Jane MccarthyThe Open University (UK) / University of Reading
Jane Mccarthy
PhD Sociology
About
81
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Introduction
Besides my position at the Open University, I am also a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading.
Additional affiliations
May 2017 - present
September 2001 - present
September 1990 - September 2001
Publications
Publications (81)
While there is a significant interdisciplinary and international literature available on death, dying and bereavement, literature addressing responses to death is dominated by assumptions about individuality, framing ‘bereavement’ and ‘grief’ in terms of the inner psychic life of the individual. Scholarly literature tells us little about how the co...
David Morgan’s contributions to family sociology started from a direct engagement with theoretical perspectives, but his 1996 publication, Family Connections , took his family sociology in a new, somewhat ‘fuzzy’ direction. Two key motifs for his later work are the emphasis on ‘family’ as an adjective, and its fruitfulness when conjoined with the d...
At this re-launch of the journal Bereavement, we explore the question, ‘Do we need to decolonise bereavement studies?’ We do not offer definitive answers, but rather seek to open up conversations. We briefly explore some of the main debates and explanations of what ‘decolonising’ means. In its broader understandings, this entails questions about th...
This paper contributes to studies of care practices and care ethics beyond the Minority world by analysing informal caringscapes after a family death in urban Senegal. Based on the findings of a qualitative study in the cities of Dakar and Kaolack, we explore exchanges of care by the living for the living in the period immediately following the dea...
Both family sociology and childhood studies have sought in recent years to reflect on their most basic assumptions, most notably what is means to be ‘a child’ or ‘a family’. While this has led to some productive and challenging debates in affluent Anglophone and Western European contexts, these discussions have not fundamentally re-thought these ch...
The twin themes of “family troubles” and “troubling families” are closely linked, but they are also each distinct in themselves, and nuanced in particular ways. Rooted particularly (but not solely) in our U.K.-based academic experiences, we offer an account of family studies as siloed between a binary of “the mainstream”, focused on what may be imp...
Despite significant work on family geographies in recent years, geographers have paid less attention to changes and challenges that may be considered 'family troubles' in diverse contexts. Through this editorial and the special section, we unpack time-space dynamics of ‘family troubles’ in diverse contexts, with a particular focus on care and relat...
Based on interviews with Senegalese people living in four contemporary urban neighbourhoods, who had experienced the death of an adult family member, we explore how the research challenged and surprised the White, British members of the research team. Such challenges help to shed light on some dominant, taken-for-granted understandings of ‘bereavem...
Despite calls for cross-cultural research, Minority world perspectives still dominate death and bereavement studies, emphasising individualised emotions and neglecting contextual diversities. In research concerned with contemporary African societies, on the other hand, death and loss are generally subsumed within concerns about AIDS or poverty, wit...
This article draws on multidisciplinary perspectives to consider the need and the possibilities for inter-cultural dialogue concerning families that may be seen by some to be ‘troubling’. Starting from the premise that ‘troubles’ are a ‘normal’ part of children’s family lives, we consider the boundary between ‘normal’ troubles and troubles that are...
This article reflects on the profound complexities of translating and interpreting ‘grief’, and emotions and responses to death more broadly, in multilingual, cross-cultural contexts. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in urban Senegal, West Africa, we discuss the exchange of meanings surrounding grief and death through language, including t...
This article reflects on the profound complexities of translating and interpreting ‘grief’, and emotions and responses to death more broadly, in multilingual, cross-cultural contexts. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in urban Senegal, West Africa, we discuss the exchange of meanings surrounding grief and death through language, including t...
This paper reflects on the methodological complexities of producing emotionally-sensed knowledge about responses to family deaths in urban Senegal. Through engaging in 'uncomfortable reflexivity', we critically explore the multiple positionings of the research team comprised of UK, Senegalese and Burkinabé researchers and those of participants in S...
This article engages with the question of how theorisation of the social construction of childhood can be applied across cultural contexts, taking China and Britain as examples. The paper draws on collaborative dialogue between scholars from the People's Republic of China and Britain, and literatures from both Anglophone and Mandarin sources. It ta...
We explore contested meanings around care and relationality through the under-explored case of caring after death, throwing the relational significance of ‘bodies’ into sharp relief. While the dominant social imaginary and forms of knowledge production in many affluent western societies take death to signify an absolute loss of the other in the dem...
In this chapter, I ask what are the existential dilemmas raised by considering children's family troubles across cultures, and what value frameworks may be available to help determine how to draw lines between 'normal' family troubles, and troubling circumstances that might require interventions.
People have migrated around the globe for centuries, but there are new contexts for such migration in the contemporary world – not least, the advent of telecommunications and air travel, and the rise of women's migration as part of global care chains (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; Yeates, 2009) – with variable significance for the family lives o...
As the everyday family lives of children and young people come to be increasingly defined as matters of public policy and concern, it is important to raise the question of how we can understand the contested terrain between 'normal' family troubles and troubled and troubling families. In this important, timely and thought-provoking publication, a w...
Introduction
Wherever one looks on the globe it appears that human beings want to be edified by their miseries. It is as if the desire to make suffering intelligible and to turn it to some advantage is one of those dignifying peculiarities of our species.… Human beings, unlike other living things, want to … make their suffering intelligible, even a...
