; thirdly, nexus thinking offers a policy-relevant frame through which GCYF can engage questions of intergenerational justice with questions of resource sustainability.

Never after? Queer temporalities and the politics of non-reproduction

What kind of family is evoked by the label ‘family geographies’ and who might be excluded from this conceptual frame? Drawing upon literature from feminist and queer geographies, this paper examines the lives of those who exist outside of normative notions of ‘the family’. Data comes from biographical narrative interviews, conducted in Britain, with those who are both single and childfree. The paper outlines the potential queerness of a 'non-reproductive' life, exploring the alternative temporalities and spatialities this produces. In what ways does the non-reproductive challenge normative ideals of the way a life should unfold? How do 'procreational norms' shape the landscape? By answering such questions, the paper contributes an empirically grounded reflection on the queer potentialities of non-reproduction, challenging certain queer theorizations that equate non-reproduction with anti-futurity. Ultimately, the paper argues that an exploration of the non-reproductive may help reform our understandings of the geographies of intimacy, care and relatedness.

Interpreting family struggles in West Africa across Majority-Minority world boundaries: tensions and possibilities

The 'family' is associated with powerful, often emotive discourses in both the Majority and Minority worlds. However, family geographies to date have been largely focused on research with children and families in the Minority world, reflecting the wider dominance of geographical knowledge and social science theories developed in affluent, Anglophone contexts. In this intervention, I reflect on the tensions in attempting to theorise family meanings, practices and struggles in West Africa without imposing Minority world framings and perspectives. In my research in urban Senegal, the team's approach of 'uncomfortable reflexivity' enabled us to have frank conversations about our own experiences of 'family' and the death of a significant person, about our differing emotional responses to participants' experiences and about the nuances of the language used. My collaborative research with Ghanaian academics highlights the importance of time and space to develop shared qualitative understandings of everyday family struggles for publication in international journals. Given global inequalities in social science knowledge production, an ethic of care is needed that seeks to collaborate reflexively with others across disciplinary, linguistic and Majority-Minority world boundaries. This endeavour will hopefully generate more nuanced insights into the plurality and diversity of everyday family lives globally, while recognising the commonalities we share, situating knowledge in place and approaching the 'global' from the Majority world.

Everyday geographies of family: feminist approaches and interdisciplinary conversations

Our key aim with this collection, a combination of original empirical contributions and interventions by experts from across social geography and sociology, is to consolidate and advance feminist, interdisciplinary approaches to the everyday geographies of family via contemporary, empirically grounded research and direct interdisciplinary exchanges. This themed section showcases cutting edge geographical work in relation to the everyday geographies of family life; highlights the diversity of work being done within feminist geography and; develops a feminist geography that is enriched through engagement with interdisciplinary intellectual exchanges. We describe the intervention section that follows this introductory piece, bringing together writing from across sociology and geography, where there has been a cross-pollination of ideas around everyday family life, but very little concerted effort to bring these into dialogue to date. In introducing each contributor and their substantive interests, we will draw out relevant theoretical links across papers that illustrate how both family and the everyday, as key concepts, are being unsettled and problematised. Contributors to the intervention section are notable scholars that have set and shaped key agendas and debates. In their shorter papers, they will reflect on their influence on developing debates about family and everyday life. Drawing links across this suite of themed and intervention papers, it will be argued that interdisciplinary work around the family is important for carving out and consolidating feminist, interdisciplinary discussions and for determining what might also be distinctive about feminist approaches to family geographies as debates progress.

Everyday austerity: Towards relational geographies of family, friendship and intimacy

This paper advances ideas about relational geographies to explore ‘everyday austerity’. Whilst geographers have analysed the causes and aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the focus largely remains on problems within economic systems and urban governance, rather than austerity as lived experience. I outline how focusing on everyday relationships and relational spaces – family, friendship and intimate relations – provides exciting opportunities for thinking geographically about everyday life in austerity. Using examples of care and support and mundane mobilities, I demonstrate how a relational approach extends current understandings of how austerity cuts through, across and between spaces.

Questions of agency: Capacity, subjectivity, spatiality and temporality

Geographies of Children, Youth and Families is flourishing, but its founding conceptions require critical reflection. This paper considers one key conceptual orthodoxy: the notion that children are competent social actors. In a field founded upon liberal notions of agency, we identify a conceptual elision between the benefits of studying agency and the beneficial nature of agency. Embracing post-structuralist feminist challenges, we propose a politically-progressive conceptual framework centred on embodied human agency which emerges within power. We contend this can be achieved though intensive/extensive analyses of space, and a focus on ‘biosocial beings and becomings' within dynamic notions of individual/intergenerational time.

Bereavement from afar: transnational grieving and the emotional geographies of migration

ABSTRACTThis exploratory article aims to contribute to scholarship on migrants’ experiences of bereavement and grief through the loss of a parent in their country of origin. It considers how transnational bereavement and grieving relate to the ever changing emotional geographies of migration and transnational families. Empirical material is drawn from a research project conducted with Latin American and Latino-British families living in the north of England, particularly from narratives presented by sons and daughters who had experienced such bereavements. Middle generation migrants may express: a continuing bond with a deceased parent as part of their emotional support network; regret at missing the death of the parent and the reinforcement of ambivalent emotions regarding their migration project; boundary ambiguity towards the transnational family; and a sense of physical distance from the family home as a geographical cure which allows working through the grieving process and troubling changes in family configurations.

Fr Mažvydas, Žemaitija and the Gniezno Consistory Court of Appeal, 1525–1539

By the late fifteenth century, more notably after 1477, appeal cases from Catholics in the Grand Duchyof Lithuania began to appear before the Consistory Court in Gniezno in increasing numbers. Thesecases involved quite a wide social group, and dealt with a broad range of issues (not just matrimonialdisputes or the hiring out of parish churches between priests). Appellants came before the judgesfrom across the Grand Duchy. This article covers cases from 1524 to 1539. Even when court materialgives few details of cases, it can help solve issues of parish church and chantry foundations andpatronage. The most striking feature of the records between 1524 and 1538 is the predominance ofcases from Žemaitija, a diocese which previously featured only in disputes involving the bishop. Thisconfirms the deepening of Catholic practice across the diocese of Medininkai (Žemaitija) as reflectedin particular in the increasingly predominant use of Christian forenames from the last quarterof the fifteenth century. Most interesting perhaps for those studying the rise of Protestantism inLithuania will be the occurrence of one Fr Andriejus Mažvydas, parish priest of Alsėdžiai, among theappellant litigants of 1536. This information about a very probable kinsman (uncle, cousin, brother?)of Martynas Mažvydas offers new insights into the Lutheran’s family background and geography. KEY WORDS : Catholic Church, consistory court, appeal, Gniezno, Lithuania, Žemaitija, Andriejus Mažvydas.

Where in the World Is Ronald McDonald? Involving Families in Geographic Fun!

A Family Geography Night (FGN) kit can be used to bring families together, teach about the world, give parents the opportunity to share their beliefs, and participate in the educational system whil...