Governing Families
This book provides a focused discussion of how families are governed through technologies. It shows how states attempt to influence, shape and govern families as both the source of and solution to a range of social problems including crime.
The book critically reviews family governance in contemporary neo-liberal society, notably through technologies of self-responsibilisation, biologisation, and artificial intelligence. The book draws attention to the poor working class and racialised families that often are marked out and evaluated as culpable, dysfunctional, and a threat to economic and social order, obscuring the structural inequalities that underpin family lives and discriminations that are built into the tools that identify and govern families.
Filling a gap where disciplinary perspectives cross-cut, this book brings together sociological and criminological perspectives to provide a unique cross-disciplinary approach to the topic. It will be of interest to researchers, scholars and lecturers studying sociology and criminology, as well as policy-makers and professionals working in the fields of early years and family intervention programmes, including in social work, health, education, and the criminologically-relevant professions such as police and probation.
Rosalind Edwards (she/her) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton, UK. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a co-editor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology. She has published widely on families and research methods.
Pamela Ugwudike is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Southampton and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). She is a Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy and co-Editor-in-Chief of Criminology and Criminal Justice Journal.