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22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 955 start with f

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Fake

Edited by Jacob Copeman and Giovanni da Col

HAU, 2019

Fakes, forgery, counterfeits, hoaxes, frauds, knock-offs—such terms speak, ostensibly, to the inverse of truth or the obverse of authenticity and sincerity. Do all cultures equally spend an incredible amount of energy and labor on detecting differences between the phony and the genuine? What does the modern human obsession with fabrications and frauds tell us about ourselves? And what can anthropology tell us about this obsession?

This timely book is the product of the first Annual Debate of Anthropological Keywords, a collaborative project between HAU, the American Ethnological Society, and L’Homme, held each year at the American Anthropological Association meetings. The aim of the debate is to reflect critically on keywords and terms that play a pivotal and timely role in discussions of different cultures and societies, and of the relations between them. This volume brings together leading thinkers to interrogate the concept of fake cross-culturally, including insightful contributions by Giovanni da Col, Gabriella Coleman, Veena Das, John Jackson Jr., Graham Jones, Carlo Severi, Alexei Yurchak, and Jacob Copeman.

All HAU Books are OPEN ACCESS, through Knowledge Unlatched, and are available on the HAU Books website: Haubooks.org.

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Fall Guys

False Confessions and the Politics of Murder

Jim Fisher

Southern Illinois University Press, 1996

Jim Fisher, criminal justice professor and former FBI agent, reveals how he uncovered the framing of two boys in a pair of unrelated murders committed in 1956 and 1958.

In the first of the cases, eleven-year-old Charlie Zubryd confessed that at the age of eight, he had murdered his widowed mother by driving a hatchet into her skull. The crime was committed in the basement of the modest Zubryd home in a rural section of Sewickley Township in western Pennsylvania, an area not far from Pittsburgh. Following intense police questioning, young Zubryd confessed to the crime in March 1959, a full twenty-eight months after the bloody murder of his mother.

Too young to prosecute, Charlie Zubryd was adopted after his confession and a brief stay in a mental ward. A childless couple gave Zubryd a new name and identity. It would be twenty years before Charlie Zubryd—now going by the name Chuck Duffy—would have any contact with his biological family.

When Zubryd/Duffy made an effort to get his real family back, he was rejected because his relatives still believed he had murdered his mother. In fact, until Fisher began to investigate the case in 1989, Chuck Duffy himself was not sure he had not killed his mother during some kind of mental blackout.

The second murder occurred in 1958, two years after the Zubryd case. Thirteen-year-old Jerry Pacek endured forty-one hours of police grilling before he confessed to raping and killing fifty-year-old Lillian Steveck as she walked home one evening from a bus stop in Breckenridge, Pennsylvania. Pacek told the same Allegheny County homicide detective who had framed Charlie Zubryd that he had killed the woman with a variety of blunt objects, none of which were ever found. The thirteen-year-old boy was tried and convicted of the murder the following spring. He was sent to Camp Hill Prison, where he remained incarcerated for ten years.

Fisher’s investigation cleared the names of both the wrongfully accused boys. Because of his investigation, the Zubryd case was reopened, which led to the identification of a vicious killer. In 1991, Fisher’s investigative efforts convinced the governor of Pennsylvania to grant a full pardon to Jerry Pacek, who as a teenager had served ten years in an adult prison for a murder he had not committed.

Jim Fisher and the Zubryd and Pacek stories have been featured on a number of nationally broadcast television programs.

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Fall or Fly

The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia

Wendy Welch

Ohio University Press, 2017

Chaos. Frustration. Compassion. Desperation. Hope. These are the five words that author Wendy Welch says best summarize the state of foster care in the coalfields of Appalachia. Her assessment is based on interviews with more than sixty social workers, parents, and children who have gone through “the system.” The riveting stories in Fall or Fly tell what foster care is like, from the inside out.

In depictions of foster care and adoption, stories tend to cluster at the dark or light ends of the spectrum, rather than telling the day-to-day successes and failures of families working to create themselves. Who raises other people’s children? Why? What’s money got to do with it when the love on offer feels so real? And how does the particular setting of Appalachia—itself so frequently oversimplified or stereotyped—influence the way these questions play out?

In Fall or Fly, Welch invites people bound by a code of silence to open up and to share their experiences. Less inspiration than a call to caring awareness, this pioneering work of storytelling journalism explores how love, compassion, money, and fear intermingle in what can only be described as a marketplace for our nation’s greatest asset.

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Falling Back

Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth

Fader, Jamie J

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Winner of the 2016 Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology (ASC)

Winner of the 2016 Outstanding Book for the Academy of Criminal Justice Science (ACJS)

2014 Scholarly Contribution Award from the Children and Youth Section of the American Sociological Association

Received an Honorable Mention for the American Sociological Association Race, Gender and Class Section's 2014 Distinguished Book Award

Named a 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Jamie J. Fader documents the transition to adulthood for a particularly vulnerable population: young inner-city men of color who have, by the age of eighteen, already been imprisoned. How, she asks, do such precariously situated youth become adult men? What are the sources of change in their lives?

