Browse

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 1,766 items for :

  • Migration and Immigration x
Clear All

To explore the complexity of household living conditions and their relation to electricity consumption, the socio-technical constellations they create for themselves and the perceived ease of saving electricity, we conducted a clustering analysis to categorise Norwegian participants in an electricity-saving programme based on environmental concerns, personal norms and socio-economic parameters. We also explored if the household clusters differed in perceived risk of energy poverty. A sample of 1,135 Norwegians participated in the study in 2023. A two-step cluster analysis resulted in five distinct clusters which we named: (1) older couples with moderate environmental concern; (2) eco-ease in midlife; (3) middle-aged females in medium-sized households; (4) growing families with moderate concerns; and (5) moderate advocates with adolescents. Analysis of variance indicated significant variations in mean scores of environmental concerns, access to energy appliances and perceived behavioural control implement energy-saving tips across clusters (p<0.01), but no difference in perceived risk of energy poverty. The results show that changes in the living situation, especially children moving out, seems to have strong effects on per capita electricity consumption, if the housing infrastructure is not adapted to the new family size. Lower environmental concern particularly impacts electricity consumption negatively in the time after children leave the household, and the same can be concluded for gender roles with females being more motivated to save electricity. Based on these results we recommend to more actively support these transitions of living situations, but also support existing sustainable energy use practices or connect electricity saving to other motivations (like supply security) for clusters where environmental concern is low.

Restricted access
Author:

This article uses Erich Fromm’s list of five fundamental human needs discussed in The Sane Society (1955) to critically explore the role of psychological needs and desires in the concerning resurgence of fascist and far-right movements globally and especially in the United States. First, the article addresses the hesitancy expressed by some activists and theorists about engaging psychology in relation to fascism. I critique the view that such psychological inquiry undermines structural critique of society. I demonstrate that unproductive and harmful attempts to meet human needs outlined by Fromm are contributing to fascist resurgence and also to the rise of the ‘fascistic’ mass shooter, who must be understood as both influenced by structural/political dynamics and by the personal attempt to resolve the ‘existential’ problems of human life described by Fromm.

Restricted access
Author:

How can we get at the intimate worlds of families in the past? This article reflects on a methodology of collaborative critical family history as a way to better understand both what families did in the past and how those histories have been constructed and passed on. Through a collaborative project with family historians and research into my own family, this research project involved a different kind of researcher subjectivity. This article considers how we might use concepts of feeling like, feeling with, and feeling for research participants, both living and dead, to write more ethical histories, and to write histories that are inaccessible through conventional archival methodologies.

Restricted access
Author:

This article explores the ways residents of Finnish small-scale communes navigate boundaries between personal separateness and the group’s togetherness within a domestic space. Studies on communal living have shed light on the ambivalence in communal relations, where people choose to live together but simultaneously remain independent from one another. However, the ways space affects their navigations of this ambivalence have not yet been analysed in detail. Based on 31 semi-structured interviews with residents of Finnish small-scale communes, floor plans drawn by interviewees of their homes and two ethnographic fieldwork periods, I argue that navigations of the residents’ separateness and unity are deeply intertwined with spatial processes and that the sensory and embodied spatial connections complicate the possibilities of distinguishing the individual from the group. Communal dwellers navigated their mutual boundaries through their daily use of the spaces, which centred embodied acts, spatial orientations and sensory experiences.

Restricted access

This study explores middle-SES Turkish women’s perceptions of being a good mother within a context-specific version of intensive motherhood and the intercessions of expert advice with their motherly subjectivities through a phenomenological approach. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with three groups of 12 mothers each with children aged 0–6, 7–12 and 13–18, a total of 36 women living in Istanbul. According to findings, middle-SES Turkish mothers, in line with expert advice, shift their prioritisation of the child’s secure attachment to supporting the child’s future chances through education as they grow older. Mothers’ agency out of these concerns is a culturally positioned resource that enables social mobility. However, with the experience of mothering, these concerns are negotiated in everyday life and mothering practices are reflexively (re)constructed in a logic in which the subjective wellbeing of the mother and the child are sought to be brought together. This study argues that these negotiations are tied to increasing experience in mothering and the availability of conflicting expert advice.

