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My book is about my personal life and views that I’ve encountered over the years and wanted to turn into written real-life stories. By doing this, I think it would help and inspire those who can relate to my everyday situations and struggles. Without these experiences I’ve encountered over the years, my book wouldn’t be possible.
How is it possible to feel an affinity with a place? What is happening when someone feels almost literally transported to another time by a smell or a texture or a song? Why do striking family resemblances sometimes feel uncanny? In each of these cases a potent connection is being made, involving forces, flows, energies and atmospherics that conventional sociological approaches can find hard to grasp, but that are important nonetheless. In this innovative book Jennifer Mason argues that these are affinities – potent charges and charismatically lively connections in personal life, that rise up and matter in some way and that enchant or toxify the everyday. She suggests that exploring affinities opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing the experience of living in the world through what she calls the 'socio-atmospherics of everyday life'. This book invites the reader to embrace possibilities and themes that may seem outside the usual range, and to engage in a more open, attentive, inventive and poetic sociological sensibility.
The Second Edition of this best-selling text offers students and first-time researchers invaluable guidance on the practice of qualitative social research. Throughout the author addresses the key issues which need to be identified and resolved in the qualitative research process, and through which researchers develop essential skills in qualitative research. The book highlights the "difficult questions" that researchers should get into the habit of asking themselves in the course of doing qualitative research, and outlines the implications of the different ways of responding to these questions. The new edition of Qualitative Researching has been fully revised and updated with expanded covera...
Negotiating Family Responsibilities provides a major new insight into contemporary family life, particularly kin relationships outside the nuclear family. While many people believe that the real meaning of 'family' has shrunk to the nuclear family household, there is considerable evidence to suggest that relationships with the wider kin group remain an important part of most people's lives. Based on the findings of a major study of kinship, and including lively verbatim accounts of conversations with family members concepts of responsibility and obligation within family life are examined and the authors expand theories on the nature of assistance within families and argue that it is negotiated over time rather than given automatically.
The importance of significant family contexts that are not easily circumscribed with reference to a household or a limited set of family roles has been underlined throughout the last two decades by researchers. A strong interest for family relationships beyond the nuclear family has emerged in the social sciences. The various contributions to this book develop a configurational approach to families, which emphasizes interdependencies existing among large numbers of family members, and reconsiders some of the central issues of family life in this light: fertility projects, childcare and socialization, monetary transfers across generations and support for the elderly, relationships with grandparents, uncles, aunts and in-laws, gender inequalities, divorce and other family disruptions, and the importance of friends and acquaintances for families. Beyond very real changes affecting the structures of family life since the sixties, the book reveals that basic forms of togetherness still underlie much of what is going on in family configurations.
The book explores methodological approaches in three key areas - personal life and relationships; places and mobilities, and socio-cultural change. These work as vehicles to expound methodological issues and challenges that are relevant across a much wider range of domains. Understanding Social Research brings together leading researchers in the social sciences – including sociology, health, geography, psychology and social statistics - to elaborate their approach to research design and practice, based on their own research experience, and to consider what kinds of knowledge their methods can produce. Each of the contributing authors reflects on their own methods and identifies what is distinctive about them. The book contains fascinating insights into how the knowledge we produce is shaped by the methods we choose and use.
Blue Riley has wrestled with her own demons ever since the loss of her mother to cancer. But when she encounters a beautiful devil at her town crossroads, it’s her runaway sister’s soul she fights to save. The devil steals Blue’s voice—inherited from her musically gifted mother—in exchange for a single shot at finding Cass. Armed with her mother’s guitar, a knapsack of cherished mementos, and a pair of magical boots, Blue journeys west in search of her sister. When the devil changes the terms of their deal, Blue must reevaluate her understanding of good and evil and open herself up to finding family in unexpected places. In Devil and the Bluebird, Jennifer Mason-Black delivers a captivating depiction of loss and hope.
In Civilized Creatures, Jennifer Mason challenges some of our most enduring ideas about how encounters with nonhuman nature shaped American literature and culture. Mason argues that in the second half of the nineteenth century the most powerful influence on Americans' understanding of their affinities with animals was not increasing separation from the pastoral and the wilderness; instead, it was the population's feelings about the ostensibly civilized animals they encountered in their daily lives. Americans of diverse backgrounds, Mason shows, found it attractive as well as politic to imagine themselves as most closely connected to those creatures who shared humans' aptitude for civilized l...
Inheritance, once the preserve of the propertied upper classes, has become a much more common experience. Many more people now than in the past have something of material value to bequeath when they die, mainly because of the spread of home ownership during the second half of the twentieth century. Passing On examines what these changes can tell us about kinship in England, through a study of how contemporary families handle inheritance. Based on the findings of a major research project into inheritance and kinship, Passing On examines how it is transmitted, 'who gets what' and the meaning this has for individuals and families. The authors argue that we should understand English kinship as a set of relational practices which are flexible and variable, rather than as a rigid structure or system. Inheritance is characterised more by symbolic practices and moral reasoning than by materialism. Of interest to lecturers and students of sociology, anthropology, social policy, law and gender studies, Passing On is also of considerable interest to those seeking to understand changing forms of kinship and ownership, especially researchers, policy makers and legal practitioners.
More and more scrapbookers and paper artists are seeking clever ways to make their albums and paper projects more interesting and three-dimensional. One of the most exciting ways of accomplishing this is by adding interactive elements, such as doors that open and reveal hidden layers, and envelopes and pockets that hold secret text, personal letters, or special photos. Pockets, Pull Outs and Hiding Places: A Guide to Interactive Scrapbooking, Memory Art and Paper Art teaches the paper engineering techniques for making three dimensional and interactive ôpaper toolsö such as vellum pockets, hinged doors that reveal mini booklets underneath. These tools are applicable to scrapbookers, memory, and paper artists at any level of experience. The tools are also adjustable enough to be used in any style of work.