Families, Relationships and Communities

We consider notions of families, personal relationships, households and communities, whilst also recognising their continuing significance at political, policy and personal levels.

About the programme

Our focus is the diverse ways in which people live and experience their personal lives and relationships. We take a comprehensive view, which includes material and socio-cultural contexts and the emotional dynamics of families, relationships and communities.

The programme is interdisciplinary in approach and considers notions of families, personal relationships, households and communities, whilst also recognising their continuing significance at political, policy and personal levels.

The theoretical focus is wide ranging encompassing: personal relationships, inter-subjectivity, relationality, autonomy and connectedness care, emotion, memory and representations power, control and resources legislation, policy-making and welfare practice.

The Programme has been, since its inception, at the forefront of cutting-edge research in this field and we have contributed to pioneering publications, including a new journal, Families, Relationships and Society, which is co-edited by Professor Brid Featherstone, with Dr Jacqui Gabb co-editing the Open Space Section.

The Families, Relationships and Communities programme currently hosts the major ESRC funded project, Enduring Love?, that explores the diversity of relationship experience in the 21st Century and the factors that enable couples to sustain long-term relationships.

Our research is clustered under seven key themes, each of which hosts specific projects:

Children and childhood: An investigation into what impacts on children’s lives
Families, transnationalism and mobilities: An exploration of how families are constituted and lived across transnational borders
Family troubles?: A review of the contested terrain between ‘normal’ family troubles and troubled and troubling families
Gender, households and work: An examination of what goes on within households in terms of resource allocation, decision-making processes and tasks of everyday living
Intimate relationships: An examination of the experience, meanings, social policy and cultural mediations of relationships between adult couples
Parenthood: An investigation into the increasingly diverse family formations in contemporary society
Social Relations of Neighbourhoods: An exploration of the issues associated with social inclusion/exclusion, community participation and community cohesion