Family and Space

Rethinking Family Theory and Empirical Approaches

Maya Halatcheva-Trapp, Giulia Montanari, Tino Schlinzig, Maya Halatcheva-Trapp, Giulia Montanari, Tino Schlinzig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351017930
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

While the 'spatial turn' within the social sciences has already nurtured a broad discussion of the relation between society and space, little attention has so far been paid to the question of what we can learn about families when exploring space in its different facets. This book brings together international authors from the fields of sociology, human geography, and anthropology to support the development of space-sensitive and de-territorialised perspectives on the family that reach beyond classical concepts such as the 'household' or the 'nuclear family'. With close attention to the implications of differing relations to space for the social fabric of families, it presents studies of theoretical, methodological, and empirical aspects of late-modern family life. Examining the meaning of absence and presence for parenting, the aesthetic, and sensual dimensions of everyday family life, and its digital and media-related features aspects, Family and Space considers the value of a range of approaches to researching the spatial elements of family life, including ethnographic accounts, interviews, group discussions, mobile methods, and network analyses.

1 Introduction

Rethinking family and space in mobile times

Maya Halatcheva-Trapp, Giulia Montanari and Tino Schlinzig

‘The modern individual is, above all else, a mobile human being’, Richard Sennett claims in his 1994 book Flesh and Stone (p. 255f.) – at that time this still meant moving from one locality to another in a rather physical sense. More than 20 years later mobility has changed and even expanded from physical means to others including the virtual and imagined (see Büscher and Urry, 2009). These are parts of an accelerating transformation process of societies adapting to the current use of new transport systems, telecommunications, and information media that convey what Harvey (1989) described as ‘time-space compression’.

The present volume itself can be read as a witness to this core idea. It was compiled in a social space beyond, between, and in changing geographical places. The main editorial work has been done between the German cities of Berlin, Dortmund, Dresden, and Munich as well as Burgas/Bulgaria, Puebla/Mexico, and Zurich/Switzerland. As editors, we have almost never been in the same place and thus physically co-present when working on the book project. At the same time, we were intensively virtually co-present and connected in a ‘polymedia environment’ (see Madianou and Miller, 2012; Baldassar, 2008; Licoppe, 2004), using information and communication technologies (ICT) such as email, video conferencing via instant messenger, and cloud storage platforms. This enabled us to transcend physical space and build up a network of colleagues spanning different localities to contribute to the umbrella topic of Family and Space with current research and theoretical considerations. Just as everyone’s everyday life stretches between different places of work and private life, our collaboration was also organised multi-locally in the sense of being located, working, and living in more than one place and being repeatedly and simultaneously mobile between them (see Hilti, 2016, p. 468). That only three people are to be found in such numerous and international places is the result of complex and demanding processes of negotiating personal relationships, family, and work in times of increasingly required (if not enforced) and desired spatial flexibility. Changing and diversifying mobility, space/place-making processes, and ICT-mediated practices represent a selection of aspects that come to the fore when focusing the manifold topic of family and space. This will be part of what this book is about.

When reflecting on all this, we have been able to build on rich exchanges with our colleagues from the Schumpeter project group ‘Multi-locality of family: The management of family life under spatial separation’, supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, at the German Youth Institute (DJI) in Munich, as well as the influential works of the invited authors, with whom the members of the group have already collaborated. The book will showcase the current state of research and discussions presented at two international workshops organised by the research group: ‘The Everyday Life of Multi-local Families: Concepts, Methods and the Example of Post-Separation Families’ in 2011 and ‘Family – Space – Identity: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches after the Spatial Turn’ in 2016. However, with this volume we aim to go one step further. This book shall contribute to the latest discourse on different lines of studies after the spatial turn that vary not only in respect to the applied and developed concepts of space, co-presence, and family life, but it also aims to grasp a broad spectrum of theoretical and methodological approaches that can be found in the research fields of disciplines as sociology, geography, and cultural anthropology.

