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For more than a decade, Carol Smart has been at the forefront of debates about the sociology of the family. Yet she has become frustrated by the fixation of many commentators with the supposed decline of commitment, and even the decline of the possibility of family life. In this exciting new book, she puts forward a new way of understanding families and relationships. Breaking with conventional wisdom, her book offers a fresh conceptual approach to understanding personal life, which realigns empirical research with theoretical analysis. She gives emphasis to ideas of connectedness, relationality and embeddedness, rejecting many of the assumptions found in theories of individualisation and de...
Offers a conceptual approach to understanding 'personal life', which realigns empirical research with theoretical analysis. This work emphasises ideas of connectedness, relationality and embeddedness, rejecting many of the assumptions found in theories of individualisation and de-traditionalisation by authors such as Beck and Beck Gernsheim.
Author very well known - leading writer on women and law provides major new critique of law in controversial areas such as rape, pornography, child custody 2 way promotion - criminology, women's studies
First published in 1977, Women, Crime and Criminology presents a feminist critique of classical and contemporary theories of female criminality. It addresses the issue that criminology literature has, throughout history, been predominantly male-oriented, always treating female criminality as marginal to the 'proper' study of crime in society. Carol Smart explores a new direction in criminology, and the sociology of deviance, by investigating female crime from a committed feminist position. Examining the types of offences committed by female offenders, Smart points to the fallacies inherent in a reliance on official statistics and shows the deficiencies of the popular argument that female ema...
Law, crime, and sexuality transcends the traditional fragmentation of sociology, criminology, socio-legal studies, and feminist theory and philosophy. It enables readers to draw on aspects from each discipline and see how various themes and discussions are related. Compiled specifically for students' needs, the essays show that theory need not be too hard or too inaccessible, and help students to understand the law in conceptual terms while enabling them to become fully aware of the extent to which the law is implicated in our everyday lives.
Concern and debate over changes to family life have increased in the last decade, as a result of evolving employment patterns, shifting gender relations and more openness about sexual orientation. Most politicians and researchers have viewed these changes as harmful, suggesting that the family as an institution should not alter. The `New' Family? challenges these dominant views. Leading academics in the field consider current diverse practices in families, and reveal the lack of balance between policies based on how families should be and how they actually are, illustrating the need for a broader definition of family. This book shows the need to take fluidity and change in family arrangements seriously, rather
Focusing on femicide, this book provides a contemporary re-evaluation of Carol Smart’s innovative approach to the law question as first outlined in her ground-breaking book, Feminism and the Power of Law (Routledge 1989). Smart advocated turning to the legal domain not so much for demanding law reforms as construing it as a site on which to contest gender and more particularly, gendered constructions of women’s experiences. Over the last 30 to 40 years, feminist law scholars and activists have launched scathing trans-jurisdictional critiques of the operation of provocation defences in hundreds of femicide cases. The evidence unearthed by feminist scholars that these defences operate in p...
This accessible book addresses one of the twenty-first century's most important issues: the increasing lack of connection between political institutions and the social reality of our everyday lives. A gulf between popular expectations and formal politics has widened continually since the revolts against authority of 1968, the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the growth of new social movements. Today, popular disillusion with politics is ubiquitous. Enormous social transformations on a global scale since the 1970s have produced no fundamental change in what are considered normal political institutions such as the state, or in mainstream political ideologies and parties. This book prov...
This exciting new book engages with the recent resurgence of interest in the family, offering empirical material and theoretical analysis which give rise to a fresh understanding of the nature of family practices in modern societies. The past decade has seen the emergence of an orthodoxy which depicts the family as being in moral decline and 'blames' parents for the harms of divorce. Family Fragments? takes issue with this political vision and with the idea that divorce is inevitably a harmful process. Although some households are fragmenting, the authors argue that moral commitments are not simply sundered. Instead they put forward a different perspective on divorce as well as formulating p...
Family life in modern societies is being transformed by high rates of divorce. Such changes have given rise to concerns that the quality of family life for children has deteriorated and that children are damaged by the choices their parents are making. It is possible, however, that children and families are more resilient than this. Rather than witnessing the end of the family and the end of contented childhood, we could be seeing the emergence of post-divorce families and new experiences of childhood based on these new arrangements. This path-breaking book explores children's own accounts of family life after divorce and allows us to see these changes from their point of view. It provides a sociological perspective on how childhood may be changing and how the 'democratic' status of children in the family may be in the process of transformation. The implications for family and legal policy of listening to children's views are also set out. The Changing Experience of Childhood will be of interest to all those in academic and public life concerned about the future of the family.