“Family Troubles” and “Troubling Families”: Opening Up Fertile Ground (original) (raw)

2019, Journal of Family Issues

The twin themes of 'family troubles', and 'troubling families', explored through this special issue, are closely linked, but they are also each distinct in themselves, and nuanced in particular ways, which we consider in this introductory discussion. We will also argue that these themes offer fertile ground for opening up new dialogue between contrasting bodies of work concerned with family lives and relationships. We are thus particularly delighted for the Journal of Family Issues to be hosting this special issue, since our twin themes are intended to cross (and indeed to question) such boundaries, and to encourage fresh perspectives as a result. The history and institutionalisation of family studies In what follows, we offer an account of family studies as siloed between a binary of 'the mainstream'-focused on what may be implicitly understood as 'ordinary' family lives-and 'the problematic'-focused on aspects of family lives that may be of interest to social policy experts, professionals and practitioners, and geared towards interventions of some sort. At the same time, we are conscious that these distinctions and contrasts are also perhaps understood in variable ways in different countries even within the affluent Minority worlds of Anglophone and Western European societies, let alone in Majority world countries. The account we offer here is primarily rooted in our UK based experience of family sociology on the one hand, and social policy and social work on the other. It has thus been our experience over many years that these are inclined to constitute distinct bodies of work, with limited dialogue between them either in publications or in conference venues, and, consequently, that this binary between the study of 'ordinary' and 'problematic' families is to some extent structurally embedded and institutionalised.