The question of which Scottish surnames constitute a Clan and which do not is hotly contested. It is wrongly felt, especially in the Scots-abroad communities, that Clan is somehow of higher status than “Family” or “House” and/or applies to everyone of Scottish heritage. Opinions and assertions are on a spectrum between two absolutes: (a) “everyone in Scotland is in a Clan, and everyone should wear kilts and tartans”; to (b) “Clans disappeared in the 18th century and there is no point clinging to a Romantic notion with no modern relevance”. Historically, the Clan is a phenomenon of the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands and was not found as a social structure in the Lowlands; the Southern Uplands (Scottish Borders) are a special case. The “everyone” persuasion leads to cultural nonsenses such as Lowland-ancestry Scots abroad forming “Clan” Societies and adopting Highland dress. Scots overseas are looking for an authoritative statement as to whether their surname constitutes a Clan, a family, or some other nomenclature. Yet, there is no official or agreed historically based list of who are Clans and who are not. There is no such list—or a formula by which an answer can be derived. This essay is intended as a step towards that. Also, the non-historical concept of “Septs” is dismissed.
This essay examines relationships between adoptees and the (extended) adoptive family, focusing on the inheritance rights of adopted persons as entry points into levels and cycles of their belonging and un-belonging. The essay contextualizes a case report (or summary reports) on the kind of estrangement in the adoptee world that is fueled by inheritance disputes. It delves into postadoption perceptions and thus into the “unwritten” truths about adoption and its possible fallout. It draws from archival sources, semi-structured interviews (life-story interviewing), and life writing by adoptees, and also from a sequence of real-life exchanges dating back to 2018. All these sources focus on the contested inheritance of children, now older adults, who were adopted from Greece in the 1950s–60s and who became (or should have become) subsequent heirs to the estates of their adoptive parents and/or relatives. The Greek out-of-country adoptions of the postwar and early Cold War era involved more than 4000 children, most of whom were sent to the United States. The various testimonies and sections reflect critically on the continuing trend to infantilize the adopted persons, forever the adopted children, to push their origins back into the past and into geographical distance, to untie the family connections they have forged over the course of half a century. The examples take the reader from the adoptive family’s pre-adoption attempts at disowning the child through the postadoption stage of the end of an adopted lifetime, including cases of the extended adoptive family’s attempts at “de-adopting” the adopted person. This essay includes various sources of life-cycle documentation, among them an extensive case study and online obituaries. It adheres to truth and authenticity by incorporating fairly long original quotations, which, in the case study of the second half especially, assist the reader in comprehending much historical information in a question-and-answer format. This bolder structure offers the advantage of taking the reader step by step through the transactions of a prominent Greek adoption scheme (Rebecca and Maurice Issachar) and also through the various layers of the postadoption mindset and minefield. The material presented here is intended to raise awareness that change can and must still benefit the Greek adoptees today, whose lives may have been permeated by conditionality and nonlinearity. I conclude that, in the cases discussed here, the child’s orphanhood may well be a perpetual state, with the adoptee being orphaned of individuality and of a protective family on more than just one occasion.
In the 2017 Danzy Senna novel, New People, the mixed-race protagonist is described as a white ‘passing’ mixed-race woman who interprets the death of her adopted Black mother as a symbol of the death of her Black identity. The book’s themes parallel ongoing multiracial political debates that explore the extent to which mixed-race people with proximity to whiteness perceive individual agency in identity negotiations. This paper examines how mixed-race people in Britain discuss the experience of loss and separation, thereby demonstrating how loss and separation interact with their sense of self. Employing a content and thematic analysis of 19 stories from the British-based organisation Mixedracefaces, my findings show that the mixed-race respondents saw their racially marginalised family members as critical connections to their own. Thus, a process of identity de/construction was instigated when they experienced a loss that perpetuated and/or challenged monoracism. I argue that we must disrupt oppressive monoracial paradigms of ‘race’ that uphold monoracial whiteness and prevent mixed-race identity agency. Through mixed-race counterstories, we can reveal further generational histories of struggles, resistance, love, and refusal in Britain. I intentionally provide a safe space for the millions of mixed people looking for connection through this experience.