Introduction
In setting out to explore changes and challenges in the family lives of children and young people, and whether and how it may be important, useful and productive to consider such experiences as troubling or troublesome, we started from some basic assumptions for framing our thinking across diverse topics and circumstances. The first is...
As the everyday family lives of children and young people come to be increasingly defined as matters of public policy and concern, it is important to raise the question of how we can understand the contested terrain between "normal" family troubles and troubled and troubling families. In this important, timely and thought-provoking publication, a w...
The central concern of this paper is that there has been a move within British sociology to subsume (or sometimes, even replace) the concept of 'family' within ideas about personal life, intimacy and kinship. It calls attention to what will be lost sight of by this conceptual move: an understanding of the collective whole beyond the aggregation of...
Family Studies is a key area of policy, professional and personal debate. Perhaps precisely because of this, teaching texts have struggled with how to approach this area, which is both 'familiar' and also contentious and value laden. This innovative and reflective book deals with such dilemmas head-on, through its focus on family meanings in divers...
This article examines the notion of ‘family’ to consider how it may be understood in people's everyday lives. Certain recurrent and powerful motifs are apparent, notably themes of togetherness and belonging, in the context of a unit that the person can be ‘part of’. At the same time, there may be important variations in the meanings given to indivi...
Taken from the book to be published by Sage in December 2010, this document provides the Introduction to the book, in which the authors discuss issues in Family Studies as a contemporary field of academic and professional work. Their discussion includes: some of the different positions adopted by researchers towards the use of the language of 'fami...
This chapter discusses the importance of social contexts and looks at a number of available examples of research evidence. These evidences are rooted in particular cultural understandings and empirical work that are based in New World and European societies. One reason why social contexts are important in understanding bereavement is that the lives...
[About the book]: - Why is the concept of ‘security’ so important in modern society? - Why do people and governments invest so much in the pursuit of different forms of security? - How do we make sense of the changing nature of the relationship between security and insecurity? This book focuses on the concept of 'security' - as an idea, an ideal an...
Experience of significant bereavement is reported by the majority of young people in contemporary western societies, but it receives little attention from mainstream services or academics, and this marginality is paralleled in young people’s everyday bereavement experiences. Existing academic and professional work concerned with children and young...
One of the tasks that all researchers have to undertake, whether for postgraduate study or for funded research, is a literature review. Such reviews are particularly significant in the light of current policy and professional concern for ‘evidence based practice’ (Muir Gray 2001). At the same time, we have seen an explosion of academic and research...
We sometimes hear it said that 'children are resilient', but is this a helpful statement in relation to bereaved young people? The notion of resilience can be controversial, and presumes that the death of someone close is indeed a potential sources of significant adversity in the lives of bereaved children. The conceptual issues and empirical evide...
This wide ranging review of the literature on young people, bereavement and loss examines: case studies and other evidence of how young people discuss their experiences of bereavement the theoretical history of research into bereavement and young people the evidence of bereavement as a 'risk factor' in the lives of young people the social and cultu...
This book collects together significant research on the involvement of parents and carers in their children’s education. The findings stress the importance of dialogue and action between teachers and parents so parents can actively share in the decisions about their children’s educational experience. The contributors explore the challenges this pre...
The use of interviews from related individuals has become increasingly common in social research. This is particularly apparent in the area of family sociology, which has previously been criticized for relying on research of family lives based solely on interviews with mothers. Obtaining such accounts can raise postmodern ontological and epistemolo...
Flux is an essential characteristic of ‘family’ life. The inevitable passage of chronological time, characterized by constantly evolving circumstances and life experiences, mean that change and transition are major features of every individual’s life. But such themes are most commonly associated with ‘youth’ as a particular phase of life and studie...
This book goes to the heart of academic, political and popular debates, as well as professional concerns, about the nature of contemporary family life and parenting. Families are widely discussed in western societies as breaking down or as radically changing, with step-families in particular seen as evidence of such trends. In one of the first Brit...
Step-fathering is becoming increasingly common in contemporary western societies, yet it has received little research attention from either social policy or sociological perspectives. In this article, we draw on our empirical studies of step-families in Britain and Sweden to argue that social context is important in shaping step-fathers' understand...
About the Book: While the family and its role continues to be a key topic in social and government policy, much of the literature is concerned with describing the dramatic changes that are taking place. By contrast, Analysing Families directly addresses the social processes responsible for these changes - how social policy interacts with what famil...
In a recent article in Sociology, Joe Bailey maps out some important recent developments in sociological theorising, which he represents as 'the private'. In this he seeks to use 'the private' for one particular sociological purpose, but maybe in danger of obscuring other purposes that may also be important. In his discussions he largely neglects t...
In this study ‘ordinary’ young people (aged between 16 and 18) and their parents talk about their lives on their own terms. In-depth interviews explore issues of independence and relatedness, understandings of parental support and the meaning of ‘family’. They reveal how independence may mean different things to parents and young people; how parent...
