Anne-Marie Kramer

• Lecturer at University of Nottingham

In Summer 2008 I commissioned a Part 1 Directive on 'Doing Family History Research' from the Mass Observation Project as part of a Leverhulme-funded project[1] on the status and significance of genealogy and its role and consequences in personal and family lives. Drawing on examples from this research project, this article will consider how we can...

Family history is both extremely popular and pervasive in British culture. Part of its attraction is its capacity to reclaim attention for the formerly ‘unseen’, to make space for the ‘intangible’, the dead, the deliberately forgotten, the misplaced and the over-looked. In so doing, family history centres the imagination, memory, feelings and the r...

Along with Australia, Canada and the USA, contemporary British society is immersed in a seemingly unprecedented boom in the family heritage industry. Drawing on recent work in memory studies which attends to the relationship between individual and collective historical experiences, this article analyses the celebrity genealogy BBC TV programme Who...

Drawing on the 2008 Mass Observation Directive ‘Doing Family Research’, this article explores the role of genealogy in personal lives from the perspective of genealogists and non-genealogists in the UK. Analysing the ends to which genealogy is put, it finds that genealogy is a key kinship practice, mapping connectedness, offering a resource for ide...

The issue of abortion has been the topic of heated and frequent debate in post-Communist Poland. Parliamentary debate in 1998—9 centred around a legislative attempt to restrict prenatal testing, specifically amniocentesis, in order to further reduce the numbers of abortions carried out, as it was argued to inevitably result in the termination of pr...

The collapse of communism across East Central Europe was marked by a renewal of debates around reproduction, with abortion debates surfacing in Romania, Germany and Poland. Reproductive politics and more specifically abortion debates typically come to the forefront in times of crisis or societal transformation. Struggles over women's reproductive r...

The overall aim of this research project has been to develop a curriculum which is not only research led and student centred but is co-managed and co-taught by students. Principally, students have researched and delivered teaching sessions on the third year undergraduate module in sociology Money Sex and Power in Global Context and, as part of the...

Reproductive policy and politics have surfaced as topics of debate across Central and Eastern Europe since 1989. In Romania, the liberalization of abortion was one of the first initiatives proposed by the provisional government,1 while in East Germany questions around access to abortion threatened the future of unification with West Germany.2 In th...

This article takes up Gal and Kligman’s insight that struggles over reproductive politics, as evidenced by shifting debates around the legal status of abortion, are intimately related to and bound up with ongoing symbolic and concrete re-definitions of Polish nationhood and citizenship. Analysing Polish reportage around abortion in two newspapers u...

Across East Central Europe, postcommunist transformation is being effected through the discourses of gender. It is in this context that debate around abortion has surfaced repeatedly in Poland. This is an empirical case study of Polish postcommunist transformation centred on gender and in particular, on abortion debate. It focuses on the connection...