This article examines how the insecure and precarious legal status of adoptees gives rise to vulnerabilities, with a particular focus on the citizenship of foreign-born adoptees. The primary objective of this work is to identify vulnerabilities associated with U.S. citizenship rules. While adoption is often assumed to guarantee both familial belonging and a legal status of citizenship, the U.S. legal framework frequently reveals gaps that leave adoptees in vulnerable positions. By tracing how administrative requirements, adoptive parents’ lack of due diligence, and fragmented legal pathways create insecurity, this article shows that the law itself may generate or exacerbate vulnerabilities it purports to resolve. Drawing on the concepts of vulnerability and navigating the intersection of family law and immigration law, the analysis highlights how citizenship is more than a legal status, affecting deeper issues of identity-building and belonging. The article concludes by underscoring the need for a protective, adoptee-centered, coherent approach to citizenship rules, one that offers better legal permanence for adoptees.
The contribution that arts can make to our health and wellbeing is widely acknowledged in public discourse, with the concept of ‘creative health’ having come to prominence in the UK in the last ten years. This paper asks about the kinds of values at play in contemporary appeals to creativity by exploring the value of art for life from a philosophical perspective. Drawing on Pierre Hadot’s influential work on the ancient philosophical practice of the ‘art of living’, it goes on to consider how aesthetic perception of the world functions as a kind of model for philosophical perception. Inflecting these ideas with Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of values, the paper examines the role of art and philosophy in relation to luxury and need, and to fundamental conditions of life enhancement. Building on this distinctive application of Nietzsche’s genealogy, it develops the question of how to assess the value of art for life outside the current neoliberal narratives of wellbeing and the creative industries. In its focus on values rather than ideals, the paper makes an original contribution to current thinking and practice in creative health.
In early modern Europe, genetic‑biological paternity – i. e. the ability to procreate –, the moral and emotional ability to behave in a paternal manner and, finally, paternal authority in the legal and social sense of the term were intrinsically linked to the image of political leadership. The display of fatherhood made it possible to convey concepts and ideas, such as virility, dynastic continuity and the continuity of a political regime, the sovereign’s responsibility and his emotional ties with his subjects. The alleged natural authority of the father was used to justify a rules legitimacy to govern his people. The article offers a heuristic approach, intended as a contribution to a preliminary phenomenology of visual representations of the body of the monarch as a father, without pretending to offer a systematic or exhaustive study of this imagery. The case studies, which are to be situated between the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the end of the eighteenth century, cover a geographical area ranging from the Holy Roman Empire to France, Spain and Sweden.
Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
This study analyzes displaced families’ disintegration amidst multifaceted crises in the Far North Region of Cameroon. The focus is on displaced families in four divisions where host communities along the border of Nigeria have fled Boko Haram, due to sociopolitical instability and environmental degradation. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses show how insecurity and precarity have resulted in disintegrating, dispersing and sometimes recomposing the traditional structure of the family institution by disrupting marriage traditions, gender roles and intergenerational relations. Such shifts in the family occurred as a result of the challenging contexts in their hometowns, during flight and after settling in the host towns. The findings demonstrate the effects of the multifaceted crises, which created intergenerational, but also inter- and intra-community rifts that are challenging to repair amidst mass distrust and continued insecurity. This study contributes especially to understanding how these crises affect family cohesion and intergenerational relations as part of dynamics of great social change.
Though often under-represented in the official and national narratives and in Canadian military historiography more broadly, the intimate and personal lived experiences of Canadian prisoners of war (POW) during the Second World War can be found in archives, photography collections, and collections of war art. In an attempt to see past the mythologised versions of POWs that appear in Hollywood films, best-selling monographs, and other forms of popular culture, it is through bits of ephemera—including wartime log books and the drawings carefully kept and sent home to loved ones along with handwritten letters—that the stories of non-combatant men and women who spent their war as POWs, can be told. Together, Canadian POWs created and curated community and fostered unconventional family ties, sometimes called “emotional communities”, through the collection and accumulation of drawings, illustrations, paintings, and other examples of war art on the pages of their wartime log books while living behind barbed wire. This article uncovers some of these stories, buried in the thousands of boxes in the George Metcalf Archival Collection—the textual archives—at the Canadian War Museum (CWM) in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Chris Kempshall, Catriona Pennell, Felicity Tattersall
Community partnerships, based on ‘the collaborative turn’ in academic research, are an increasingly common framework through which ‘bottom-up’ histories, particularly of diverse and/or more marginalised communities, are being told. This article is about the ‘doing’ of this type of work. It focuses on the question: what lessons can be made visible when attempted cooperation fails to deliver the outcomes initially hoped for? Firstly, this article outlines the events and activities undertaken by the authors in exploring the ways that ephemera and other objects can be used to understand and transmit the historical experiences of communities often on the periphery of mainstream war commemoration. It will discuss the ways in which connections with these communities were built, with the aim of undertaking several creative writing workshops, leading to a co-produced publication of the participants’ material. Secondly, as part of a broader acknowledgment of the possibility of failure and its benefits, it will explore why some of these creative workshop efforts failed to meet expectations and outline a series of recommendations for other historians and community-orientated projects to consider for future activities.
