Samantha Punch

University of Stirling · Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology

Engaging in competitive leisure and sporting practices can cause relationship tension and stress. This paper explores negotiations of gendered time and serious leisure participation. Using the card game bridge, as a case study, it discusses the ways elite tournament players combine intimate relationships with a competitive mindsport. By having an i...

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been several public confessions to cheating from elite-level players in the online version of the card game bridge. Whilst the deviance of cheating is a perennial issue in the world of elite sports, little is known about how bridge compares as a mindsport. A Foucauldian theoretical lens examines...

The classification of mindsports such as the card game of bridge within sport and society continues to be keenly debated. The concept of ‘physicality’ is often cited as being a prerequisite for an activity to be classed as a ‘sport’, a characteristic typically seen as lacking in mindsports. However, by drawing upon monist conceptualisations of the...

Ingrained gendered discourses about women’s abilities and skills impact on their participation in leisure and sport. This paper argues that gendered stereotyping extends to the serious leisure context of mindsport in the form of neurosexism. The card game bridge is played by a roughly equal proportion of men and women but at elite-level male player...

8 bridge research projects can be seen in the research section of the Bridge: A MindSport for All (BAMSA) webstite www.bridgemindsport.org See the Events section for many recordings and summary reports for each of the 8 themed sessions at our online international conference: bridge and well-being, benefits of mindsport, gender, healthy ageing, di...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the ways in which reactive researcher collaboration helps to manage some of the challenges present in insider research. Design/methodology/approach Employing (auto)biographical reflections from across two different case-studies, the authors explore the ways in which reactive collaboration is enmesh...

Gender differences in the sporting world are long-standing and historic. Couched often as biologically given, differences in the uptake, training and playing of sport, from hobby to elite Olympian, are riven with discourses, practices and attitudes regarding the different aptitudes of men and women. Recognizing the ways these gendered differences o...

The concept of emotional complexity is vital to theorising emotions in late modernity. Building from decades of ‘emotion management’ research, it captures how emotions are increasingly an object for individual self-management and reflection. Using Goffman’s dramaturgy as a framing for emotions research in sport and leisure, this article contributes...

Bridge is a partnership card game that has increasingly professionalized in recent years, particularly at ‘elite’ level. ‘Elite’ bridge players participate in a unique leisure world which hitherto has been understood as a form of serious leisure. However, due to professionalization there is the possibility to work as a professional bridge player th...

Researchers navigate a complex network of relationships, positions, and responsibilities that are determined by their discipline, funding bodies, and the research community they are studying. Tensions often emerge between and across each of these different spaces. This paper uses reflexive autobiographical writing to discuss some of the ongoing cha...

International, elite level tournament bridge is a unique context for exploring the dynamics of serious leisure experience. This paper presents sociological research on participation and motivation in a dyadic serious pursuit, understood through the lens of the serious leisure perspective (SLP) and complementary approaches of social worlds and leisu...

This article contributes to the emerging sociology of mind-sport as a new area of research by showing how everyday interaction and life skills are sharpened and honed through strategic interaction at the bridge table. Using the example of the card game bridge, the article explores how elite players engage in time-consuming and repetitive performanc...

Mind-sports are a relatively under-explored area within the sociology of sport, especially the internationally played game of bridge. In this qualitative sociological study of tournament bridge, we examine the formation and performance of elite bridge player identities through interviews with 52 US and European players. Drawing on symbolic interact...

This paper considers why age and generation tend not to be recognised as social variables in the same way that gender, ethnicity and class are mainstreamed within Social Science disciplines. It questions why the concept of the generational order is not always integral to either Childhood Studies or the related sub-disciplines, such as Children’s Ge...

This volume addresses children and young people’s relationships both within and beyond the context of the family. It begins with familial relationships and the home by examining the social and cultural complexities of families, intimacies and interdependencies, including the dynamics of families as spatial units (nuclear, multi-generational, altern...

Young people living in residential out-of-home care (henceforth OoHC) are at increased risk of becoming overweight or obese. Currently, recognition of the everyday mechanisms that might be contributing to excess weight for children and young people in this setting is limited. The aim of this study was to better understand the barriers and complexit...

