Bøger af Nancy E. Riley

China is home to a fifth of the world's inhabitants. For the last several decades, this huge population has been in flux: fertility has fallen sharply, mortality has declined, and massive rural-to-urban migration is taking place.

Engaging the question of whether waged work gives Chinese women power in their families, this book analyzes the finding that women use jobs and urban status as a tool in negotiating their family status, to strengthen their contribution as wives and mothers.

Demography has developed into a remarkably coherent field and now stands as a firmly established discipline with strong ties to policy-making agencies. However, in recent years there has been increasing recognition within demography of the limits of existing theories and methods, particularly its absence of a strong critical tradition and its isolation from recent theoretical developments in other social sciences. In this study, Nancy Riley and James McCarthy use the lens of postmodernism to structure a critical analysis of the field of demography. Paying particular attention to the fundamental epistemologies and methodologies that currently underlie the field, they explore how postmodern perspectives might serve to energize the field and how demography could be enhanced by the introduction of insights from other social sciences. Drawing on examples of new kinds of research in demography and related fields, this is an important new book that seeks to reinvigorate the field of demography.

This volume examines adoption as a way of understanding the practices and ideology of kinship and family more generally. It focuses primarily on adoption practices in the US but will also use examples of adoption and fostering across cultures to put those American adoption practices into a comparative context.