One of the periods with the greatest social, cultural, and religious changes was, without a doubt, the European medieval period. The concept of “<i>Family</i>” was one of the fields that gradually evolved, from individuals who shared the same biological lineage, to members of the same “<i>House</i>”. One of the ways to study the concept of “<i>Family</i>” in ancient periods is through a bioarchaeological perspective, where both anthropology and genetics have proven to be essential disciplines for studying “<i>Families</i>”. Through burial rituals, observing whether the graves were single or multiple, as is carried out in the study of human remains, we discuss the profound contribution of anthropology to the “<i>Family</i>” investigation, through mobility studies, the investigation of biological sex, observing certain congenital anomalies or, even, the study of certain ancient infectious diseases. Concerning genetics, the study of bones or teeth allows us to determine whether individuals were from the same close family or if they belonged to the same lineage through the maternal and paternal sides, being one of the only scientific ways of proposing social relationships between individuals, such as that created through adoption.
The exploration and advancement of feminism are vital for addressing critical issues such as social progress, equitable education, and healthcare access. This paper comprehensively examines the feminist movement’s impact on architecture over the past century, identifying key trends and significant areas to establish an academic foundation for feminist architecture. A literature review on feminism in urban planning, architecture, landscape design, and urban safety highlights the current research focus on feminist architectural development. Furthermore, this paper traces the evolution of feminist architecture through both purpose-driven and process-oriented approaches, exploring the interplay between feminist and modern architectural practices. It specifically examines the development of feminist architecture within the Chinese context from two perspectives: the influence of feminist thought on architecture and the evolution of gendered spaces within the “Residence and Courtyard” model. By comparing the internal logic of feminist architectural development in China and the West, this study investigates how geopolitical culture and regional differences shape the future trajectory of this field. Unlike traditional feminist architectural research, which often emphasizes women’s practices within specific feminist ideologies or focuses on visual culture and psychological interpretations of gendered spaces, this paper redefines the scope of feminist architectural studies through a comparative analysis of historical and contemporary contexts, and Eastern and Western perspectives, employing a systematic genealogical approach.
