Vanessa May
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 181578 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Vanessa May |
| NOMBRES | Vanessa |
| APELLIDO | May |
| FIRMA | MAY V |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1547-9352 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 64 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 557 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 62 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Theorising Ageing in Place During Urban Regeneration
Urban regeneration reshapes the meaning, use, and potential of urban spaces, yet its implications for older residents remain under theorised. This is despite the growing ageing urban population and policy focus on ‘ageing in place’, supporting older adults to remain in their homes and communities. This paper contributes to ageing in place literature by introducing Brenner and Schmid’s multi‐dimensional framework of space, which conceptualises spa…
For the benefit of mothers and children
This article examines how day care and welfare became tied in United States social welfare policy, as programs that aimed to serve two constituencies—mothers and children—who federal policymakers had historically treated as non-workers. One set of policymakers and child welfare reformers, led by the Children’s Bureau, envisioned a universal system of social welfare protections, including welfare and daycare, specifically designed for women and ch…
Sociology of Everyday Life in the Past and Future Uses of the Mass Observation Project
This article, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Sociological Research Online, explores the sociological uses of the Mass Observation Project (MOP) for the study of everyday life. Mass Observation has been entangled with British sociology since the growth of the movement in the early 20th century, but has found most use as an archive for historians. After a hiatus in the mid-20th century, MO was renewed in the 1980s, with a new panel of responde…
Family life in urban public spaces
This article contributes to a reconceptualisation of the boundaries of sociological attention regarding where family is enacted. Despite being aware of the cultural contingency of the distinction that is drawn between the public and private spheres, family scholars in the Global North tend to study families as bounded units with an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, and as spatially centred in the home. I argue that there is a need to systematically expl…
It Will Be Our Job to Make Them Workers
Journal Article “It Will Be Our Job to Make Them Workers”: Child Labor and Youth Employment in Postwar America Get access Vanessa May Vanessa May Vanessa May is an associate professor of history at Hunter College, City University of New York Readers may contact May at [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 110, Issue 3, December 2023, Pages 474–496, …
On not 'being there
This paper investigates transnational families' experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and the accompanying sudden and unexpected travel restrictions. Our data consist of written stories collected in April-June 2020 from migrants with ageing kin living in another country. For many respondents, the situation provoked an acutely felt urge for physical proximity with their families. By analysing their experiences of 'not being there', we seek…
Ageing in Place Over Time
Ageing in place' is a key component of UK policy, aimed at supporting older people to remain living in their own homes and communities for as long as possible. Although wide-ranging, the scholarly literature in this field has not sufficiently examined the interconnections between ageing in place and the changing experience of 'home' over time. This article addresses this gap in a novel way by bringing together qualitative secondary analysis of lo…
Micro-atmospheres of place
This paper examines the role that light and dark play in how residents of Claremont Court, a modernist housing scheme in Edinburgh, Scotland, form a sense of atmosphere of place. Our findings show that the design of Claremont Court affords particular experiences of light and dark and of related warmth and cold that are meaningful to how residents experience and feel about the Court. While atmospheres tend to be conceptualised as spatially and tem…
Neighbours, neighbouring and acquaintanceship
In 2012, David Morgan gave a talk titled ‘Neighbours, neighbouring and acquaintanceship: some further thoughts’ at the University of Turku, Finland. In this article we engage in dialogue with Morgan’s talk, as well as his 2009 book Acquaintances , in particular the observations he made about the simultaneous closeness and distance that characterises neighbouring relationships. We suggest that using the metaphors of elasticity and stickiness inste…
Holding back and hidden family displays
This article explores aunthood as a morally charged category. By conducting a thematic analysis, we analyse advice-seeking posts published in Dear Savvy Auntie, an American online advice forum for aunts. We examine the moral tales of aunthood and particularly why some aunts might feel that they cannot openly articulate their sense of responsibility within the family context, and the consequences of this. This leads us to assert that one way of 'd…