Family lives are an area where people's moral identities are crucially at stake. Yet the significance of dependent children to the work needed to sustain morally adequate adult identities is largely overlooked. Furthermore, the particular situation of divorce or separation and repartnering where children are involved is fundamentally relevant to cu...
Legislative changes in recent years have emphasised the continuing tie with the biological parent after divorce. This paper consequently considers both legal and everyday discourses concerning the position of step-parents, with reference to any rights or responsibilities they might have towards their step-children. We suggest that two main themes c...
In this chapter we utilize the concept of boundaries as both a substantive and methodological issue, to look at aspects of power and resistance in the research process. Our substantive topic is parenting and step-parenting after divorce or separation. Our methodology is qualitative and intensive, concerned with listening on their own terms (as far...
How can researchers produce work with relevance to theoretical and formal traditions and requirements of public academic knowledge while still remaining faithful to the experiences and accounts of research participants based in private settings? Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research explores this key dilemma and examines the interplay between t...
Social research is a difficult and perplexing task, whatever its focus and topic. One of its fascinations is that it requires sensitivity to issues on many different levels. On the one hand, we need to think through our theoretical frameworks and assumptions. On the other hand, research is also an intensely practical exercise, requiring us constant...
In this article we introduce the rationale for, and contributions to, this Special Issue. We go further, too, to raise questions concerning how we can approach and make sense of women's private and domestic lives. We identify and consider two main issues and tensions within this: intimacy/connection and individuality/instrumentality. We point to th...
In this article we introduce the rationale for, and contributions to, this Special Issue. We go further, too, to raise questions concerning how we can approach and make sense of women's private and domestic lives. We identify and consider two main issues and tensions within this: intimacy/connection and individuality/instrumentality. We point to th...
Dr Anne West and Jean Hailes are members of the Centre for Research at the London School of Economics and Politics. Professor Miriam David and Dr Jane Ribbens are members of the Social Sciences Research Centre of South Bank University. In this paper they report upon a study which examines how parents choose secondary schools for their children. Amo...
This article reconsiders the picture of the mother of young children in industrialised societies as the ‘isolated housewife’, suggesting this notion is by no means straightforward. We suggest there is considerable evidence for the existence of mothers' social contacts and their significance both as ‘work’ and ‘friendship’ in industrial societies. A...
In the previous chapter, I considered the existence and meaning of maternal responsibility/authority in the preschool years, and discussed the presence and significance of a major geographical, temporal and social boundary that occurs at the point where young children reach compulsory school age. In this chapter, I will continue past the point of s...
This book is about the various aspects of the relationships between mothers and education at different levels in the education system. In particular, we shall look at mothers of young children, either pre-school age or school-age children, in relation to various educational policies, in interaction with their children’s schools and teachers, as stu...
Women take primary responsibility for the care of young children in all Western industrialised societies (as we argued in Chapter 1), yet this experience may be complex and contradictory. While women’s obligations towards their young children may be psychologically and practically onerous, such maternal responsibility may also contribute a potentia...
In response to the recent articles in Sociology on the concept of `strategy', this paper aims to make a contribution to the debate by drawing attention to some of its gendered aspects. We seek to raise some further questions without necessarily providing clear-cut answers. We argue that the concept is rooted within masculine spheres of activity, an...
This paper seeks to explore what feminist concerns may mean in the minutiae of the personal relations that develop within interviews, for example, notions of reciprocity, friendship, and collaboration. While the paper draws on the author's current experiences of qualitative interviews with various family members, especially mothers, it also conside...
Evidence shows that bereavement is an issue that touches the lives of the majority of young people, and yet it is often left to the province of specialists. This timely book provides the first in-depth, interdisciplinary overview of our knowledge and theorizing of bereavement and young people including the voices of young people, as well as major s...
A concise review of the research evidence in this area for use by professionals and practitioners working with children and young people.
[About the book]: "Capturing from the start that 'Childhood is, and always has been, a vulnerable time," we have a rich ingathering of contributed pieces that bring us into the raw, fragile arena of children traumatized by life events and behaviors..." --Illness, Crisis, and Loss "Balk and Corr again have edited a book that will set the direction o...
This book focuses on family meanings through a range of different approaches, including readings by researchers in the field of family studies with explanations, activities and further questions provided to build on and link together what these writers have said.
Evoking and listening to research voices raises issues about the contingency and precariousness of the perspectives being voiced. For private perspectives and understandings to be communicated, and formulated as public knowledge, they first have to be articulated in a personal voice. Yet, given the power of public bodies of knowledge, we may strugg...
Projects
Projects (3)
A collaborative exploration of the family lives of children in China, and the institutionalisation of childhood.
This Leverhulme funded project ran from 2014-2016 under the leadership of Ruth Evans at the University of Reading. The final report is now available and further publications are in progress. See http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/research/projects/death-in-the-family-in-urban-senegal
This is a long term project exploring changes and challenges in the family lives of children and young people, how we can determine the point at which 'normal' family troubles become unacceptable and troubling including across cultural contexts, and how far contemporary idealized constructions of childhood add to children's family troubles. More details of all our activities are available here: http://www.open.ac.uk/ccig/research/projects/family-troubles
