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Abstracts & Papers
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Frank Furedi Helen Reece Sociologists and other commentators have identified a trend towards the therapeutic in contemporary society. They have included legal developments within this trend, for example compensation culture, and therapeutic justice. So far, this analysis has tended to focus on legal process as opposed to legal content. However, the trend towards the therapeutic also casts light on changes in legal content. In this paper, I take the specific example of parental responsibility orders and show that the grounds on which such orders are made has shifted from being about decision-making power to being about the parties’ feelings and emotions. This is an unusual (if not unique) example of an order for a status being granted specifically to make the applicant ‘feel good’, and is an indication of the extent to which the law has become therapeutised. The paper presented is currently in press: Gayle Letherby Link to AV recordings Mary Ann Kanieski This paper analyzes the process in which mothers’ emotions became an object of scientific investigation and intervention. By tracing the medical and psychological research literature on mothers’ love, this paper identifies the rhetorical strategies used by researchers to medicalise mothers’ emotions. Medicalisers viewed mothers’ love as essential to children’s wellbeing. Maternal love was constructed as threatened by changing women’s roles, the isolated nuclear family, and the growth of individualism. The research on maternal emotion individualized social problems and promoted greater scrutiny of mothers’ behaviour. Link to AV recordings Ciara Doyle In this seminar I will be exploring representations of grandmothers and other kin in TV parenting programmes. Grandmothers exist just one step outside the nuclear family. They could therefore more accurately be described as kin, or existing within kinship networks, that existing in ‘The Family’. As such, the presence of a Grandmother in a family home can, theoretically, act as a disrupter and threat to strict interpretations and definitions of the family based on modern nuclear family ideals. In this paper I will be arguing that within Reality Television Parenting Programmes this is exactly what happens, and results in a presentation of grandmothers in passive and negative terms only, the most dominant two being Grandmother as interfering but incompetent and Grandmother as helpless victim. Link to AV recordings Janice McLaughlin Parents of disabled children experience an intensification of what is expected of them as parents. They do so in a context where social responses to disability mean that they are stepping outside ‘normal’ narratives of family; where they are far more embedded in medical practices that sustain their child’s life; and where, in the UK, welfare provision is directed towards parental responsibility for care. The question is whether the additional care needs of children with disabilities should be seen as simply additional components to the parental portfolio of care responsibilities? Parents can experience the role of being intensive carers as different from what they expect parenting to be. This paper, based on a 3 year ESRC ethnographic study working with families in two locations in the UK, investigates the ways in which parents of disabled babies and infants explore their changing experiences of caring and parenting and the distinctions they draw between the two. The paper, by its focus on disability, contributes to discussions of what is framed as parenting and what is framed as caring in everyday settings of shattered public/private boundaries, the presence of medical technology and ‘different’ narratives of family. This is put in a political context where the paper considers the implications for how we think about what place care has within citizenship. At one level the caring role parents – most often mothers – are expected to provide suggests a gendered privatisation of care and a minimisation of care within welfare citizenship. At another level the participation of parents – most often mothers – in challenging the privatisation of care and the modes of care they receive through public sector provision suggests a politicisation of care, which requires a presence in welfare citizenship debates Link to AV recordings Maud Perrier This paper is based on qualitative interviews with younger and older mothers and examines how they construct and present themselves as good mothers in relation to dominant discourses of good motherhood. Here I will focus on presenting my analysis of how mothers’ moral maternal selves are articulated across interconnected sites of difference such as class, gender, age at first birth and employment. My investigation of the moral work undertaken by mothers looks at their comparisons with other mothers, their experiences of ‘shared’ parenting and of combining mothering with paid work. Drawing on feminist research of family life and motherhood which has already highlighted the importance of the moral, I develop this argument further through my empirical findings to show that mothers’ moral positionings are constituted through, and shaped by, intersecting differences of, amongst others, age and class. For example I discuss how moral mothering selves are nearly always constituted by mothers in relation to an ‘other’, often a gendered, aged or classed other. Moreover, I also show that whilst the moral script of putting children’s needs first (Ribbens et al, 2000) is central in mothers’ narratives and continues to be a fundamental requirement for good moral motherhood, the intensification of mothering has further extended the moral terrain of good mothering. Thus the interconnections between changing discourses of good mothering and how mothers draw on and negotiate these discourses to construct their moral selves are explored. My research points to both the unchallenged and absolute status of ‘putting children’s first’ as a moral imperative for mothers and to the emergence of a new moral script, articulated through an intensive and child-focused mothering ideology. In conclusion I emphasize the importance of developing a critique of intensive mothering which highlights the renewed significance of mothering as a key site for the construction and (re)production of classed moral selves. Link to AV recordings Jan Macvarish |
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