In the introduction to her influential work on Asian American cultural studies and feminist materialist critique, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Lisa Lowe shatters the contradictions manifested in Asian immigration, wherein Asians’ entry into the United States marked them either as marginalized from “within” the national political sphere or as linguistically, culturally, and racially “outside” of the national polity For Asian immigrants, the debate of being simultaneously needed and excluded is no more evidenced historically than using Chinese labor during the California Gold Rush in the mid-nineteenth century. Their migratory relocation was hardly met with ease and public enthusiasm, however. Evoking anxiety in their Anglo counterparts, the Chinese were characterized as foreign noncitizens: barbaric, alien, and dangerous, the quintessential “yellow peril” threatening to displace white European immigrants such as the Irish. The irrational fear of the “Oriental” from the Far East led to a succession of immigration exclusion laws passed by Congress that denied the Chinese from entering the U.S. and their rights to naturalization in 1882. Passed by Congress and signed by President Chester A. Arthur, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act suspended the entry of Chinese laborers into the U.S. based on their nationality for ten years. This paper argues that the possibility of agency for Chinese workers existed throughout the exclusionary period. Specifically, this site of agency resides with Chinese women and is expressed through a literary mode. For instance, Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948) captures this moment of immigrant agency in the post-exclusion era. Lin, a pioneering Chinese writer and inventor who wrote texts such as My Country and My People (1935), The Importance of Living (1937), and Moment in Peking (1939), often utilized his narratives to bridge the clash between the East and West. Identifying what I see as the inadequacy of probing one of the earliest Chinese American texts from a rigid literary mode, I move to reconsider the novel as a legal counternarrative to the three exclusionary laws: the Page Law of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Cable Act of 1922. To direct my critical reorientation of Lin’s novel away from, though not necessarily against, literary castings of this early immigrant tale, I take the narrative as a strategic literary re-imagination that structures itself around these three legislative pieces to critique restrictive practices enacted upon the Chinese. The novel showcases how Chinese immigrants maneuvered and manipulated the legal system in their favor during assimilation. In this context, critical reappraisal is needed in scrutinizing how the Exclusion Act generated a wave of domestic-based diasporic relocation of Chinese workers from California to New York. Due to acute anti-Chinese sentiments on the West Coast, resetting Chinese workers in the northeast in search of a new Gold Mountain led to a unique phenomenon. This dispersal elevated Chinese women as valuable social capitals who transformed metropoles like New York City and redefined their views as nationalist subjects of the “about-to-be” in industrial capitalist modernity. Through a legal framework, then, Lin’s portrayal of the Fong clan suggests the emergence of a gendered Sino-immigrant agency, one that enabled the Chinese woman/mother to situate herself as the locus of the traditional patriarchal Chinese entrepreneurial family and the forefront of the northeast industrial capitalist scene.
The secession campaign in Catalonia created a political fracture into two sizeable and opposing citizenry segments, those who favored secession from Spain and those who were against it. In a series of longitudinal studies covering the entire period of regular surveys made by the official polling agency of the Regional Government (2006–2019), we showed that this fissure operated mainly through an ethnolinguistic cleavage based on family language and ascendancy origins. Media outlets linked to successive pro-secession Regional Governments accentuated the division. Here we extend these analyses till 2022, to capture potential variations in such a division across the five years following the failed secession attempt of October 2017. Present findings confirm the persistence of the fissure along similar lines: family language interacts with the influence of regional partisan media to keep the fracture alive, though with trends denoting an attenuation of antagonistic identity alignments. We detected, as well, a turning point for the attenuation of both political confrontation and social division, within a conflict that has not been solved, albeit it appears mitigated. We discuss how elapsed time after secession failure and the effects of several political and non-political events might have helped to dampen down divisive tensions and repair a serious fracture produced by the secession push.
This essay explores the dominant expectations of “objectivity” and “distance” that continue to penetrate classrooms and academic journals, and conferences and public spaces. In the process, I argue, they (re)produce everyday violences that stretch their slippery tentacles, keeping in suspension those who think, feel, write, and relate otherwise. In order to trace the lived effects of these processes, I focus here on several instances, their articulations and permutations, where I and those close to me were reminded, suspected, even accused—jokingly, scoldingly, teasingly, lovingly, and/or violently—of “being too close to it.” Here, “it” stands for a geographical location (“the field”), lived experience, and particular sensibility, struggle, and commitment that comes from being proximate—nationally/ethnically, geographically, politically, and affectively—to the field/home.
Factors leading to racial and ethnic differences in non-marital fertility, which account for nearly 41% of all births in the U.S., are not well understood. This study examines how mother–child relationships and parental control shape the likelihood of having a non-marital birth in adulthood among non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic Asian women from 1994–2009. This paper uses data from Waves I, III, and IV of Add Health (n = 7171) and event-history analysis to find that mother–child relationships are associated with the likelihood of having a non-marital birth, with variation by race and ethnicity. Maternal warmth and communication in adolescence are associated with a decreased likelihood of having a non-marital birth in adulthood, but only among non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic Asian women. Parent–child relationships are dynamic and can have lasting impacts on children’s fertility behaviors across the life course.
The idea for this Special Issue of Genealogy came from my fascination not just with my own family history research, but through my involvement with groups of other passionate fellow family history researchers [...]
