Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Understanding what ‘family’ means – and how best to support families – depends on challenging politicised assumptions that frame ‘ordinary’ families in comparison to an imagined problematic ‘other’.
Learning from the perspectives of people who were in care in childhood, this innovative book helps redefine the concept of family. Linking two longitudinal studies involving young adults in England, it reveals important new insights into the diverse and dynamic complexity of family lives, identities and practices in time – through childhood and beyond.
Paving the way for future policy and practice, this book makes an important contribution to the theorisation of family in the 21st century.
Chapter 7 concludes the book by drawing together learning from the preceding chapters to consider the value of a sociological lens, and of attention to family practices, for thinking through the conceptualization of family for people who have been in care. The chapter argues that learning about ‘unconventional’ family lives from the perspective of people who are care experienced enriches the theorization of ‘family’ more generally – in terms of understanding family practices, fluidity and continuities, for example. This in turn helps with identifying the implications for the politics, policy and practice of child and family welfare. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the importance of thinking through ‘family’ when working with children in care and with families who encounter public care systems, through childhood and beyond.
Chapter 6 turns to understandings and experiences of parenthood. It begins by focusing on the experiences of participants who are parents (all but one of whom were mothers), including the implications of child removal for understandings of parenthood and family. The chapter considers how participants practise family at-a-distance and how they manage and maintain identities as parents separated from their children, taking account of different permanence, placement and contact arrangements. Finally, this chapter engages with participants’ narratives of future imagined families and the ways in which those are positioned in relation to their past and present experiences, including relationships with partners and children not-yet-born, as well as the potential return of children who are currently in placement.
Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical framework for the book as a whole, introducing the two studies and establishing the critical arguments for thinking beyond a ‘single story’ of the conventional or the ‘troubled’ family. The chapter addresses the underpinning conceptualization of ‘family’, including attention to a family practices conceptual framework, and discusses the importance of thinking beyond childhood in relation to family and interdependence in early adulthoods. The chapter also introduces the wider context for the research in relation to the sociopolitical context of austerity policies in England during the period of the research, considering the implications for family lives, early adulthoods, and for public and political conceptualizations of family and family responsibility.
This chapter reconstructs the process of becoming and being a Polish mother. Analysis of the narratives of women/mothers made it possible to grasp biographical experiences of motherhood and the processes that shape a mother’s identity.
The theoretical basis for this study is symbolic interactionism, and data were collected using the technique of narrative interviewing. The research conducted within the Inclusive Education and Social Support to Tackle Inequalities in Society (ISOTIS) project involved 16 women, differentiated by age, education, number of children, legal marital status and place of residence. The analytical procedure of the narrative-interview method made it possible to distinguish process structures (biographical action schemes, institutional expectation patterns, trajectories of suffering and biographical metamorphoses) through which women’s biographies and motherhood experiences were reconstructed, and presented in the form of five patterns.
The Introduction provides an overview of extant state-of-the-art international biographical research scholarship on mothering. It specifically engages with the book’s principal themes, which both shape and reflect the multidimensionality of mothering in diverse social and cultural contexts, social circumstances and culturally anticipated narratives of idealised motherhoods. It further highlights the complexities of policy-based narratives of mothering and motherhood, which are socially and culturally variable, both in and across time, while underlining contradictions between policy-based understandings of mothering on the one hand and the complexities of women’s everyday lived experiences on the other. Key theoretical and biographical narrative methodological perspectives on mothering are discussed in relation to salient topics – definitions of mothering identities through the prism of biographical research methods – emphasising ethics and the cultural sensitivity of the biographical approach.
What does mothering mean in different cultures and societies? This book extensively applies biographical and narrative research methods to mothering from international perspectives.
This edited collection engages with changing attitudes and approaches to mothering from women’s individual biographical experiences, illuminating how socially anticipated tasks of mothering shaped through interlinking state, media, religious beliefs and broader society are reflected in their identities and individual life choices. Considering trust, rapport, reflexivity and self-care, this collection advances methodological practice in the study of mothers, carers and childless women’s lives.
The chapter is based on a thematic narrative analysis of 25 in-depth biographical interviews conducted with Roma mothers in Czechia in 2018 within the larger scope of the international ISOTIS project (Inclusive Education and Social Support to Tackle Inequalities in Society). The focus of this chapter is on construction of the multiple roles and identities that Czech Roma mothers experience while living in highly marginalised contexts with regard to their ethnic-minority and low-income backgrounds. Their life narratives reveal patterns of mothering in their families of origin; how they became mothers (physically, socially and emotionally); what it means to them to be a mother; and how they reflect on their own socialisation and the imposition of their socialisation on the daughters they raise, assuming that they too will become mothers one day. The various forms of mothering experiences intertwined in their biographical stories are sometimes in line with more traditional family role models, but, at other times, represent Roma women’s complicated efforts to become emancipated from a larger family, poverty and social marginalisation. Their narratives present the symptomatic struggle between traditional expectations and the changing social conditions in which these mothers live.
In this chapter, we focus on the marginalised group of mothers of children with Down syndrome. Applying an intersectional feminist sociological lens, we examine how neoliberalism converges with race, class, gender and ableness to shape experiences of mothering in contemporary Australia. To impact readers in a way that traditional academic writing cannot, we draw upon the scholarship of researchers who advocate for departing from traditional academic conventions in their scholarly work and utilise a crystallisation approach. We crystallise academic and creative writing and present a narrative literature review, six case studies, and a provocative conclusion. Through this methodology, we demonstrate that, despite contending with neoliberal expectations of mothering from medical professionals, family, friends and society, the mothers shared their stories with agency, evocative language, and often humour. Hence, we considered it an ethical imperative that we did not reinforce these hectoring discourses and misrepresent mothers’ experiences by sterilising the emotion in their stories to fit the hegemonic and masculine norms of traditional academic research and writing. Rather, by providing an embodied and affective understanding of neoliberal forces, we show that crystallisation is ideal for reaching beyond academia and redressing the social injustices that these mothers experience.
This qualitative phenomenological study was conducted to understand how social-mothering is perceived and experienced by one mother, drawing on her life biography. Using in-person interviews, the chapter explores the concept of social mothering by focusing on the life narrative of one female informal worker (Melodi) in Nairobi, Kenya, and showing how her social-mothering experiences are embedded within broader personal life trajectories and choices. Melodi’s life narrative is considered within its socio-economic, cultural and historical contexts to prioritise unheard voices and fully understand how social mothering is constructed, shifts and is experienced. Living in an informal urban settlement situates Melodi in spaces of contestation whereby the challenges of social mothering are juxtaposed with her own subjective mothering identity. The life history method enables mapping of co-existing and competing frames, revealing the ontological multiplicity of social mothering. Here, African feminist theory offers an avenue for the articulation of multiple perspectives within which to map and explore the relational worlds of social mothering. These findings on the shifting spaces for social mothering are important for the development of African feminist theory given the uncertainties that mothers continue to face.