Falling Back is based on over three years of ethnographic research with black and Latino males on the cusp of adulthood and incarcerated at a rural reform school designed to address “criminal thinking errors” among juvenile drug offenders. Fader observed these young men as they transitioned back to their urban Philadelphia neighborhoods, resuming their daily lives and struggling to adopt adult masculine roles. This in-depth ethnographic approach allowed her to portray the complexities of human decision-making as these men strove to “fall back,” or avoid reoffending, and become productive adults. Her work makes a unique contribution to sociological understandings of the transitions to adulthood, urban social inequality, prisoner reentry, and desistance from offending.

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Fallout

Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture

Grégoire Mallard

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Many Baby Boomers still recall crouching under their grade-school desks in frequent bomb drills during the Cuban Missile Crisis—a clear representation of how terrified the United States was of nuclear war. Thus far, we have succeeded in preventing such catastrophe, and this is partly due to the various treaties signed in the 1960s forswearing the use of nuclear technology for military purposes.

In Fallout, Grégoire Mallard seeks to understand why some nations agreed to these limitations of their sovereign will—and why others decidedly did not. He builds his investigation around the 1968 signing of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which, though binding in nature, wasn’t adhered to consistently by all signatory nations. Mallard looks at Europe’s observance of treaty rules in contrast to the three holdouts in the global nonproliferation regime: Israel, India, and Pakistan. He seeks to find reasons for these discrepancies, and makes the compelling case that who wrote the treaty and how the rules were written—whether transparently, ambiguously, or opaquely—had major significance in how the rules were interpreted and whether they were then followed or dismissed as regimes changed. In honing in on this important piece of the story, Mallard not only provides a new perspective on our diplomatic history, but, more significantly, draws important conclusions about potential conditions that could facilitate the inclusion of the remaining NPT holdouts. Fallout is an important and timely book sure to be of interest to policy makers, activists, and concerned citizens alike.

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False Black Power?

Jason L. Riley

Templeton Press, 2017

Black civil rights leaders have long supported ethnic identity politics and prioritized the integration of political institutions, and seldom has that strategy been questioned. In False Black Power?, Jason L. Riley takes an honest, factual look at why increased black political power has not paid off in the ways that civil rights leadership has promised.

Recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of black elected officials, culminating in the historic presidency of Barack Obama. However, racial gaps in employment, income, homeownership, academic achievement, and other measures not only continue but in some cases have even widened. While other racial and ethnic groups in America have made economic advancement a priority, the focus on political capital for blacks has been a disadvantage, blocking them from the fiscal capital that helped power upward mobility among other groups.

Riley explains why the political strategy of civil rights leaders has left so many blacks behind. The key to black economic advancement today is overcoming cultural handicaps, not attaining more political power. The book closes with thoughtful responses from key thought leaders Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.

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False Promises

The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness

Stanley Aronowitz

Duke University Press, 1992

This classic study of the American working class, originally published in 1973, is now back in print with a new introduction and epilogue by the author. An innovative blend of first-person experience and original scholarship, Aronowitz traces the historical development of the American working class from post-Civil War times and shows why radical movements have failed to overcome the forces that tend to divde groups of workers from one another. The rise of labor unions is analyzed, as well as their decline as a force for social change. Aronowitz’s new introduction situates the book in the context of developments in current scholarship and the epilogue discusses the effects of recent economic and political changes in the American labor movement.

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False Promises

The Struggle for Black Voting Rights in 1800s Ohio

Ric S. Sheffield

Ohio University Press, 0

Brings to life the struggle for Black suffrage in nineteenth-century Ohio

In False Promises, the fight for Black voting rights in Ohio comes alive through narratives of men of color who defied the state’s nineteenth-century restrictions on suffrage. Though ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment ostensibly extended the franchise, state election laws still forced men of color into a perilous struggle for full citizenship. Ric S. Sheffield depicts their courage and determination, revealing their humanity through stories of sacrifice, resistance, and hope.

Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, Sheffield weaves together historical records with imaginative reconstructions of dialogue, setting, and descriptive elements beyond the dusty courthouse pages. Grounded in archival evidence yet reimagined to fill in the silences, these stories recount the lived experiences of those who risked everything to exercise their right to vote.

False Promises also connects these historical battles to the present, illustrating how voter-suppression tactics in today’s Ohio have roots in the racial exclusions of the nineteenth century. By exposing the enduring legacy of white supremacist policies, the book challenges the widespread misconception that racial disenfranchisement was solely a southern problem. Ohio’s complex racial history—noted for its role in the Underground Railroad but also for its repressive Black Laws—also includes a fierce and ongoing struggle over the right to vote. Through compelling storytelling, historical analysis, and a reclamation of voices lost to history, False Promises urges readers to reconsider their understanding of democracy and the right to vote.

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Fame and Fandom

Functioning On and Offline

Celia Lam

University of Iowa Press, 2022

Celebrities depend upon fans to sustain their popularity and livelihood, and fans are happy to oblige. With social media they can follow their favorite (or least favorite) celebrities’ every move, and get glimpses into their lives, homes, and behind-the-scenes work. Fans interact with celebrities now more than ever, and often feel that they have a claim on their time, attention, and accountability. In Fame and Fandom, the contributors examine this tumultuous dynamic and bring together celebrity studies and fan studies like never before.

In case studies including Supernatural, Harry Styles, YouTube influencers, film location sites, Keanu Reeves, and celebrities as fans, readers find new approaches to fan/celebrity encounters and parasocial relationships. This is the go-to volume on the symbiotic relationship between fame and fandom.

