Books
Win a copy of Food Waste by David Evans
Food Waste: Home consumption, material culture and everyday life In recent years, food waste has risen to the top of the political and public agenda, yet until now there has been no scholarly analysis applied to the topic as a complement and counter-balance to campaigning and activist approaches. Using ethnographic […]
43. Carol Smart and researching personal life
The Sociology of Personal Life deals with a cluster of loosely related and overlapping themes such as, family, kinship, friendship, sexualities, acquaintanceship, generations and consumption. It develops earlier sociological research on ‘the family’, which tended to focus on traditional, and narrow, ideas of who counts as ‘family. And it adds […]
34. Displaying families
Janet Finch launched the concept of  ‘Displaying families’ in her seminal article of the same name, published in Sociology in 2007. The concept extends David Morgan’s original argument about ‘doing family’, that: ‘families need to be ‘displayed’ as well as ‘done’. It also builds on work by Carol Smart and Jennifer […]
Sociology of Personal Life
Edited by Vanessa May (2011) What can sociology tell us about our personal lives, families and intimate relationships? This book explains how key theoretical perspectives and relevant contemporary research in the discipline can shed new light on even the most familiar areas of our everyday worlds. Sociology of Personal Life, together […]
Connecting Self to Society: Belonging in a Changing World
Vanessa May (2013) Belonging forms the bedrock of how we relate to the world around us, yet its relationship to society and social change is often overlooked. How do we explain that connection between self and society? How do our friendships and relationships shape our sense of belonging? Why does […]
Rethinking Family Practices
David H J Morgan (2011) David Morgan’s ‘family practices’ approach has been hugely influential to the study of families and personal life internationally. First developed in the 1990s, and set out in Family Connections (1996), this new book revisits and elaborates the original argument, exploring the theoretical antecedents of this […]
Acquaintances: The Space Between Intimates and Strangers
David Morgan (2009)Â The distinction between friends and acquaintances is often made in everyday conversation but the significance of the distinction is under-explored. Acquaintanceship can be understood as a form of knowledge of other people that lies somewhere between intimates and strangers. This book argues that acquaintanceship is a topic […]