Material-temporal registers of belonging
This paper explores the interplay of temporality and the built environment in diverging discourses of belonging at Claremont Court, a modernist housing scheme in Edinburgh which was designed in 1958 by Sir Basil Spence, a key figure of post-war architecture. It explores belonging to place as a complex temporal process, in which the individual is connected to the built environment through various material-temporal registers. While existing analyse…
Researching embodied relationships with place
This article explores the utility of sit-down interviews in researching people's embodied relationships with place. We offer a critical intervention in the ongoing debates concerning methodological 'innovation' by exploring under which circumstances sit-down interviews can produce dynamic and embodied knowledge. We propose that when conducted in situ in an environment well known by both research participants and researchers, and when focused on i…
Introduction
At a time when nationalist sentiment is on the rise, this special issue takes stock of how sociology can contribute to understanding the past, present and future of nationalism. In contrast to declarations of 'the end of history', which was also meant to herald increasing integration due to a lowering of cultural and national barriers, nationalism never went away. The articles in this collection engage with the question of nationalism at a theore…
Displaying morally responsible motherhood
This study examined how lone mothers rationalise their work during non-standard hours (e.g., evenings and weekends), which they perceive as problematic in terms of child wellbeing, and thereby as violating the culturally shared moral order of ‘good’ motherhood. The data comprise interviews with 16 Finnish lone mothers, analysed as accounts, with a special focus on their linguistic features. The mothers displayed morally responsible motherhood thr…
Politics of the Pantry
Review Article| September 01 2019 Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century AmericaLB, Emily E.. Twarog New York: Oxford University Press, 2017xiv + 189 pp., $34.95 (cloth) Vanessa May Vanessa May Seton Hall University Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2019) 16 (3): 130–131. https://…
Brokering Servitude
Historians have long noted the exploitation of domestic workers in different times and places. They have also demonstrated the occupation’s embeddedness in American racial and gendered hierarchies. In his dense new book, Andrew Urban places the history of domestic work in transnational scope, tying together the histories of different groups of workers over time and space. He argues that domestic employment brokers commodified immigrant and migran…
Michael Banton and Sociology
Professor Michael Banton died in May 2018 aged 91. His long career involved a decade at the University of Edinburgh in the Department of Social Anthropology before spending the rest of his career at the University of Bristol. In Bristol he was Professor of Sociology (1965–1992) and subsequently Emeritus Professor, during which time he remained deeply engaged in scholarly research and publication (see Obituaries). It seems a fitting tribute, in th…
The Involved Observer
The aims of this article are to, first, empirically investigate the experiences of aunts, who to a large extent have been ignored by family sociologists. Second, we aim to add to the existing theorising of everyday family life by bringing Simmel's work - hitherto under-utilised in the field - into dialogue with the sociological literature on doing and negotiating families. Based on a textual analysis of online accounts posted on a US advice forum…
Belonging across the lifetime
Our sense of belonging rarely stands still, yet the research literature has hitherto paid little attention to the temporal nature of belonging. Based on an analysis of 62 Mass Observation Project (MOP) accounts written by people living in the UK aged from their 20s to their 90s, this paper argues that as people age, how they locate belonging in time shifts. This has to do with changing concerns related to belonging, but also to metaphysical issue…
Researching the home using architectural and social science methods
This article explores the possibilities of using innovative, interdisciplinary methods for understanding home-making. Drawing on a study of Claremont Court (1959-1962), a post-war social housing scheme designed by Sir Basil Spence in Edinburgh, we discuss the methodological potentials of combining architectural and social science methods to study the home. Claremont Court was built in the post-war era as part of Scotland's social housing drive. I…
Families and Relationships' e-Special Issue Introduction