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Familial Fitness

Disability, Adoption, and Family in Modern America

Sandra M. Sufian

University of Chicago Press, 2022

The first social history of disability and difference in American adoption, from the Progressive Era to the end of the twentieth century.

Disability and child welfare, together and apart, are major concerns in American society. Today, about 125,000 children in foster care are eligible and waiting for adoption, and while many children wait more than two years to be adopted, children with disabilities wait even longer. In Familial Fitness, Sandra M. Sufian uncovers how disability operates as a fundamental category in the making of the American family, tracing major shifts in policy, practice, and attitudes about the adoptability of disabled children over the course of the twentieth century.

Chronicling the long, complex history of disability, Familial Fitness explores how notions and practices of adoption have—and haven’t—accommodated disability, and how the language of risk enters into that complicated relationship. We see how the field of adoption moved from widely excluding children with disabilities in the early twentieth century to partially including them at its close. As Sufian traces this historical process, she examines the forces that shaped, and continue to shape, access to the social institution of family and invites readers to rethink the meaning of family itself.

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Familial Undercurrents

Untold Stories of Love and Marriage in Modern Iran

Afsaneh Najmabadi

Duke University Press, 2022

Not long after her father died, Afsaneh Najmabadi discovered that her father had a secret second family and that she had a sister she never knew about. In Familial Undercurrents, Najmabadi uncovers her family’s complex experiences of polygamous marriage to tell a larger story of the transformations of notions of love, marriage, and family life in mid-twentieth-century Iran. She traces how the idea of “marrying for love” and the desire for companionate, monogamous marriage acquired dominance in Tehran’s emerging urban middle class. Considering the role played in that process by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century romance novels, reformist newspapers, plays, and other literature, Najmabadi outlines the rituals and objects---such as wedding outfits, letter writing, and family portraits---that came to characterize the ideal companionate marriage. She reveals how in the course of one generation men’s polygamy had evolved from an acceptable open practice to a taboo best kept secret. At the same time, she chronicles the urban transformations of Tehran and how its architecture and neighborhood social networks both influenced and became emblematic of the myriad forms of modern Iranian family life.

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Familiar Perversions

The Racial, Sexual, and Economic Politics of LGBT Families

Montegary, Liz

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Winner of the 2018 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Over the past two decades, same-sex couples raising children have become more visible within US political and popular culture. Thanks to widely circulated images of well-mannered, well-dressed, and well-off two-parent families, a select number of LGBT-identified parents have gained recognition as model American citizens. In Familiar Perversions, Liz Montegary shows how this seemingly progressive view of same-sex parenting has taken shape during a period of growing racial inequality and economic insecurity in the United States. This book evaluates the recent successes of the “family equality” movement, while asking important questions about its relationship to neoliberalism, the policing of sexual cultures, and the broader context of social justice organizing at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Montegary’s investigation of the politics of LGBT family life takes us on a journey that includes not only activist events and the courtrooms where landmark decisions about same-sex families were made, but also parenting workshops, cruise ships, and gay resort towns. Through its sustained historical analysis, Familiar Perversions lays critical groundwork for imagining a queer family movement that can support and strengthen the diverse networks of care, kinship, and intimacy on which our collective survival depends.

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Familiar Stranger

A Life Between Two Islands

Stuart Hall

Duke University Press, 2017

"Sometimes I feel myself to have been the last colonial." This, in his own words, is the extraordinary story of the life and career of Stuart Hall—how his experiences shaped his intellectual, political, and theoretical work and how he became one of his age's brightest intellectual lights.

Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Kingston, Jamaica, still then a British colony, the young Stuart Hall found himself uncomfortable in his own home. He lived among Kingston's stiflingly respectable brown middle class, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white elite. As colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Kingston and across the world. In 1951 a Rhodes scholarship took Hall across the Atlantic to Oxford University, where he met young Jamaicans from all walks of life, as well as writers and thinkers from across the Caribbean, including V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming. While at Oxford he met Raymond Williams, Charles Taylor, and other leading intellectuals, with whom he helped found the intellectual and political movement known as the New Left. With the emotional aftershock of colonialism still pulsing through him, Hall faced a new struggle: that of building a home, a life, and an identity in a postwar England so rife with racism that it could barely recognize his humanity.

With great insight, compassion, and wit, Hall tells the story of his early life, taking readers on a journey through the sights, smells, and streets of 1930s Kingston while reflecting on the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain. Full of passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds.

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Families Apart

Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love

Geraldine Pratt

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

In a developing nation like the Philippines, many mothers provide for their families by traveling to a foreign country to care for someone else’s. Families Apart focuses on Filipino overseas workers in Canada to reveal what such arrangements mean for families on both sides of the global divide.

The outcome of Geraldine Pratt’s collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre of British Columbia, this study documents the difficulties of family separation and the problems that children have when they reunite with their mothers in Vancouver. Aimed at those who have lived this experience, those who directly benefit from it, and those who simply stand by and watch, Families Apart shows how Filipino migrant domestic workers—often mothers themselves—are caught between competing neoliberal policies of sending and receiving countries and how, rather than paying rich returns, their ambitions as migrants often result in social and economic exclusion for themselves and for their children. This argument takes shape as an open-ended series of encounters, moving between a singular academic voice and the “we” of various research collaborations, between Vancouver and the Philippines, and between genres of “evidence-based” social scientific research, personal testimony, theatrical performance, and nonfictional narrative writing.

