Family and space – an interpretive perspective on two central concepts in population geography

Abstract

Abstract. Introductory texts in population geography are often organized using a sociological approach to demography (Barcus and Halfacree 2018:2; Newbold 2014:6). This is particularly evident in discussions on the concept of family. Both sociology and geography center concepts like marriage, divorces, births, the number of children in a household, and the composition of households. However, many of these concepts are outdated, with limited value for understanding contemporary social change. As the editorial to this special issue suggests, population geography must look to other fields for concepts that describe subjects' meaning-making. Interpretive family studies' conceptual and methodological approaches can help reconfigure established assumptions about the term “population” (Gubrium and Holstein 1993; LaRossa and Reitzes 1993; Bösel, 1980; Burgess, 1926). While classic population geography research does engage with new mobility and flexibility regimes and pluralization tendencies, it often fails to identify their consequences for lived experiences and intergenerational relationships. This limits scholars' understandings of new living conditions and practices, as well as their consequences for central concepts of mobility, for example, co-presence, absence, relocation, and residential location. This also occurs with the concept of “family”, which is generally applied to mono-local nuclear families in a household unit. In this contribution, we draw on classic and contemporary interpretive research to (re-)evaluate the multi-locality of families and theories of co-presence to extend the concepts of family and space within population geography (see also Halatcheva-Trapp et al., 2019a). By transcending standard quantitative categories (e.g., the household, fertility, simplified models of mobility), we offer interpretive insights to better conceptualize an important topic in population geography – the family.