yesInterpretations of living apart together (LAT) have typically counter-posed 'new family form' versus 'continuist' perspectives. Recent surveys, however, construct LAT as a heterogeneous category that supports a 'qualified continuist' position - most people live apart as a response to practical circumstances or as a modern version of 'boy/girlfriend', although a minority represents something new in preferring to live apart more permanently. This article interrogates this conclusion by examining in depth why people live apart together, using a nationally representative survey from Britain and interview accounts from 2011. Our analysis shows that LAT as a category contains different sorts of relationship, with different needs and desires. While overall coupledom remains pivotal and cohabitation remains the goal for most, LAT allows people flexibility and room to manoeuvre in adapting couple intimacy to the demands of contemporary life. Hence, we suggest, LAT is both 'new' and a 'continuation'.ESRCOpen access obtained (gold)The full text of the published article is open access. Full text of the author's final draft was released to the Repository 09/10/2014 at the end of the publisher's embargo period
How do children understand the privacy implications of the contemporary digital environment? This question is pressing as technologies transform children’s lives into data which is recorded, tracked, aggregated, analysed and monetized. This article takes a child-centred, qualitative approach to charting the nature and limits of children’s understanding of privacy in digital contexts. We conducted focus group interviews with 169 UK children aged 11–16 to explore their understanding of privacy in three distinct digital contexts—interpersonal, institutional and commercial. We find, first, that children primarily conceptualize privacy in relation to interpersonal contexts, conceiving of personal information as something they have agency and control over as regards deciding when and with whom to share it, even if they do not always exercise such control. This leads them to some misapprehensions about how personal data is collected, inferred and used by organizations, be these public institutions such as their schools or commercial businesses. Children’s expectation of agency in interpersonal contexts, and their tendency to trust familiar institutions such as their schools, make for a doubly problematic orientation towards data and privacy online in commercial contexts, leading to a mix of frustration, misapprehension and risk. We argue that, since the complexity of the digital environment challenges teachers’ capacity to address children’s knowledge gaps, businesses, educators, parents and the state must exercise a shared responsibility to create a legible, transparent and privacy-respecting digital environment in which children can exercise genuine choice and agency.
This paper explores transformations in institutional norms about same-sex sexualities across four European countries: Bulgaria, Norway, Portugal and the UK. Focusing on the period from the late 1960s to the present day, it examines both endogenous, path-dependent nationally specific factors at work in the changing regulation of same-sex sexualities, particularly the campaigns of lesbian and gay movements, and exogenous influences exerted by processes of Europeanization and transnationalization. Three processes of normative change are discussed: the legitimation of same-sex sexual practice; the protection of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people; and the recognition of intimate relationships. We argue that there has been a radical shift in the landscape of heteronormativity in Europe, with the emergence of a new European norm of "homotolerance" and the progressive normalization of same-sex sexualities: a process of "homonormalization".
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