Gender, generations, and lineage; faith, hope, and justice; gifts, duties, and debts; affection, responsibility, and generativity; values, secrets, and objectives; transmissions and transitions: these are the primary themes of family. They refer to what the family relationship builds in terms of organizational structure, motives, and objectives. Family assumes different forms and attire according to culture and the passage of time, but there are seeds that pass constantly through the millstone of family relationships and make up its identity. Family Identity: Ties, Symbols, and Transitions is the fruit of many years of research, and of the fertile exchanges with researchers all over the world, through personal contact as well as through their writings. The aim of this volume is to bring into focus all the many themes that help to construct family identity. It provides a conceptualization of the family that is both fresh and traditional. This book will appeal to researchers and students in family studies, developmental psychology, social psychology, and clinical psychology.

Approaching the question of identity through a lens that combines interactionist and intersectional perspectives, and applies two strands of sociological theories, Mengxi Pang invites readers to unravel the process of identity-making and to delineate the effect of family and wider society on the formation of mixed identities in Scotland.

Investigations into the daily life of Roman families show that children were key actors in the process of the construction of social memory: they were the pivotal point of the transmission of family tradition and values in both elite and non-elite families. This collection of essays draws together the perspectives of various disciplines to provide a multifaceted picture of the Roman family based on a wide range of evidence drawn from the 1st century BCE to Late Antiquity and theChristian period. The contributors define the notion of memory, discuss the role of children in the transmission of social memory and social identities, and also deal with threats to familial memory, in the cases of children deliberately or accidentally excluded from tradition, long believed to beinvisible, such as those born at home to slaves, or outcast because of illness or their unusual status, for example as the offspring of an incestuous relationship.

In Jewish Family: Identity and Self-Formation at Home Alex Pomson and Randal F. Schnoor advance a new appreciation for the deep significance of Jewish family in developing Jewish identity. This book is the result of ten years of research focused on a small sample of diverse families. Through their work, the authors paint an intricate picture of the ecosystem that the family unit provides for identity formation over the life course. They draw upon theories of family development as well as sociological theories of the transmission of social and cultural capital in their analysis of the research. They find that family networks, which are often intergenerational, are just as significant as cultural capital, such as knowledge and competence in Judaism, to the formation of Jewish identity. Pomson and Schnoor provide readers with a unique view into the complexity of being Jewish in North America today.

In The Co-authored Self, Kate McLean addresses the question of how an individual comes to develop an identity by focusing on the process of interpersonal storytelling, particularly through the stories people hear, co-tell, and share of and with their families. McLean details how identity development is a collaborative construction between the individual and his or her narrative ecology.

A Bustle Most Anticipated Debut of the Year From The Guardian’s Georgina Lawton, a moving examination of how racial identity is constructed—through the author’s own journey grappling with secrets and stereotypes, having been raised by white parents with no explanation as to why she looked black. Raised in sleepy English suburbia, Georgina Lawton was no stranger to homogeneity. Her parents were white; her friends were white; there was no reason for her to think she was any different. But over time her brown skin and dark, kinky hair frequently made her a target of prejudice. In Georgina’s insistently color-blind household, with no acknowledgement of her difference or access to black culture, she lacked the coordinates to make sense of who she was. It was only after her father’s death that Georgina began to unravel the truth about her parentage—and the racial identity that she had been denied. She fled from England and the turmoil of her home-life to live in black communities around the globe—the US, the UK, Nicaragua, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and Morocco—and to explore her identity and what it meant to live in and navigate the world as a black woman. She spoke with psychologists, sociologists, experts in genetic testing, and other individuals whose experiences of racial identity have been fraught or questioned in the hopes of understanding how, exactly, we identify ourselves. Raceless is an exploration of a fundamental question: what constitutes our sense of self? Drawing on her personal experiences and the stories of others, Lawton grapples with difficult questions about love, shame, grief, and prejudice, and reveals the nuanced and emotional journey of forming one’s identity.