The notion and terminology of ‘transition(s)’ have long dominated discussions of pathways from youth to adulthood and have increasingly come to characterise the educational journeys people make, with a strong emphasis on the shift from schooling to undergraduate study. However, the transitional experiences of postgraduate students have been signifi...

This chapter considers the methodological issues and generational power relations involved in conducting research with children in the home setting. The paper discusses some task-based interview tools as well as the advantages and disadvantages of interviewing children individually and in groups within the home context. Moral, emotional, and practi...

This chapter argues that the birth order is socially constructed and shows how birth order hierarchies are negotiated in everyday interactions between siblings. It explores the relative opportunities and constraints of children’s birth order positions within families. The chapter indicates that both children and parents recognize the existence of a...

This article draws on a critical evaluation of a knowledge exchange (KE) project, FoodforThought, devised to promote and develop awareness of the use of food within children’s residential and foster care services. From the 22 qualitative interviews conducted, reflections on the differing forms of knowledge incorporated into the design of the projec...

This article, by drawing on examples from sociology, anthropology and geography, argues that childhood studies is generally a multi-disciplinary field rather than inter-disciplinary. It emphasises that childhood studies could benefit from greater dialogue between its sub-disciplines as well as with those outside academia. While advances have been m...

This chapter explores the interrelationships between economic change and environmental issues, by showing how aspiration, education, and migration are variously connected to a loss of agroecological knowledges for rural young people. It reviews a series of case studies from Vietnam, India, and China on the implications for rural youth of changed as...

This chapter considers the methodological issues and generational power relations involved in conducting research with children in the home setting. The paper discusses some task-based interview tools as well as the advantages and disadvantages of interviewing children individually and in groups within the home context. Moral, emotional, and practi...

This chapter explores the interrelationships between economic change and environmental issues, by showing how aspiration, education, and migration are variously connected to a loss of agroecological knowledges for rural young people. It reviews a series of case studies from Vietnam, India, and China on the implications for rural youth of changed as...

The children’s rights agenda has dominated discourses around state care for children. Over recent years, a number of scandals relating to the abuse and maltreatment of looked-after children have highlighted the need for a robust and comprehensive monitoring of the day-to-day care experiences that such children receive. However, the application of r...

This chapter explores the household livelihoods of fishers who have recently moved from living on their fishing boats for generations to on-land, government-built flats in southern China. This significant household and employment transition has resulted in marked patterns of intergenerational change requiring young people, adults and older people t...

This chapter argues that more effective dialogue between the Majority and Minority Worlds could enhance our understanding of childhoods across the globe. While recognizing the limitations and challenges of cross-world dialogue, it compares and contrasts youth transitions across Majority and Minority Worlds, drawing on empirical research from Bolivi...

Over the last few years research funding has increasingly moved in favour of large, multi-partner, interdisciplinary and multi-site research projects. This article explores the benefits and challenges of employing a full-time research fellow to work across multiple field sites, with all the local research teams, on an international, interdisciplina...

This paper, based on a longitudinal and multi-sited ethnographic study, explores the intersection between youth transitions, migration and relationships. It considers the complex ways in which rural Bolivian young people move back and forth between work and education, between home and migrant destinations as they strive to form their own household...

This article identifies some of the multiple processes of capitalist development through which access to common property resources and their utility for communities are undermined. Three sites in upland Asia demonstrate how patterns of exclusion are mediated by the unique and selective trajectories through which capital expands, resulting in a decl...

This article is based on an ethnographic study that explored everyday food practices and relationships in three residential children's homes in Scotland. On the one hand, food practices in residential child care can be used to cross intergenerational boundaries in a positive, enabling and caring manner. On the other hand, food can be interpreted di...

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in migration during the life course stages of childhood and youth (for example, de Lima et al. 2012; Gardner 2012; Hashim and Thorsen 2011; White et al. 2011). Migration offers a range of opportunities and constraints for children and young people. The advantages may include regular work, higher...

