Family and Space: Rethinking Family Theory and Empirical Approaches

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.

Maya Halatcheva-Trapp is a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Educational Science, Psychology and Sociology at TU Dortmund University, Germany.

Giulia Montanari is an independent researcher based in Munich, Germany and Puebla, Mexico.

Tino Schlinzig is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Technische Universitat Dresden, Germany.