Shared Lives

Written by three authors who combine a wealth of expertise as researchers, clinicians and practitioners, this challenging book presents a renewed vision for the support of people with intellectual disabilities.

Lyndall Gordon, the acclaimed biographer of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, grew up in Cape Town, South Africa in the 1950s. This intimate and moving memoir is the story of Rosie, Ellie, and Romy- her closest friends from childhood until their early deaths. Daughters of Jewish immigrants, these girls grew into adulthood together, shaped by their parents' and grandparents' Eastern European heritages, the stifling atmosphere of their proper girls' school, South Africa's politics, and the intense pressure within their bourgeois milieu for early marriage. Though miles distanced them as they grew older and went off to New York, Oxford and Paris, their bonds of friendship remained strong, separated only by their untimely deaths.

With a growing population, rising housing costs and housing providers struggling to meet demand for affordable accommodation, more and more people in the UK find themselves sharing their living spaces with people from outside of their families at some point in their lives. Focusing on sharers in a wide variety of contexts and at all stages of the life course, Shared Housing, Shared Lives demonstrates how personal relationships are the key to whether shared living arrangements falter or flourish. Indeed, this book demonstrates how issues such as finances, domestic space and daily routines are all factors which can impact upon personal relationships and wider understandings of the home and privacy. By directing attention towards people and relationships rather than bricks and mortar, Shared Housing, Shared Lives is essential reading for students and researchers in fields such as sociology, housing studies, social policy, cultural anthropology and demography, as well as for researchers and practitioners working in these areas

Animals are conscious beings that form their own perspective regarding the lifeworlds in which they exist, and according to which they act in relation to their species and other animals. In recent decades a thorough transformation in societal research has taken place, as many groups that were previously perceived as being passive or subjugated objects have become active subjects. This fundamental reassessment, first promoted by feminist and radical studies, has subsequently been followed by spatial and material turns that have brought non-human agency to the fore. In human–animal relations, despite a power imbalance, animals are not mere objects but act as agents. They shape our material world and our encounters with them influence the way we think about the world and ourselves. This book focuses on animal agency and interactions between humans and animals. It explores the reciprocity of human–animal relations and the capacity of animals to act and shape human societies. The chapters draw on examples from the Global North to explore how human life in modernity has been and is shaped by the sentience, autonomy, and physicality of various animals, particularly in landscapes where communities and wild animals exist in close proximity. It offers a timely contribution to animal studies, environmental geography, environmental history, and social science and humanities studies of the environment more broadly.

Sharing Lives explores the most important human relationships which last for the longest period of our lives: those between adult children and their parents. Offering a new reference point for studies on the sociology of family, the book focuses on the reasons and results of lifelong intergenerational solidarity by looking at individuals, families and societies. This monograph combines theoretical reasoning with empirical research, based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The book focuses on the following areas: ● Adult family generations, from young adulthood to the end of life, and beyond ● Contact, conflict, coresidence, money, time, inheritance ● Consequences of lifelong solidarity ● Family generations and the relationship of family and the welfare state ● Connections between family cohesion and social inequality. Sharing Lives offers reliable findings on the basis of state-of-the-art methods and the best available data, and presents these findings in an accessible manner. This book will appeal to researchers, policymakers and graduate students in the areas of sociology, political science, psychology and economics.

With many couples separating each year, the question of how to determine the financial and property consequences of such separation has always been a problem area within family law. Should the principles be the same for married and cohabiting couples? Should the division of assets reflect the parties' own expectations or norms imposed by society? These are just two of the questions which the essays in this collection seek to explore. Recent cases in the House of Lords have seen willingness on the part of the judges to seek out empirical studies to inform their deliberations, but if the law is to engage with empirical data then much more information is needed, both about the arrangements people make during their relationships, and about the impact of the law when a relationship breaks down. This inter-disciplinary work brings together leading academics in the fields of law, economics, sociology and psychology in an attempt to provide some of the missing empirical information. Part I sets out the legal framework and identifies the importance of empirical studies for this area. Part II examines how couples (whether cohabitants or spouses) manage their money during their relationships. Part III then considers the impact that the law currently has on separating couples - examining how legal principles translate into reality and what their consequences are for the parties. Finally, Part IV considers the issue of legal rationality: it may be rational for the law to be shaped by patterns of behaviour, but how far will individual couples allow their behaviour to be shaped by the law?