Familial pragmatism: modern families navigating the private/public junction

Abstract

Familial pragmatism: modern families navigating the private/public junctionThis double-volume Special Issue (SI) aims at mapping the tensions that shape families and family life at the junction of what is private and personal about families and for their members, on the one hand, and how families are rendered public and political through external actors and agendas, on the other hand. As per the SI's title -The privacy and politicisation of parenting in Europe: family as a set of practices and as an object of external influence -we specifically foreground the clashes and mutual interdependencies between the two -private and public -domains of family life in the European perspective.As the main argument, we stipulate that lasting tensions and the need to either reconcile, or, at least, successfully navigate between what is private and public about the family, can be tracked not only to scholarly debates and theorisation of families (see: Bridges, 2011;Hao, 2003;Hartman, 1996), but is also inherent in the experiences that families and their members enjoy and endure across private and public domains. In this Guest Editorial to the double volume of Social Policy Issues, we recapitulate some of the main points in the debates within the private/public lenses for studying families, as well as propose a navigating concept of familial pragmatism as our contribution to the means of observing the private/political junction in family life.

Different methods – lasting tensions: exploring familial pragmatism through a methodological lens

“…Going forward, we postulate a need for combining explorations of family practices and family pragmatism with mixed-methods approaches. In order to fully understand the processes of "doing family" (Morgan, 1996) and familial pragmatism (Chang, 1997;Pustułka & Sikorska, 2023), family research should strive to break the existing divides -both between the individual and structural perspectives, and the qualitative and quantitative methods that tend to come with them.…”