This 'Families and Relationships' e-Special Issue contains a selection of 10 articles previously published in Sociology. In this Introduction, we first outline the broader sub-disciplinary context and explain our selection criteria. The increased popularity of families and relationships as a focus of sociological study is reflected in the dominance of articles published in the 1990s and later. Our selection highlights the following developments w…
Capitalist Family Values
Polly Reed Myers’s book began, she tells us, with one box in the Boeing Historical Archives. The result is a “micro-level” analysis, organized into case studies, that examines the gendered work culture of the Boeing Corporation between World War II and the dawn of the twenty-first century (8). Myers demonstrates how the shift from World War II–era fraternal welfare capitalism to twenty-first century neoliberalism affected gender equality in large…
Belonging from afar
Belonging is a fundamentally temporal experience that is anchored not only in place but also time, yet this dimension of belonging has so far remained under-researched. Based on an analysis of 25 British Mass Observation Project accounts I argue that a focus on the temporal location of belonging contributes to our knowledge about how memory is used to create a sense of belonging, and the consequences this has for the self. The paper is structured…
Just One? Solo Dining, Gender and Temporal Belonging in Public Spaces
In recent years, various lifestyle websites have offered tips on eating out alone as well as lists of the best restaurants for solo dining in major cities of the world. Utilising the theoretical concepts of participation units, territories of the self (Goffman 1972[1971]) and belonging (May 2011, 2013), this paper explores the challenges that spatio-temporal conventions pose for women solo diners in particular. Through the lens of solo dining, we…
Positive Parenting and Parenting Stress Among Working Mothers in Finland, the UK and the Netherlands
This study explored the effects of working time patterns on positive parenting and parenting stress, and the moderating effects of working hours, the unpredictability of work schedules, and autonomy over working time in a European context. This cross-national survey study compared Finnish (n = 337), Dutch (n = 283) and British (n = 317) mothers with children under the age of 13, using structural equation modeling with a multigroup procedure. We f…
Self, Belonging and Social Change
One of the central interests of sociology is the relationship between self and society, and in particular how social change affects individuality, constraining or liberating the selves that we can be. This article proposes that because a sense of belonging plays a central role in connecting the person to the social, it can act as a window into studying the relationship between social change and the self. Furthermore, belonging offers a complex pe…
Connecting Self to Society
On Being a 'Good' Mother
This article examines how women present a moral self in relation to public norms that constitute'good' motherhood.Thefocus of this article is on two types of written life story: first, those written by mothers who express a past or current wish to divorce and, second, those written by lone mothers.The life stories offer insights into how individuals account for their actions in situations where they face the moral dilemma of clashing ethical norm…
Belonging from afar
Belonging is a fundamentally temporal experience that is anchored not only in place but also time, yet this dimension of belonging has so far remained under-researched. Based on an analysis of 25 British Mass Observation Project accounts I argue that a focus on the temporal location of belonging contributes to our knowledge about how memory is used to create a sense of belonging, and the consequences this has for the self. The paper is structured…
Childcare and parental work schedules
This study examined the association between parental work schedules and non-parental childcare arrangements among dual-earner families in Finland, the Netherlands and the UK. Data from the ‘Families 24/7’ web-survey were used, including 937 parents with children aged 0-12 years. Results showed a negative association between non-standard work and formal childcare across all countries. A similar association was found for using a combination of form…
Ambivalence and the Paradoxes of Grandparenting
This paper focuses on 'normative talk' about grandparenting. It is based on a secondary analysis of a study involving 46 interviews with grandparents. It identifies two main cultural norms of grandparenting that emerged from the data - 'being there' and 'not interfering'. There were very high levels of consensus in the study that these constituted what grandparents 'should and should not' do. However, these two norms can be contradictory, and are…
Everyday Belonging and Ageing
In this paper, we discuss findings from a study on intergenerational relationalities in order to examine some aspects of how people over 50 years of age experience belonging in their everyday lives. Belonging emerged not as a single unitary 'thing', but a complex intersecting of relational, cultural and sensory experiences. We explore how people, place, time and cultural context intertwined in people's sense of belonging to place. Although much p…