Through these experiments with different modes of storytelling, Pratt seeks to transform frameworks of perception, to create and collect sympathetic witnesses—in short, to promote a wide-ranging public discussion and debate about a massive worldwide shift in family (and nonfamily) relations of intimacy and care.

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Families That Work

Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment

Janet C. Gornick

Russell Sage Foundation, 2003

Parents around the world grapple with the common challenge of balancing work and child care. Despite common problems, the industrialized nations have developed dramatically different social and labor market policies—policies that vary widely in the level of support they provide for parents and the extent to which they encourage an equal division of labor between parents as they balance work and care. In Families That Work, Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers take a close look at the work-family policies in the United States and abroad and call for a new and expanded role for the U.S. government in order to bring this country up to the standards taken for granted in many other Western nations. In many countries in Europe and in Canada, family leave policies grant parents paid time off to care for their young children, and labor market regulations go a long way toward ensuring that work does not overwhelm family obligations. In addition, early childhood education and care programs guarantee access to high-quality care for their children. In most of these countries, policies encourage gender equality by strengthening mothers' ties to employment and encouraging fathers to spend more time caregiving at home. In sharp contrast, Gornick and Meyers show how in the United States—an economy with high labor force participation among both fathers and mothers—parents are left to craft private solutions to the society-wide dilemma of "who will care for the children?" Parents—overwhelmingly mothers—must loosen their ties to the workplace to care for their children; workers are forced to negotiate with their employers, often unsuccessfully, for family leave and reduced work schedules; and parents must purchase care of dubious quality, at high prices, from consumer markets. By leaving child care solutions up to hard-pressed working parents, these private solutions exact a high price in terms of gender inequality in the workplace and at home, family stress and economic insecurity, and—not least—child well-being. Gornick and Meyers show that it is possible–based on the experiences of other countries—to enhance child well-being and to increase gender equality by promoting more extensive and egalitarian family leave, work-time, and child care policies. Families That Work demonstrates convincingly that the United States has much to learn from policies in Europe and in Canada, and that the often-repeated claim that the United States is simply "too different" to draw lessons from other countries is based largely on misperceptions about policies in other countries and about the possibility of policy expansion in the United States.

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Families We Need

Disability, Abandonment, and Foster Care’s Resistance in Contemporary China

Erin Raffety

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Set in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need traces the movement of three Chinese foster children, Dengrong, Pei Pei, and Meili, from the state orphanage into the humble, foster homes of Auntie Li, Auntie Ma, and Auntie Huang. Traversing the geography of Guangxi, from the modern capital Nanning where Pei Pei and Meili reside, to the small farming village several hours away where Dengrong is placed, this ethnography details the hardships of social abandonment for disabled children and disenfranchised, older women in China, while also analyzing the state’s efforts to cope with such marginal populations and incorporate them into China’s modern future. The book argues that Chinese foster families perform necessary, invisible service to the Chinese state and intercountry adoption, yet the bonds they form also resist such forces, exposing the inequalities, privilege, and ableism at the heart of global family making.

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Families and Food in Hard Times

European Comparative Research

Rebecca O'Connell and Julia Brannen

University College London, 2021

An examination of food poverty in austerity-era Europe.

Food is fundamental, yet food poverty has increased in the Global North. Adopting a comparative case approach, Food and Families in Hard Times addresses the global problem of economic retrenchment and the burden it places on the most vulnerable. This timely book examines food poverty in the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Norway following the 2008 financial crisis, examining the resources available to families in relation to the intersection of public policies, local institutions, and kinship networks. The book explores the ways that low income impacts household food provisioning, formal and informal support for struggling families, the provision and role of school meals, and constraints upon families’ social participation. Drawing upon extensive and intensive knowledge on the conditions and experiences of low-income families, the book also draws upon current research in European social science literature to shed light on the causes and consequences of food poverty in austerity-era Europe.

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Families and Religion

Dynamics of Transmission Across Generations

Edited by Christel Gärtner, Linda Hennig, and Olaf Müller

Campus Verlag, 2025

Faith is more than a personal choice; it’s a generational story. This study reveals when and why religious transmission succeeds or fails within families.

How does religion—or the lack of it—pass from one generation to the next? Families and Religion studies the intergenerational shifts in faith and secularism in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Finland, and Canada, depicting when, how, and why religious beliefs change.

Using a mixed-methods approach, the book looks into the role of family and historical context in shaping religious affiliation and identity, specifically focusing on adolescence as a key period of transformation. Comparing diverse social settings, the authors uncover the subtle yet powerful forces influencing whether religious traditions persist or fade across generations. A vital contribution to the study of religious change, this volume offers new insights for scholars of sociology and religious studies, and for those interested in understanding how faith may be passed down within families.

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Families as Sources of Strength, Healing, and Hope

Groves Monographs on Marriage and Family (Volume 9)

Edited by Raeann Hamon and Chloe D. Merrill

Michigan Publishing Services, 2026

Groves Monographs on Marriage and Familyis an edited book series based on the annual meetings of the Groves Conference on Marriage and Family, an interdisciplinary, interprofessional organization of limited invited membership founded in 1934. The Groves Monographs publishes work on the leading edges of theory development and empirical research in the field of family studies. Individual volumes are edited by the chairs of the annual Groves Conferences and include peer-reviewed chapters by the conference presenters and invited authors. Topics are timely and provocative with diverse themes.

