While it continues to ebb and flow in its construction and composition, the family (in its many iterations) remains a crucially important and influential social institution and economic construct (Tankersley 2008). As a result, shifting ideologies surrounding “the family” inform and carry implications for economic, political, cultural, and social practices and activities. As Turner and West (2015) note, the family is often considered as a group markedly different from other groups to which individuals belong. This is due to a number of interacting factors, including feelings of obligation, emotional ties, unique communication patterns, and the contribution of family to one’s evolving sense of identity and self-worth (Turner and West 2013).
As a result of this dominance and influence of the family, this special issue centers on family-focused library and information science (LIS) research and is borne from conversations and reflections posed at a 2019 iConference Session for Interaction and Engagement of the same name. In proposing the iConference session and this special issue, we hoped to draw attention to the possibilities that considerations of the family may open up within LIS scholarship, allowing for different ways of thinking about central theoretical concepts and offering alternatives to dominant methodological approaches. Familial relationships have been central to our own work in various ways (e.g., Barriage 2016; Barriage and Searles 2015; Dalmer 2018, 2020), and we have experienced, firsthand, the intriguing questions and unique challenges that situating one’s research within this context can pose.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Illinois School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/113646
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2021 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Library Trends 70 (2) Fall 2021: Family Matters: Mapping Information Phenomena within the Context of the Family. Edited by Nicole K. Dalmer and Sarah Barriage.
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