What does the duration of belonging tell us about the temporal self
Belonging is a fundamentally temporal experience, yet there exists to date little research on belonging as a temporal phenomenon. This paper offers an important contribution to the literatures on belonging, time and the self by exploring how the experience of belonging is tethered to time. Focussing on the temporal dimensions of the interconnection between belonging and the self contributes to our understanding of how people experience time and c…
When Recognition Fails
This article examines British Mass Observation Project (MOP) accounts written by people who say that they have struggled with belonging. The main focus lies on acts of misrecognition that occur within everyday relationships, and the impact that the ensuing relational non-belonging has had on the MOP writers' sense of self. The concept of 'invisible strangers' is developed to account for experiences of misrecognition that are perceived to be the r…
On not 'being there
This paper investigates transnational families' experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and the accompanying sudden and unexpected travel restrictions. Our data consist of written stories collected in April-June 2020 from migrants with ageing kin living in another country. For many respondents, the situation provoked an acutely felt urge for physical proximity with their families. By analysing their experiences of 'not being there', we seek…
Belonging across the lifetime
Our sense of belonging rarely stands still, yet the research literature has hitherto paid little attention to the temporal nature of belonging. Based on an analysis of 62 Mass Observation Project (MOP) accounts written by people living in the UK aged from their 20s to their 90s, this paper argues that as people age, how they locate belonging in time shifts. This has to do with changing concerns related to belonging, but also to metaphysical issue…
Researching the home using architectural and social science methods
This article explores the possibilities of using innovative, interdisciplinary methods for understanding home-making. Drawing on a study of Claremont Court (1959-1962), a post-war social housing scheme designed by Sir Basil Spence in Edinburgh, we discuss the methodological potentials of combining architectural and social science methods to study the home. Claremont Court was built in the post-war era as part of Scotland's social housing drive. I…
Holding back and hidden family displays
This article explores aunthood as a morally charged category. By conducting a thematic analysis, we analyse advice-seeking posts published in Dear Savvy Auntie, an American online advice forum for aunts. We examine the moral tales of aunthood and particularly why some aunts might feel that they cannot openly articulate their sense of responsibility within the family context, and the consequences of this. This leads us to assert that one way of 'd…
Researching embodied relationships with place
This article explores the utility of sit-down interviews in researching people's embodied relationships with place. We offer a critical intervention in the ongoing debates concerning methodological 'innovation' by exploring under which circumstances sit-down interviews can produce dynamic and embodied knowledge. We propose that when conducted in situ in an environment well known by both research participants and researchers, and when focused on i…
Why Can't They Agree? The Underlying Complexity of Contact and Residence Disputes
The Children Act 1989 gave priority to the welfare of children when family courts make orders for residence and contact. As a consequence, other issues came to be viewed as less significant. In this article, we examine the court records of three County Courts to determine to what extent the disputes that parents bring to court are actually about children (seen as legitimate concerns) as opposed to other matters (seen as illegitimate concerns). Ou…
Lone motherhood past and present
The aim of this study is to examine how Finnish lone mothers of two age cohorts construct their lone motherhood and also to show how the meanings ascribed to social phenomena are socially and historically embedded. Finland presents an interesting case for studying the links between the social and the individual because the country has experienced rapid social shifts since World War II. It is shown how specific social contexts to some degree set t…
Ageing in Place Over Time
Ageing in place' is a key component of UK policy, aimed at supporting older people to remain living in their own homes and communities for as long as possible. Although wide-ranging, the scholarly literature in this field has not sufficiently examined the interconnections between ageing in place and the changing experience of 'home' over time. This article addresses this gap in a novel way by bringing together qualitative secondary analysis of lo…
Material-temporal registers of belonging