Volume 9: Families as Sources of Strength Healing and Hope This monograph elaborates on the theme of the 2022 Groves Conference on Marriage and Family held in Paradise Island, Bahamas--- Families as Sources of Strength, Hope and Healing. The authors offer insights into and the value of employing a strengths-based mindset, whether engaging in clinical work or teaching. They also identify numerous factors which empower children, couples, and families, including things like expressing love, commitment, and relational fidelity. This volume is intended to help researchers, practitioners, and the lay public to adopt a more strengths-based and hopeful approach to relationships.

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Families at Work

Expanding the Bounds

Naomi Gerstel

Vanderbilt University Press, 2002

What is the relationship between work and family in a world where employment creates endless tensions for families and families create endless tensions for the workplace? This collection of reprinted and original articles broadens this discussion by addressing issues from the perspectives of often neglected populations: from white middle-class women with young children to people of color, to poor families, to the new sorts of families gays and lesbians are struggling to construct, to fathers, to older children.

To discuss work and family is also to discuss gender. Ranging from California's Silicon Valley to a remote fishing village in the northeast, part one shows how new work arrangements have created new expectations for what it means to be a woman or a man, and how slow and uneven the pace of change can be. Nowhere are the tensions of work and family more potent than around childcare. Part two takes up these tensions, showing how various "solutions" to caring for children of all ages (whether infants or teenagers) create new problems. Parts three and four turn outward to show how the new relationships between families and work are changing the relationships between families and the communities in which they live and generating new social policy dilemmas.

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Families at the Intersection of Mental Health and Disabilities

Groves Monographs on Marriage and Family (Volume 6)

Brian Paul Masciadrelli

Michigan Publishing Services, 2022

Volume 6: Families at the Intersection of Mental Health and Disability offers scholars and practitioners an opportunity to focus on the multiple ways these experiences impact individuals, families, and communities in American society. Chapters in this volume are influenced by the theme of the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Groves Conference, held in Buffalo, New York.

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Families for Mobility

Elite Korean Students Abroad and Their Parents' Reproduction of Privilege

Juyeon Park

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Families for Mobility documents elite Korean transnational families, focusing on how they use elite education abroad as a tool for class reproduction. Drawing on over 100 interviews with both parents and children at elite U.S. colleges, the book explores the desires, aspirations, and expectations that shape these education-driven transnational family arrangements. By triangulating the perspectives of children, mothers, and fathers, Families for Mobility argues that gendered transnational parenting—by both mothers and fathers—plays a crucial role in the intergenerational transmission of mobility and cosmopolitan lifestyles. The analysis shows how class and gender shape both parents’ and children’s approaches to their transnational ‘family projects,’ with fathers and sons appearing more resourceful and ambitious than mothers and daughters, reflecting the gender achievement gap even among the elite. The book challenges stereotypes of Asian high achievers and ‘tiger’ parenting, providing a more nuanced understanding of who thrives in the hierarchical realms of global education and business, as well as the familial support systems behind their success.

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Families, Lovers, and their Letters

Italian Postwar Migration to Canada

Sonia Cancian

University of Manitoba Press, 2010

Families, Lovers, and their Letters takes us into the passionate hearts and minds of ordinary people caught in the heartbreak of transatlantic migration. It examines the experiences of Italian migrants to Canada and their loved ones left behind in Italy following the Second World War, when the largest migration of Italians to Canada took place. In a micro-analysis of 400 private letters, including three collections that incorporate letters from both sides of the Atlantic, Sonia Cancian provides new evidence on the bidirectional flow of communication during migration. She analyzes how kinship networks functioned as a means of support and control through the flow of news, objects, and persons; how gender roles in productive and reproductive spheres were reinforced as a means of coping with separation; and how the emotional impact of both temporary and permanent separation was expressed during the migration process. Cancian also examines the love letter as a specific form of epistolary exchange, a first in Italian immigrant historiography, revealing the powerful effect that romantic love had on the migration experience.

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Family Activism

Immigrant Struggles and the Politics of Noncitizenship

Pallares, Amalia

Rutgers University Press, 2014

During the past ten years, legal and political changes in the United States have dramatically altered the legalization process for millions of undocumented immigrants and their families. Faced with fewer legalization options, immigrants without legal status and their supporters have organized around the concept of the family as a political subject—a political subject with its rights violated by immigration laws.

Drawing upon the idea of the “impossible activism” of undocumented immigrants, Amalia Pallares argues that those without legal status defy this “impossible” context by relying on the politicization of the family to challenge justice within contemporary immigration law. The culmination of a seven-year-long ethnography of undocumented immigrants and their families in Chicago, as well as national immigrant politics,Family Activism examines the three ways in which the family has become politically significant: as a political subject, as a frame for immigrant rights activism, and as a symbol of racial subordination and resistance.

By analyzing grassroots campaigns, churches and interfaith coalitions, immigrant rights movements, and immigration legislation, Pallares challenges the traditional familial idea, ultimately reframing the family as a site of political struggle and as a basis for mobilization in immigrant communities.