Bringing space into the fore of family studies

Space as a category within social theory is nothing new; rather, it seems appropriate to think of a long-lasting and recurring space forgottenness within sociology (Schroer, 2006). In fact, space has repeatedly stimulated sometimes heated discussions within sociological discourse and the social sciences in general. As Warf and Arias (2008) illustrate, the so-called ‘spatial turn’ has come in waves. It began with the Chicago School in the 1920s, which introduced the physical environment as a relevant social category. Lefebvre and Foucault opened up the discussion of the production of space in the 1960s, which was followed by the addition of David Harvey’s Marxist-geographical approach. The geographer Edward Soja developed this account further with his ‘thirdspace’ concept. From the 1990s on, Manuel Castells introduced the ‘spaces of flows’ (Warf and Arias, 2008, p. 3). Ultimately, German sociologist Martina Löw proposed a sociology of space on the basis of Giddens’ practice-theory account. Here, space is viewed as structuring the social as well being constantly socially produced (Löw, 2016). In reviewing the accounts of sociological classics such as Norbert Elias, Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, Niklas Luhmann, Michel Foucault, and Henri Lefebvre, alongside the geographical perspectives of Doreen Massey and David Harvey, she brings together the already existing sociological discussion – which goes far beyond an essentialistic concept of space as a mere physical substrate, preceding the social – and focusses on the manifold cognitive, social, and cultural processes of (re)production of space (Löw, 2016, p. 105ff.). A similar approach was followed by Markus Schroer, who also stresses the necessity of taking the multilevel character and plurality of spatial relationships into consideration, and who takes thorough account of the dimension of time (Schroer, 2006).

While the ‘spatial turn’ within the social sciences has already given rise to a broad discussion on the relation between society and space, little attention has been paid to the question of what we can learn about families from exploring space in its different facets. This is despite the fact that empirical findings hint at a different social relation to space (Löw, 2016, p. 55ff.; Warf and Arias, 2008, p. 4ff.) – or as Löw put it, a ‘changing practice of the organization of proximity’ (Löw, 2016, p. 226): one that brings with it consequences for the social fabric of families. For instance, socioeconomic changes are inducing differentiated mobility patterns in the everyday lives of families. Higher divorce and separation rates, as well as employment conditions that demand higher physical as well as temporal flexibility, account in part for these developments. Furthermore, society’s renegotiation of the relation between private and public spaces, stimulated by new technological developments, also contributes to a complex social environment that reflects on, and is reflected within, families.

It is salient that most contributions to date neglect the multifaceted phenomenon of spatially dispersed family arrangements, aiming at both the practical implications of family life beyond multiple households and issues concerned with the construction of personal and group identity from the children’s and parents’ perspectives. However, there is a noticeable tendency towards bringing both categories together to encompass the current transformations in the notion of family, primarily through migration processes in the course of war and expulsion and economic constraints, the increase in multi-local family arrangements after separation and divorce, higher mobility demands in the context of employment, and the growing labour force participation of women. The long-established connection between family and household in sociological theory and research needs to be reconsidered, and also recognised within teachings in sociology, geography, and anthropology. The present book aims to make a substantial contribution in this regard by intensifying the discourse in this interdisciplinary research field.