Restricted access

Secrets are important for understanding interpersonal and family relationships. They give insights into the dynamics, processes, interactions and bonds that are developed, interrupted or revisited throughout life. We address family secrets as observatories of interpersonal relationships in two ways. One relates to how the disclosed secrets reveal social norms and social changes in family relationships. The second relates to telling an individual or family secret during a research interaction and what ethical issues and practices this disclosure implied. We address these issues through the secrets that emerged from 49 interviews carried out within a family histories research project with 15 Portuguese families. We identified a variety of family secrets related in particular to family and reproduction, money and addiction. The emergence of secrets in the interviewees’ narratives reveals the fundamental role of secrets in attributing meanings to biographies and family histories.

Restricted access
Authors: and

Marital paradigm theory (MPT) asserts that societal and cultural norms and values contribute to marital beliefs. The current research examines a tenet of MPT that marital salience – a belief about the importance of getting married – and marital centrality – a belief about the importance or weight assigned to the spousal role once married – are related but distinct concepts such that individuals can diverge in their endorsement of each (for example, highly endorse one but not the other). Data from an online, anonymous survey of 4,060 emerging adults were used to group participants into a typology of low salience-low centrality, high salience-high centrality, low salience-high centrality, and high salience-low centrality. Groups were compared across background characteristics and marital meaning beliefs. Several patterns of differences among predictors were identified and discussed in the context of how the high salience-low centrality group compared with the other groups. Overall findings were consistent with MPT.

Restricted access

This study examines the childhood care experiences of women between 20 and 30 years of age from low-income households in Santiago, Chile, by employing semi-structured interviews and qualitative analysis. At present, women understand their caregiving roles as older sisters, one which burdened them with agency practices, shaping critical reflections regarding the social organisation of care and influencing their present identity. They also articulate a desire for emotional resilience, a coping mechanism previously observed in low-income neighbourhoods in Chile. While downplaying their caregiving past, they subtly reveal the weight and regret associated with their responsibilities, influencing their reluctance to become mothers in the present. This study underscores the intricate interplay of past care experiences with present decisions, revealing the impacts of empowering discourses on women’s ideals and achievements, and the inherent fragility they carry.

Full Access
Author:

For the descendants of al-Nakba survivors, who have been separated and exiled from their familial homeland in Palestine, memories of life before exile are no longer part of an act of recall, but one inherited and imagined. As seen in the narratives that follow, the memories they inherit from family members are often inflected by nostalgia and a longing for return, which in turn shape their imagined relationship with Palestine and their Palestinian identities. To narrate this ambivalence, young artists practise the traditional craft of Palestinian embroidery, or tatreez. As a result, what originated as a form of communication, passed matrilineally, has evolved to incorporate a new spectrum of voices.

This article examines discourses of Palestinian postmemory in the embroidered motifs of diasporic artists. This research examines how family dynamics and exposure to tatreez are shaped by gender and each family’s postmemory, drawing on online biographies, written autobiographies and social media posts by the artists, it explores what aspects of their families’ histories are remembered by young Palestinians and how these memories are reinterpreted and expressed through contemporary embroidered art. These individuals create art that combines nostalgia, longing, obligation, confusion, pride and commemoration that characterises al-Nakba memory and modern Palestinian identity. Each artist represents the perspectives of the descendants of survivors; they claim their stake in history and do so in ways that push the craft, as well as the identities it represents, in an evolutionary direction.

Restricted access
Authors: and

The article demonstrates how graphic narratives become a medium for managing inherited emotions in Vietnamese American second-generation works, GB Tran’s Vietnamerica and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do. Highlighting the intergenerational transmission of emotions in Vietnamese American families through parental stories about the Vietnam War, the article argues that the authors’ attempts to represent these family stories transform graphic literature into a medium for postmemorial emotion work. While drawing theoretical insights from the sociology of emotions, the study employs textual analysis to thematically close read Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do to understand the graphic strategies that aid emotion work. The graphic recreation of stories, which are narrativised versions of their inherited trauma memories, can offer potential trauma resolution and autobiographical clarity while fostering communal bonding. The analysis finds that in the works, emotion work is facilitated by various literary strategies, such as affective genealogies, affective geographies, affective pasts, and postmemorial re-embodiment. In a broader sense, the study concludes that graphic narrative strategies can aid in postmemorial emotion work for second-generation refugees grappling with inherited trauma, incoherent autobiographical knowledge, and detachment from the community or family.

Restricted access