Spring 2005
Family Stories
CLA researchers are creating and sharing new knowledge about families.
M.J. Maynes: Turning Families Inside Out
Ascan Koerner: Negotiating Family Relationships
Phyllis Moen: Life's Obstacle Course
Kathleen Hull: With This Ring: Marrying
Richard Lee: Connecting Cultures
Penny Edgell: Edgell Spreads the Word
Lisa Norling: Searching for Ahab's Wife
Susanne Jones: Messages of Comfort
They’re the Montagues and the Capulets, the Snopeses, and the Lomans. They’re the Cleavers, Bunkers, Simpsons, and Huxtables. They’re the Andersons, Bernsteins, Ojawas, Sharifs, Huangs, Sanchezes, and Sangurdekars. They’re clusters of people related by genetic heritage or by legal, ceremonial, or emotional ties. They’re the people who know your secrets, look after you, push your buttons, goad and torment you, comfort you, give and withhold love, and remember your birthday. They’re the people in your kitchen and bedroom, your photo albums, and your innermost memories.
However you define it, the family is a subject of great consequence to all of us who have, for better or worse, grown up in one, produced one, or otherwise belonged to one, whether by choice, by law, or by bloodline.
Commonly considered the bedrock of American life, “the family” is a primary site of procreation, socialization, and identity formation. It also is a shifting and fragile concept, its definitions and its boundaries contested and politically charged. Real families and family systems routinely defy categories and orthodoxies. And behind the curtains, the reality of family life is often anything but the safe, loving harbor of our ripest imaginings and deepest longings.
As “family values” increasingly drive national debates on issues ranging from marriage to parenting to public assistance, CLA faculty researchers are advancing the frontiers of knowledge about families. Their findings will yield innovative strategies for addressing these issues and lay the groundwork for wise and humane public policy.
CLA scholars across disciplines, from communication studies to sociology, are asking what counts as a family; how people in families communicate, make decisions, and resolve differences; and how family members balance family ties and responsibilities with the demands of the larger world, including school and work.
They are exploring how our modern American ideas of “family” evolved, what makes families strong or fragile, how family systems differ across cultures, and how families, with all of their oddities, disruptions, and inconstancies, somehow endure.