Bringing together two areas of scholarship on family history—separation and blended families—this article adds a new perspective to our understanding of how kin networks in early modern England were maintained, and on the factors that influenced the ongoing processes of negotiating them. The extensive correspondence of Bess of Hardwick and her children and step-children enables an investigation into what happened when a couple at the centre of a blended family network separated. Despite their unique political circumstances, the Cavendish-Talbot family offer a useful case study to understand some of the factors shaping the lives of separated wives in early modern England. For elite families the success of the house and dynasty could be jeopardized by the breakdown of a marriage, and never more so than if the family was a blended one. While Bess’s relationships with and support for her children caused problems with her husband, their invaluable support indicates further strategies that were available to separated wives. Bess’s children advocated for her at court, supported her in legal suits and actively negotiated between their parents. The Cavendish-Talbot family relationships were complex and loyalties did not necessarily follow expected patterns. However, in their complexity, and through the large number of letters surviving between the family, they offer a unique opportunity to consider the role of family members for separated wives.
Family history has become a significant contributor to public and social histories exploring and (re)discovering the micro narratives of the past. Due to the growing democratisation of digital access to documents and the proliferation of family history media platforms, family history is now challenging traditional custodianship of the past. Family history research has moved beyond the realms of archives, libraries and community-based history societies to occupy an important space in the public domain. This paper reports on some of the findings of a recent study into the historical thinking and research practices of Australian family historians. Using a case study methodology, it examines the proposition that researching family history has major impacts on historical understanding and consciousness using the analytic frameworks of Jorn Rüsen’s Disciplinary Matrix and his Typology of Historical Consciousness. This research not only proposes these major impacts but argues that some family historians are shifting the historical landscape through the dissemination of their research for public consumption beyond traditional family history audiences.
The following article analyzes the novels Debimos ser Felices, by Rafaela Lahore and Mugre rosa, by Fernanda Trías, both published in 2020. While Lahore works her way through remembrance in an intimate, fragmentary, autobiographical way, Trías’ narrative is complex, apocalyptic, and dystopic. It ranges from a progressive uncertainty about the present to memory’s capacity to hang on to family affections. However, they converge in their narratives’ subtle, dreamlike atmospheres that focus on the voice of children fluctuating between abnormality and monstrosity. Their reflections emphasize the reconstruction of their respective genealogies through reminiscence.
---
El siguiente artículo analiza las novelas Debimos ser felices, de Rafaela Lahore, y Mugre rosa, de Fernanda Trías, ambas publicadas en 2020. Si bien comparten ciertas atmósferas sutiles, casi oníricas, Lahore trabaja el recuerdo de manera íntima, fragmentaria y autobiográfica, mientras que la narración de Trías se proyecta como una compleja novela apocalíptica, distópica, que oscila entre la progresiva incertidumbre del presente y la capacidad del recuerdo para aferrarse a los afectos familiares. Ambas ponen en el centro de sus reflexiones a niños y niñas que transitan entre la anomalía y la monstruosidad, con un fuerte acento en la reconstrucción memoriosa de sus respectivas genealogías.
Background: One can argue that literacy practices work to produce forms of literacy knowledge and literate children in early childhood contexts. However, one needs to interrogate how these literacy practices create technologies of power that construct and normalise the school ready literate child.
Aim: The ethnographic study employed in this article explored everyday literacy practices in early childhood contexts that were considered ‘usual’, the kinds of literate children these practices engendered and its normalising effects on children and teachers.
Settings: The study was conducted in two early childhood centres with two early childhood teachers and teaching children between the ages of 3 and 4.
Methods: The study was qualitative in nature and used participant observation. A genealogical analysis of literacy practices showed how technologies of power were embodied in different literacy practices that worked to construct and normalise the school ready child in different ways.
Results: The findings revealed that everyday literacy practices were used to produce a literate child through disciplinary processes of observation, normalisation and examination. These literacy practices operated in covert ways where school readiness was tied to educational success. However, during this process of normalisation, children began to [re]position themselves within the literacy space, showing individual agency and self-regulation.
Conclusion: Although the findings of this study are not generalisable, it has implications for how literacy and literacy practices are conceptualised in early childhood settings. This article advocates a reconceptualisation of school readiness by questioning embedded practices within the competence model of school readiness and calls for the early childhood field to dissect incisively what and who are advantaged and disadvantaged through early literacy practices.
Special aspects of education, Theory and practice of education