How Families Matter by Pamela Braboy Jackson and Rashawn Ray explores the ways adults make sense of their family lives in the midst of the complicated debates generated by politicians and social scientists.
| Publisher | Lexington Books |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 9781498522564 |
| Year | 2018 |
| Pages | 144 |
| Format |
How Families Matter by Pamela Braboy Jackson and Rashawn Ray explores the complex ways that adults experience and define family life in contemporary American society, especially at the intersections of race, gender, and work. The book challenges simplistic public and academic debates about families by centering the perspectives of families themselves, rather than imposing abstract definitions or policy assumptions.
Drawing on qualitative stories from a racially and ethnically diverse sample of 46 families, the authors examine how family identity is shaped through everyday interactions and negotiations between parents, siblings, and extended kin. These narratives reveal that family members actively construct what counts as “family” in their own lives, responding to cultural expectations, structural inequalities, and personal needs.
Overall, the book shows that families are simultaneously simple and complicated: they reflect intimate personal commitments while also being deeply shaped by race, gender expectations, and labor patterns in American society. By weaving theoretical insights with rich first-person accounts, Jackson and Ray offer a nuanced, multicultural understanding of what family means in the modern era.
“The family remains a major social institution, primarily responsible for the replacement and socialization of future generations. Families transmit important cultural values, nurture relationships through collective decision-making, assist in identity development across the individual life course, and serve as vital sources of social support, often providing care for sick relatives. Some family members act as role models whose influence promotes the academic success and social mobility patterns of other members of the family. At a basic (micro-) level most of us have the experience of living in a family and it is this experience that connects us to each other. Even so, the definition of family and its status in American society remains a point of contestation among several stakeholders. Some voices, however, are louder than others.
Politicians seem to dominate the public forum on the family, not just defining the boundaries for who is family but also proclaiming that the family is in turmoil. In 1992 then vice president J. Dan Quayle publicly indicted the sitcom Murphy Brown for showing the main character having a child out of wedlock. According to Quayle and others, the show was promoting nontraditional family forms and subsequently destroying traditional family values[…]”
| Title | How Families Matter |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work |
| Autor | Pamela Braboy Jackson and Rashawn Ray |
| Publisher | Lexington Books |
| Year | 2018 |
| Pages | 144 |
| Country | United States of America |
| ISBN | 9781498522564 |
| Format | |
| Filesize | 1.8 MB |
| URL | Pamela Braboy Jackson and Rashawn Ray How Families Matter PDF |