The selection, preparation and consumption of food are everyday experiences; however, the social and symbolic meaning attached to such practices varies widely. This paper presents findings from a research project which aimed to explore how such food practices were experienced, produced and maintained within residential children's homes in Scotland....

In the context of ecological and economic change, this paper identifies the impact of ongoing transformations in young people's labour contribution in four natural resource-dependent regions in India, Vietnam and China. Children's work is important to maximise household labour productivity, while also endowing them with the ecological knowledge nec...

This chapter explores contemporary gender divisions in the home, showing that whilst there have been some changes and greater contributions by men, some inequalities continue to exist in the domestic division of labour. Traditional divisions of labour based on gender are outlined at the start of the chapter. It then discusses recent changes includi...

Many of the difficulties of applying rights in practice lie in competing interpretations of rights by different groups and organisations. This paper illustrates the complexities of putting a theory of children's rights into practice within the everyday contexts of residential child care, in particular, as part of the routines of food provision and...

The ‘new’ sociology of childhood emerged over 20 years ago, arguing for the social construction of childhood to be acknowledged and for the recognition of children and young people's agency and rights. Other disciplines joined this growing academic area, from children's geographies to law, so that the phrase ‘childhood studies’ has become a popular...

This paper explores the methodological challenges of doing research with transnational children. It outlines a range of strategies that researchers might employ, whilst also reflecting on the issues that such strategies raise. It argues that an ethnographic approach, combining interviews with participant observation, can enable a fuller understandi...

Many methodological and ethical accounts of fieldwork become sanitised and smoothed over particularly because they tend to be written several months after the fieldwork has taken place. They often lose the immediacy and emotional impact of the fieldwork, which is why a field diary can be essential. But why do we tend to keep our field diaries to ou...

SwansonKate, Begging as a Path to Progress: Indigenous Women and Children and the Struggle for Ecuador's Urban Spaces (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 2010), pp. xiv + 146, $64.95, $19.95 pb. - Volume 44 Issue 1 - SAMANTHA PUNCH

Despite often expressed concerns over its apparent demise, the idea (or ideal) of ‘the family’ continues to exert a powerful presence within a range of contexts (McKie et al. 2005). As Weeks puts it: Family is a powerful and pervasive word in our culture, embracing a variety of social, cultural, economic and symbolic meanings; but traditionally it...

Using an ethnographic approach, we provide an analysis of food practices in residential care to explore the atypical nature of children's homes as a three-fold space that combines characteristics of ‘home’, ‘institution’, and ‘workplace’. Residential staff invested considerable effort into recreating a ‘family-like’ home but the practices and ideal...

This paper explores forms of surveillance within residential care homes for young people. It is argued that surveillance is a crucial aspect of care and this can be experienced as both negative and positive by children and staff. In particular the research was concerned with how forms of control and monitoring are conducted in relation to food and...

This article investigates forms of strategic interaction between siblings during childhood. The authors argue that these interactions, characterized by notions of reciprocity, equivalence and constructions of fairness, are worked out in relation to responsibility, power, knowledge and sibling status. Birth order and age are not experienced as fixed...

Children’s access to food, and the negotiations that take place around it, extend beyond the realm of immediate family relations to children’s social and educational worlds. Food can thus play an essential part in their experience of other social and institutional arenas such as schools, hospitals or residential care. Food is both an essential and...

This paper contributes to the recent, but still limited, literature on the sociology of sibship. It argues that during childhood the ambivalent love/hate nature of sibship is played out through the sharing of knowledge, time and space. It draws on the work of Goffman to illustrate that children’s sibling interactions tend to consist of backstage, r...

This collection of international research and collaborative theoretical innovation examines the socio-cultural contexts and negotiations that young people face when growing up in rural settings across the world. This book is strikingly different to a standard edited book of loosely linked, but basically independent, chapters. In this case, the book...

This contribution explores the methodological implications and some of the inter-and intra-generational power relations involved when carrying out research with children at home. It draws on data from individual and group interviews about children's experiences of sibling relationships and birth order. The study was conducted with 90 children betwe...