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Family Consequences of Children’s Disabilities

Denis P. Hogan

Russell Sage Foundation, 2012

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other national policies are designed to ensure the greatest possible inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of American life. But as a matter of national policy we still place the lion's share of responsibility for raising children with disabilities on their families. While this strategy largely works, sociologist Dennis Hogan maintains, the reality is that family financial security, the parents' relationship, and the needs of other children in the home all can be stretched to the limit. In Family Consequences of Children's Disabilities Hogan delves inside the experiences of these families and examines the financial and emotional costs of raising a child with a disability. The book examines the challenges families of children with disabilities encounter and how these challenges impact family life. The first comprehensive account of the families of children with disabilities, Family Consequences of Children's Disabilities employs data culled from seven national surveys and interviews with twenty-four mothers of children with disabilities, asking them questions about their family life, social supports, and how other children in the home were faring. Not surprisingly, Hogan finds that couples who are together when their child is born have a higher likelihood of divorcing than other parents do. The potential for financial insecurity contributes to this anxiety, especially as many parents must strike a careful balance between employment and caregiving. Mothers are less likely to have paid employment, and the financial burden on single parents can be devastating. One-third of children with disabilities live in single-parent households, and nearly 30 percent of families raising a child with a disability live in poverty. Because of the high levels of stress these families incur, support networks are crucial. Grandparents are often a source of support. Siblings can also assist with personal care and, consequently, tend to develop more helpful attitudes, be more inclusive of others, and be more tolerant. But these siblings are at risk for their own health problems: they are three times more likely to experience poor health than children in homes where there is no child with a disability. Yet this book also shows that raising a child with a disability includes unexpected rewards—the families tend to be closer, and they engage in more shared activities such as games, television, and meals. Family Consequences of Children's Disabilities offers access to a world many never see or prefer to ignore. The book provides vital information on effective treatment, rehabilitation, and enablement to medical professionals, educators, social workers, and lawmakers. This compelling book demonstrates that every mirror has two faces: raising a child with a disability can be difficult, but it can also offer expanded understanding. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology

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Family Life and School Achievement

Why Poor Black Children Succeed or Fail

Reginald M. Clark

University of Chicago Press, 1984

Working mothers, broken homes, poverty, racial or ethnic background, poorly educated parents—these are the usual reasons given for the academic problems of poor urban children. Reginald M. Clark contends, however, that such structural characteristics of families neither predict nor explain the wide variation in academic achievement among children. He emphasizes instead the total family life, stating that the most important indicators of academic potential are embedded in family culture.

To support his contentions, Clark offers ten intimate portraits of Black families in Chicago. Visiting the homes of poor one- and two-parent families of high and low achievers, Clark made detailed observations on the quality of home life, noting how family habits and interactions affect school success and what characteristics of family life provide children with "school survival skills," a complex of behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge that are the essential elements in academic success.

Clark's conclusions lead to exciting implications for educational policy. If school achievement is not dependent on family structure or income, parents can learn to inculcate school survival skills in their children. Clark offers specific suggestions and strategies for use by teachers, parents, school administrators, and social service policy makers, but his work will also find an audience in urban anthropology, family studies, and Black studies.

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Family Matters in the British and American Novel

Andrea O’Reilly Herrera

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

Contributors examine the literature that challenges widely held assumptions about the form of the family, familial authority patterns, and the function of courtship, marriage, and family life from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Topics include: the family as a microcosm of the larger political sphere in Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Elizabeth Fenwick, Mrs. Opie, and Mary Shelley, and alternatives to the nuclear patriarchal family in Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Mary Louisa Molesworth.

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Family Secrets

Risking Reproduction in Central Mozambique

Rachel R. Chapman

Vanderbilt University Press, 2010

Behind a thatched hut, a birthing woman bleeds to death only minutes from "life-saving" maternity care. Author Rachel Chapman begins Family Secrets with the deceptively simple question, "Why don't women in Mozambique use existing prenatal and maternity services?" then widens her analysis to include a whole universe of cultural, political, and economic forces. Fusing cultural anthropology with political economy, Chapman vividly demonstrates how neoliberalism and the increasing importance of the market have led to changing sexual and reproductive strategies for women.

Pregnant herself during her research, Chapman interviewed 83 women during pregnancy and postpartum. She discovered that the social relations surrounding traditional Shona practices, Christian faith healing, and Western biomedical treatments are as important to women's choices as the efficacy of the therapies.

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Family Ties

John R. Logan and Glenna D. Spitze

Temple University Press, 1997

While many studies focus on the impact of social change on younger generations, FGamily Ties deals comprehensively with family relationships over a longer period of the life cycle and reveals misconceptions about grown children caring for their aging parents. Glenna D. Spitze and John R. Logan offer conclusive evidence that relationships between parents and their adult children remain intact and challenge other myths of isolation and neglect of the older generation.

The authors reveal that parents are not dependent on help from their grown children, as was previously assumed; in fact they contribute more assistance than they receive until the age of seventy-five. Also, while daughters are still the dominant caregivers, other forms of support like visiting and providing transportation are given almost equally by sons and daughters.

Logan and Spitze also report that even though the day-to-day demands on adult children have increased with the changing economy, very few seem to be torn between these responsibilities and those those of caring for their parents. This book offers reassuring news about the strength of the American family in the midst of social change. Family Ties will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in intergenerational relationships in adulthood.

