"Paying attention to families in new ways?" Professor Vanessa May, University of Manchester

Please join the Sociology group seminar with Professor Vanessa May (University of Manchester).

Paying attention to families in new ways?

This paper is concerned with the conceptual attention that sociologists direct towards family life, and the contours of family life that are drawn as a result. These questions emerge from my long-standing interest in the way that ‘the personal’, including ‘the family’, have been delineated as distinct from the public sphere. In this talk, I explore how this conceptual boundary has influenced how families are studied, and what the consequences might be for how we understand families if the boundaries were drawn differently. To help illustrate these issues, I draw examples from how the interrelated nature of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres in family life has become accentuated during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Vanessa May is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives at the University of Manchester, UK. She is Co-Editor of the journal Sociology. Her research interests include the self, belonging, temporality, ageing, family relationships and qualitative methods. Vanessa has published in a number of journals including Sociology, Sociological Review, Time & Society and British Journal of Sociology. She is the author of Connecting Self to Society: Belonging in a Changing World (Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of Sociology of Personal Life (2^nd edition, Macmillan).