Imagining Families through Stories and Rituals
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2004
Abstract
Family is an idea constituted in and through the images produced by family researchers, by families themselves, and by canonical narratives of family circulating through culture. As family researchers, we are preoccupied with imagining families. In the research we conduct, as well as in our personal lives, we make and shape family experience. All of us tell stories about families; we represent, dramatize, emplot, moralize, idealize, and formularize according to accepted conventions of academic storytelling. The texts, charts, tables, graphs, and statistical inferences that we produce represent the families we study, but they are not the families themselves. Usually, they are hard-boiled images of families, a genre of family narrative produced and governed by ritualized practices of social science research traditions.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Imagining Families through Stories and Rituals, in A. L. Vangelisti (Ed.), Handbook of Family Communication, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, p. 513-538
Scholar Commons Citation
Jorgenson, Jane and Bochner, Arthur P., "Imagining Families through Stories and Rituals" (2004). Communication Faculty Publications. 83.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/spe_facpub/83
