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Intimate encounters: the negotiation of difference within the family and its implications for social relations in public space
Author(s) -
Valentine Gill,
Piekut Aneta,
Harris Catherine
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the geographical journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.071
H-Index - 64
eISSN - 1475-4959
pISSN - 0016-7398
DOI - 10.1111/geoj.12095
Subject(s) - negotiation , diversity (politics) , context (archaeology) , sociology , social psychology , space (punctuation) , product (mathematics) , public life , gender studies , family life , survey data collection , social group , psychology , social science , geography , political science , politics , anthropology , linguistics , philosophy , statistics , geometry , mathematics , archaeology , law
This paper focuses on the neglected issue of encounters with difference within the context of family life at a moment in time when families are increasingly characterised by dissimilarity as a product of mobility and individualisation. The study upon which this paper is based involved both a survey of social attitudes (survey n = 3021) and qualitative multi‐stage research ( n = 60). The evidence of the findings is that intra‐familial diversity does produce more positive attitudes in public life towards the specific social group that an individual family member is perceived to represent. However, such positive attitudes are not translated beyond this specific ‘difference’ to challenge wider prejudices towards other groups. As such, this research contributes to literatures on geographies of encounter and the geographies of family life by exposing the limits of intimate contact with difference in changing the way social relationships are lived in the wider world.