Family and Gender

Family and intimate relations are today the subject of renewed interest wihin sociology. That institutions such as the family, marriage and division of work between the genders are broken down or altered, does something to the glue bindng interpersonal relations. Some claim that this presses forward new forms of intimacy and solidarity. Others believe that the restructuring of the family as an institution is leading to loss of solidarity and belonging.

Several researchers also turn their attention towards the role the homely, emotional and personal plays in the socialisation, or in other words in the forming of our identity and our life project. For example, the increased interest for the meaning of intimate relations in relation to the recreation of and changing of class and class relations. Questions connected to family, love and sexuality have also been revived due to increased globalisation and a more multicultural society.

The department's research on gender and family touches upon such questions as:

• What happens to work, sexuality and love when traditional gender barriers are broken down or new ones comstructed?
• What new opportunities and challenges face the family in a more globalised and multicultural society?
• How are our romances shaped by our social class and ethnicity?

Research projects

The researchers on gender and family are connected to different Norwegian and international collbaorative projects.

• New family cultures investigates the meeting point between the Norwegian gender equality model and new family forms in a more globalised Norway.
• In other people's homes is an project based at the department which develops new methodological approaches to the relationship between childhood, class and gender.
• The business elite in contemporary Norway studies romance, parenthood and family organisation in a cosmopolitan upper middle class.
• Personal development and sociocultural change will develop methodological approaches that get to grips with the relationship between psychological, sociological and historic processes in the formation of identity.
• The social meaning of children sheds light upon the fertility choices of men and women in light of how laws and rules function in a social and economic context.

Both Master's students and research fellows are connected to these research projects. These are in this area's research group but also external researchers are included.the researcher group will hold monthly seminars from 2011 onwards.