In rural Bolivia, like many rural areas of the majority world, there are few opportunities for permanent employment and most young people do not have access to their own land. Consequently, many young people in southern Bolivia migrate seasonally to Argentina and their migratory experience provides them with a sense of collective identity during pe...

First paragraph: It can be argued that childhood is a relational concept which forms part of the generational order and that generational processes shape the nature of child–adult relations (Alanen 2001; Mayall 2002). When the social positions of ‘children’ and ‘adults’ are ‘constituted, reproduced and transformed through relational activity’ (Maya...

The paper concentrates on an exploration of power relations within families. The paper discusses parental power in relation to legitimacy, household resources and children’s anticipated reactions of adult discipline. The nature of sibling power is highlighted before exploring the reciprocal expectations of sibling and child-parent interactions. The...

As in many parts of the majority world, primary education in rural Bolivia is constrained by a range of factors: poor teaching quality, lack of resources, limited infrastructure, inadequate teaching materials, and low wages for teachers. Furthermore, high rates of absenteeism, drop-out, repetition, and failure can be exacerbated by children’s work...

Drawing on ethnographic data from rural Bolivia and applying the theoretical approaches of the minority group child and the tribal child (James et al. 1998), this paper shows that majority world children integrate work, play and school, moving back and forth between child and adult-centred worlds. It argues that majority world children have largely...

This paper explores seven methodological issues in some detail to illustrate the ways in which aspects of the research process usually considered to be the same for both adults and children can pose particular dilemmas for adult researchers working with children. It argues that research with children is potentially different from research with adul...

There are few studies which document youth transitions from school to work in rural areas of the majority world. This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork in a rural community in Bolivia, considers how young people make decisions about different types of school-to-work transitions which include migrating to continue their formal education, workin...

This paper reflects on the use of a range of interviewing strategies carried out with 13-14 year olds for a research project about young people’s problems and coping strategies. The advantages and disadvantages of using both group and individual interviews with various task-based activities (grouping and ranking exercises, spider diagrams and chart...

The paper discusses the somewhat limited literature on children’s participation in household work and then presents empirical evidence from rural households in Bolivia which shows that the division of household labour is worked out according to generation, gender, age, birth order and sibling composition. It argues that whilst adult household labou...

First paragraph: Recent research in the new social studies of childhood recognises that children are competent social actors who play an active part in their social worlds (Waksler 1991; Mayall 1994; Caputo 1995; Waksler 1996). Yet there are still relatively few studies which document the ways in which children devise ways to counteract adult's pow...

Child migration is a relatively new area in academic and policy debates (although in practice this is not a new phenomena). At the beginning of the twenty-first century there was very limited literature available but over the past five years or so this is beginning to change, partly as a result of research programmes such as those being carried out...

This chapter is based on ethnographic research carried out in a rural community, Churquiales, in southern Bolivia (Punch 1998). The study focused on children's negotiation of their autonomy at home, at school, at work and at play (Punch 2000; Punch Forthcoming). During the fieldwork, I lived for two extended periods in the rural community (consisti...

This paper explores the ways in which children perceive the relative opportunities and constraints of their birth order position within their families by comparing and contrasting the views of oldest, middle and youngest siblings. It shows that birth order and age can be experienced at times as a constraint on sibling behaviour and at other times a...

First paragraph: This chapter provides an overview of how power affects, and is mobilized by, young people in rural settings. It also reflects on the theoretical frameworks operationalized in the preceding four chapters. In this process we recognize that each of the authors has very different ways of deploying notions of power in relation to young...

First paragraph: This chapter, based on my empirical study of children’s lives in rural Bolivia, exemplifies ways in which children as active agents can negotiate relative autonomy within the structural constraints of childhood in relation to more powerful, adult, social actors (see Harden and Scott 1998). The structures of adult society limit chil...

First paragraph: This chapter is based on ethnographic research carried out in a rural community, Churquiales, in southern Bolivia (Punch 1998). The study focused on children’s negotiation of their autonomy at home, at school, at work and at play (Punch 2000; Punch Forthcoming). During the fieldwork, I lived for two extended periods in the rural co...