There is an extensive corpus of literature within a broad field of family and space – focusing both on theoretical considerations as well as empirical studies (see e.g. Grassi and Ferreira, 2016; Kilkey and Palenga-Moolenbeck, 2016; Brannen, 2015; Vanderbeck and Worth, 2015; Baldassar and Merla, 2014; Holdsworth, 2013; Madianou and Miller, 2012; Rytter and Olwig, 2011; Hallmann 2010). The above-listed books place the relationship of family and space mainly within the framework of transnational migration, examining globalisation processes and their impact on intergenerational family life. Space is presumed to be an analytical category, but is not systematically questioned and theorised. All follow a rather open idea of space as relational, which seems to be the state of the art conception that still lacks a more profound discussion (Löw, 2016, p. viii). Family and space tend to be viewed in isolation and space is considered to be something peripheral to the family and/or to affect family life from the outside. Space and place, a well-established conceptual couple, at least within geography (see e.g. Hallmann, 2010; Warf and Arias, 2008, p. 2), serve as an object of study rather than a theoretical category when tackling themes such as migration and mobility (Baldassar and Merla, 2014; Holdsworth, 2013; Kilkey and Palerga-Moolenbeck, 2016), family places like the zoo or home (Hallman, 2010), mediated communication (Madianou and Miller, 2012), or sites of intergenerational encounter (Vanderbeck and Worth, 2015). Contributions like Hallman’s, which specifically aimed at the connection between family and space, opened up this broad field of family, also hoping for a deeper understanding of its linkage that reaches beyond disciplinary boundaries: ‘There will also need to be new theories applied, new concepts tested, and applications of new methodologies, as well as productive collaboration between geographers and researchers in cognate fields such as nursing, sociology, gerontology, native studies, and anthropology, to name but a few, for a more mature family-geographies scholarship to develop.’ (Hallmann, 2010, p. 222).

The present volume

Our book presents various perspectives and current developments. The contributions are not limited to the presentation of empirical research, as they also discuss theoretical and methodological approaches to the sociological analysis and understanding of the manifold phenomena in the context of family and space. In consequence, the book suggests an integrative view of family and space not as isolated but interwoven categories. What we are not aiming for, though, is to propose a specific view on what space is ontologically – such as Löw’s proposed Giddens-related reading of space as a duality that includes the production of space as well as space as the condition of social action (Löw, 2016, e.g. pp. vii/xiv). In our final remarks in the last chapter of the book, we will instead examine more closely the different thematic and conceptual views on space and family that the contributions reflect.

In this way we pursue a high level of abstraction on the one hand, and on the other a differentiated picture of the social reality of contemporary family life. Thus, our anthology addresses all analytical levels – theoretical, conceptual, methodical, and empirical. It underlines the synergetic slurring of theory development and empirical research for the production of sociological knowledge and opens up new questions for future research.

The book Family and Space. Rethinking Family Theory and Empirical Approaches brings together international authors from the fields of sociology, human geography, and sociocultural anthropology to support the development of space-sensitive and de-territorialised perspectives that reach beyond predominant concepts such as the ‘household’ or the ‘nuclear family’. The book tackles theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and methodological aspects of late-modern family life. While co-presence is a conceptual aspect of space that will be investigated more deeply in several contributions, aesthetic and sensory dimensions in everyday family life, media, and digital aspects are further topics of discussion. The project explores the conceptual value of approaches such as discourse and communication theory, the interpretative paradigm, practice theory, and the sociology of knowledge, and examines methodological questions of different empirical methods such as ethnographic accounts, interviews, group discussions, mobile methods, and network analyses.

In the course of this, we aim for good reason to go beyond the disciplinary boundaries of sociology, as the series in which the book appears at first glance recommends. In essence, the resultant epistemological question is how can new scientific knowledge be achieved if the research subject, with its many dimensions, also challenges disciplinary boundaries? Although we are far from trivialising the manifold challenges of interdisciplinary exchanges, such as in terms of terminology and methodology, we suggest looking beyond disciplinary borders and aim to align endeavours with the common subject, knowing this means charging at an already opening door. While preparing this publication we cooperated across diverse fields of research and combined discussion on space, a core category of social geography in particular, with theoretical and empirical findings on family, with its long tradition from sociology. Our experience of conjoining these partly overlapping categories demonstrates that cultural anthropology can be brought together fruitfully and advance the respective research work.

The chapters in the book will be structured into three main chapters, framed by this introduction and a concluding contribution.

Part I – Understanding family and space: Theories and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the authors
• 1 Introduction: Rethinking family and space in mobile times
• PART I Understanding family and space
• PART II Space-sensitive research on family and identity
• PART III Space in family – family in space
• Index