This paper explores the interplay of temporality and the built environment in diverging discourses of belonging at Claremont Court, a modernist housing scheme in Edinburgh which was designed in 1958 by Sir Basil Spence, a key figure of post-war architecture. It explores belonging to place as a complex temporal process, in which the individual is connected to the built environment through various material-temporal registers. While existing analyse…
Introduction
At a time when nationalist sentiment is on the rise, this special issue takes stock of how sociology can contribute to understanding the past, present and future of nationalism. In contrast to declarations of 'the end of history', which was also meant to herald increasing integration due to a lowering of cultural and national barriers, nationalism never went away. The articles in this collection engage with the question of nationalism at a theore…
The Involved Observer
The aims of this article are to, first, empirically investigate the experiences of aunts, who to a large extent have been ignored by family sociologists. Second, we aim to add to the existing theorising of everyday family life by bringing Simmel's work - hitherto under-utilised in the field - into dialogue with the sociological literature on doing and negotiating families. Based on a textual analysis of online accounts posted on a US advice forum…
Narrative identity and the re-conceptualization of lone motherhood
Lone motherhood tends to be viewed as something a woman is, an identity that defines the woman. This article takes a different route into lone motherhood by focusing on identity construction in the life stories of four Finnish lone mothers. Faced with dominant narratives that define lone motherhood in negative terms, the narrators construct a counter-normative account of their lone motherhood through a dialogue with different cultural narratives …
Are we really saying farewell to family? A response to Edwards and Gillies’ ‘Farewell to family?’
entitled 'Farewell to family? Notes on an argument for retaining the concept', which the authors admit to being to a degree polemical, is in reaction to the recent developments within the field that is perhaps best known as 'family sociology' or 'family studies'. As a result of the increasing demographic diversity of different family forms as well as of household formation (these do not always coincide), and the ensuing debates over whether this …
Meanings of Lone Motherhood within a Broader Family Context
In this paper, the theoretical approach to the concept of lone motherhood is adopted from 'new' family sociology where families are understood to be dynamic processes constituted by webs of relationships. I analyse life stories written by lone mothers in order to examine the meanings that they give to their lone motherhood in relation to their larger family context. This approach reveals that, along with the concept 'family', the category 'lone m…
Just One? Solo Dining, Gender and Temporal Belonging in Public Spaces
In recent years, various lifestyle websites have offered tips on eating out alone as well as lists of the best restaurants for solo dining in major cities of the world. Utilising the theoretical concepts of participation units, territories of the self (Goffman 1972[1971]) and belonging (May 2011, 2013), this paper explores the challenges that spatio-temporal conventions pose for women solo diners in particular. Through the lens of solo dining, we…
Divorce in Finnish women's life stories
Lone motherhood past and present
The aim of this study is to examine how Finnish lone mothers of two age cohorts construct their lone motherhood and also to show how the meanings ascribed to social phenomena are socially and historically embedded. Finland presents an interesting case for studying the links between the social and the individual because the country has experienced rapid social shifts since World War II. It is shown how specific social contexts to some degree set t…
Narrative identity and the re-conceptualization of lone motherhood
Lone motherhood tends to be viewed as something a woman is, an identity that defines the woman. This article takes a different route into lone motherhood by focusing on identity construction in the life stories of four Finnish lone mothers. Faced with dominant narratives that define lone motherhood in negative terms, the narrators construct a counter-normative account of their lone motherhood through a dialogue with different cultural narratives …
Making Families
Why Can't They Agree? The Underlying Complexity of Contact and Residence Disputes
The Children Act 1989 gave priority to the welfare of children when family courts make orders for residence and contact. As a consequence, other issues came to be viewed as less significant. In this article, we examine the court records of three County Courts to determine to what extent the disputes that parents bring to court are actually about children (seen as legitimate concerns) as opposed to other matters (seen as illegitimate concerns). Ou…
Meanings of Lone Motherhood within a Broader Family Context
In this paper, the theoretical approach to the concept of lone motherhood is adopted from 'new' family sociology where families are understood to be dynamic processes constituted by webs of relationships. I analyse life stories written by lone mothers in order to examine the meanings that they give to their lone motherhood in relation to their larger family context. This approach reveals that, along with the concept 'family', the category 'lone m…