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Family Trouble

Middle-Class Parents, Children's Problems, and the Disruption of Everyday Life

Francis, Ara

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Our children mean the world to us. They are so central to our hopes and dreams that we will do almost anything to keep them healthy, happy, and safe. What happens, then, when a child has serious problems? In Family Trouble, a compelling portrait of upheaval in family life, sociologist Ara Francis tells the stories of middle-class men and women whose children face significant medical, psychological, and social challenges.

Francis interviewed the mothers and fathers of children with such problems as depression, bi-polar disorder, autism, learning disabilities, drug addiction, alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome, and cerebral palsy. Children’s problems, she finds, profoundly upset the foundations of parents’ everyday lives, overturning taken-for-granted expectations, daily routines, and personal relationships. Indeed, these problems initiated a chain of disruption that moved through parents’ lives in domino-like fashion, culminating in a crisis characterized by uncertainty, loneliness, guilt, grief, and anxiety. Francis looks at how mothers and fathers often differ in their interpretation of a child’s condition, discusses the gendered nature of child rearing, and describes how parents struggle to find effective treatments and to successfully navigate medical and educational bureaucracies. But above all, Family Trouble examines how children’s problems disrupt middle-class dreams of the “normal” family. It captures how children’s problems “radiate” and spill over into other areas of parents’ lives, wreaking havoc even on their identities, leading them to reevaluate deeply held assumptions about their own sense of self and what it means to achieve the good life.

Engagingly written, Family Trouble offers insight to professionals and solace to parents. The book offers a clear message to anyone in the throes of family trouble: you are in good company, and you are not as different as you might feel...

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Family and Disability Activism

Beyond Allies and Obstacles

Edited by Pamela Block, Allison C. Carey, and Richard K. Scotch

Temple University Press, 2025

In 2020, Pamela Block, Allison C. Carey, and Richard K. Scotch published Allies and Obstacles, which examined the tensions and connections between disability activism and parents of children with disabilities. In Family and Disability Activism, they continue to examine these issues with a focus on the path-breaking advocacy by marginalized activists with intersectional lived experiences.

Family and Disability Activism reveals how families and disabled people who identify as BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA2S+ understand issues of rights versus justice. Contributions by Deaf and disabled activists emphasize the frequent need for either care or independence. Other chapters show how members of the disabled community and their families must navigate systemic issues of segregation, institutionalization, and access to special education services differently depending on their ethnic and racial identities.

Expanding the conversation about disability, kinship, biological and chosen families, and activism, this volume amplifies important voices in the fight for disability rights.

Contributors: Erin Compton, Diane Compton, Jaclyn Ellis, Laura LeBrun Hatcher, Elena Hung, Bridget Liang, Jenelle Rouse, Cheryl Najarian Souza, Jeneva Stone, Roger A. Stone, Lisette E. Torres, Grace Tsao, and the editors

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Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography

Tamara M. Brown

Temple University Press, 2013

Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography exposes the intimate relationship between ethnographers as both family members and researchers. The contributors to this exciting volume question and problematize the “artificial divide” between work and family that continues to permeate writing on ethnographic field work as social scientists try to juggle research and family tensions while “on the job.”

Essays relate experiences that mirror work-family dilemmas that all employed parents face, and show how deeply personal experiences affect social scientists’ home life and their studies. Bringing together voices of various family members—pregnant women, mothers, fathers, and children—Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography demonstrates how the mixture of work and family in this particular occupation has raised questions—both practical and theoretical—that relate to race, class, and gender.

Contributors include: Chris Bobel, Erynn Masi de Casanova, Randol Contreras, C. Aiden Downey, Tanya Golash-Boza, Steven Gold, Sherri Grasmuck, Barbara Katz Rothman,

Jennifer Reich, Leah Schmalzbauer, Gregory Smithsimon, and the editors.

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Family in the Time of COVID

International Perspectives

Edited by Katherine Twamley, Humera Iqbal, and Charlotte Faircloth

University College London, 2023

A global study of the effect of COVID-19 on families.

COVID-19 turned the world as we knew it upside down, impacting families around the world in profound ways. Seeking to understand this global experience, Family in the Time of COVID brings together case studies from ten countries across the world that explore how local responses to the pandemic shaped and were shaped by understandings and practices of family life.

Carried out by an international team during the first year of the pandemic, these in-depth, longitudinal, qualitative investigations examined the impact of the pandemic on families and relationships across diverse contexts and cultures. They looked at how families made sense of complex lockdown laws, how they coped with collective worry about the unknown, managed their finances, fed themselves, and got to grips with online work and schooling to understand better how life had transformed (or not). In short, the research revealed their everyday joys and struggles in times of great uncertainty.

Each case study follows the same methodology revealing experiences in Argentina, Chile, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They show how local government responses were understood and responded to by families and how different cultures and life circumstances impacted everyday life during the pandemic. Ultimately the analysis demonstrates how experiences of global social upheaval are shaped by international and local policies, as well as the sociocultural ideas and practices of diverse families.

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Famine Foods

Plants We Eat to Survive

Paul E. Minnis

University of Arizona Press, 2021

How people eat today is a record of food use through the ages—and not just the decadent, delicious foods but the less glamorous and often life-saving foods from periods of famine as well. In Famine Foods, Paul E. Minnis focuses on the myriad plants that have sustained human populations throughout the course of history, unveiling the those that people have consumed, and often still consume, to avoid starvation. For the first time, this book offers a fascinating overview of famine foods—how they are used, who uses them, and, perhaps most importantly, why they may be critical to sustain human life in the future.