Divorce in Finnish women's life stories
Metodologiska val i studien av biografiskt material - metodologiska val och deras epistemologiska konsekvenser i studien av biografiskt material
Epistemological Questions Concerning the Study of Biographical. Material: The Consequences of Choise of Methodology Using my own research on written life stories of Finnish lone mothers as a case study, this paper examines the consequences of choice of methodology when using biographical material as data. I focus on two methodo-logical alternatives: analysing biographical material as documents of preceding events, or as meaning-making con-structs…
Use of Mixed Methods in a Study of Residence and Contact Disputes between Divorced and Separated Parents
This article discusses a study of residence and contact disputes in court which utilised a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods in order to gain a multidimensional picture of these disputes. It is argued that in a study such as this, the different datasets are best viewed as complementary, rather than as a means of validating each other. The data from each stage address a different aspect of these court disputes, thus offering a better…
Ambivalence and the Paradoxes of Grandparenting
This paper focuses on 'normative talk' about grandparenting. It is based on a secondary analysis of a study involving 46 interviews with grandparents. It identifies two main cultural norms of grandparenting that emerged from the data - 'being there' and 'not interfering'. There were very high levels of consensus in the study that these constituted what grandparents 'should and should not' do. However, these two norms can be contradictory, and are…
On Being a 'Good' Mother
This article examines how women present a moral self in relation to public norms that constitute'good' motherhood.Thefocus of this article is on two types of written life story: first, those written by mothers who express a past or current wish to divorce and, second, those written by lone mothers.The life stories offer insights into how individuals account for their actions in situations where they face the moral dilemma of clashing ethical norm…
Lone Motherhood as a Category of Practice
This paper offers a critical examination of the category 'lone mother', which tends to be viewed as an identity category by both 'lay' people and social scientists. This in turn leads to the category 'lone mother' becoming reified, while the socially constructed nature of it remains hidden. The aim of this paper is to find a way of analyzing the lives of lone mothers without making totalizing claims about these women as individuals, but at the sa…
Sociology of Personal Life
Introducing a Sociology of Personal Life
Changing Notions of Lone Motherhood in Twentieth-Century Finland
Through written life stories of lone mothers, this article examines changes in lone motherhood in twentieth-century Finland. While the older life-story writers' narratives are clearly influenced by an 'ethos of survival' and the regulation of female sexuality, the younger writers relate their experiences with the help of scripts on gender equality and the psychological importance of 'good' parenting. These narrative shifts point to important chan…
Self, Belonging and Social Change
One of the central interests of sociology is the relationship between self and society, and in particular how social change affects individuality, constraining or liberating the selves that we can be. This article proposes that because a sense of belonging plays a central role in connecting the person to the social, it can act as a window into studying the relationship between social change and the self. Furthermore, belonging offers a complex pe…
Are we really saying farewell to family? A response to Edwards and Gillies’ ‘Farewell to family?’
entitled 'Farewell to family? Notes on an argument for retaining the concept', which the authors admit to being to a degree polemical, is in reaction to the recent developments within the field that is perhaps best known as 'family sociology' or 'family studies'. As a result of the increasing demographic diversity of different family forms as well as of household formation (these do not always coincide), and the ensuing debates over whether this …
Working at Home
The history of domestic service in America in the 19th and 20th centuries provides a lens through which to study the history of race, class, and gender. Yet, scholars have struggled to reconcile the history of household workers with that of workers in more public places like factories and shops. Historians have debated whether domestic workers were capable of collective labor resistance and how the issue of race has shaped the experience of domes…
Where It All Began
Sensory Belongings
Everyday Personal Life
Belonging
Relational Belongings
The Loss of Tradition
Conclusion
The Relationship Between Self and Society
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