In addition to a broader discussion of famine foods, Minnis includes fourteen short case studies that examine the use of alternative foods in human societies throughout the world, from hunter-gatherers to major nations. When environmental catastrophes, war, corrupt governments, annual hunger seasons, and radical agricultural policies have threatened to starve populations, cultural knowledge and memories of food shortages have been crucial to the survival of millions of people.Famine Foods dives deeply into the cultural contexts of famine food use, showing the curious, strange, and often unpleasant foods people have turned to in order to get by. There is not a single society or area of the world that is immune to severe food shortages, and gaining a deeper knowledge of famine foods will be relevant for the foreseeable future of humanity.

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Famine Pots

The Choctaw–Irish Gift Exchange, 1847–Present

LeAnne Howe

Michigan State University Press, 2020

The remarkable story of the money sent by the Choctaw to the Irish in 1847 is one that is often told and remembered by people in both nations. This gift was sent to the Irish from the Choctaw at the height of the potato famine in Ireland, just sixteen years after the Choctaw began their march on the Trail of Tears toward the areas west of the Mississippi River. Famine Pots honors that extraordinary gift and provides further context about and consideration of this powerful symbol of cross-cultural synergy through a collection of essays and poems that speak volumes of the empathy and connectivity between the two communities. As well as signaling patterns of movement and exchange, this study of the gift exchange invites reflection on processes of cultural formation within Choctaw and Irish society alike, and sheds light on longtime concerns surrounding spiritual and social identities. This volume aims to facilitate a fuller understanding of the historical complexities that surrounded migration and movement in the colonial world, which in turn will help lead to a more constructive consideration of the ways in which Irish and Native American Studies might be drawn together today.

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Famine in the Remaking

Food System Change and Mass Starvation in Hawaii, Madagascar, and Cambodia

Stian Rice

West Virginia University Press, 2020

Mass starvation’s causes may seem simple and immediate: crop failure, poverty, outbreaks of violence, and poor governance. But famines are complex, and scholars cannot fully understand what causes them unless they look at their numerous social and environmental precursors over long arcs of history and over long distances.
Famine in the Remaking examines the relationship between the reorganization of food systems and large-scale food crises through a comparative historical analysis of three famines: Hawaii in the 1820s, Madagascar in the 1920s, and Cambodia in the 1970s. This examination identifies the structural transformations—that is, changes to the relationships between producers and consumers—that make food systems more vulnerable to failure. Moving beyond the economic and political explanations for food crisis that have dominated the literature, Stian Rice emphasizes important socioecological interactions, developing a framework for crisis evolution that identifies two distinct temporal phases and five different types of causal mechanisms involved in food system failure. His framework contributes to current work in famine prevention and, animated by a commitment to social justice, offers the potential for early intervention in emerging food crises.

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Famous Last Words

An Anthology

Edited by Claire Cock-Starkey

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016

Which statesman was, by the end, “bored with it all?” Which world-renowned economist considered on his deathbed whether he ought to have been less abstemious, saying “I should have drunk more champagne.” Did Admiral Horatio Nelson, one of England’s greatest naval heroes, really utter “Kiss me, Hardy” to his captain just before his death in the Battle of Trafalgar?

Over the years, family and loved ones have recorded an extraordinary number of famous last words, from kings and queens to politicians, philosophers, scientists, writers, and actors. These exit lines can impart keen insights from an extraordinary life, reveal a sense of humor indomitable in even the darkest hours, or tell us something about a celebrated person’s last moments of life. Perhaps unavoidably given their provenance, many last words have proven irresistible to embellishment or remain in question. King Charles II, for example, was said to have instructed his brothers to “let not Poor Nelly starve,” asking that his favorite mistress be provided a pension of 1,500 pounds a year. Although she did indeed receive said pension, some contend that Charles’s actual last words, following a long period of illness, were, “You must pardon me, gentlemen, for being a most unconscionable time a-dying.”

For Famous Last Words, Claire Cock-Starkey has collected the most interesting, insightful, and controversial last words, from deathbed desperation to the fondest of farewells.

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Famous Long Ago

My Life and Hard Times with Liberation News Service

Raymond Mungo

University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

Originally published in 1970, Raymond Mungo's picaresque account of his adventures with Liberation News Service in the wild years of 1967 and 1968 has been variously described as youthful, passionate, lyrical, demented, and an iconic symbol of the sixties counterculture. A review in The Nation described it as “hip Huck Finn.”

A college editor at the height of the Vietnam War, Mungo found himself smack in the middle of a mad swirl of activism and dissent, vigorously protesting everything from the draft to abortion laws to the university itself. Then he connected with Marshall Bloom to cofound LNS in Washington, D.C., as a news service catering to the burgeoning underground press. One thing led to another, until LNS, like so many other radical organizations, eventually disintegrated into violently warring factions. Mungo's memoir tracks its development and destruction with wicked humor and literary panache.

In an introduction to this new edition, John McMillian discusses the enduring appeal of Famous Long Ago and situates it within its broader historical context, while the author provides his own retrospective take in a new afterword.

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