Working Group "Military Families"

Co-ordinators: Dr. René Moelker, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and Dr. Janja Vuga Beršnak, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

 

About

The Working Group Military Families aims at enhancing knowledge and understanding of military families’ adaptations to the challenges of the military lifestyle, which include recurrent transfers to new work environments, frequent family-separations as a result of deployments and training, and the risk of soldiers to be wounded or even killed during service. Understanding military families requires a multidisciplinary approach with contributions from psychology, sociology, history, anthropology and more. Furthermore, it takes a multitude of perspectives such as the theoretical, empirical, reflective, life events (narrative) approach, national and the global.

The workgroup focuses on military families in general, including service members, their spouses, children, and parents, dual-military couples, and single-parents. There are still many courses to take and much research to be conducted regarding military families’ adaptations. Cross-national comparative analyses provides depth to our understanding.

Topics that are addressed include, but are not limited to:

  • Tensions between military organization and family (work-family or work-life conflict or balance), that is, the impact of military demands on family life and of family (demands) on military work (and operations).
  • The effects of different deployment characteristics (type of mission, deployment length, deployment load) on family stress and adaptation.
  • Psychological issues, including stress and well-being of different family members and relationship quality (including parent-child and partner relationships).
  • Patterns and trends in families’ experiences (within-person changes over time) in the course of military deployments and in peacetime.
  • The impact of soldiers’ physical or mental injuries on family functioning.
  • Social support arrangements, networks, and needs, in times of military deployments and in peacetime.
  • The impact of developments and changes in society, the family, and/or the military on soldiers and families.
  • Family members’ support or objections to join or stay in the military.
  • The role of the media in families’ adaptations, opinions, and support.

The workgroup is currently working on a book that brings together international research findings on military families.

 

News and activities

 
We are working on a book proposal that goes beyond greedy institutions and discusses the various changes in family structures and forms over the decades in relation to the specifics of military families. We have built the book around four pillars, which are briefly introduced below.
 
1. We are looking for chapters that discuss the different understandings of what a military family is, from the structural, functional to the emotional view. We also want to discuss the characteristics of the military family from the perspective of the late modern family with all its particularities (e.g. capitalism, neoliberalism, old population, small families, children as emotional capital of the family).
2. Both institutions, the military and the family, are eroding, they are being de-institutionalised. So while in the past the family negotiated as a unit, we wonder whether this is still the case today or whether it is perhaps the individual who negotiates - either with the other family members or with the military. Is the family still at the centre of the military-family relationship or is it an individual? What disadvantage does the potential absence of the family as a backbone have for the individual service member who may stand alone?
3. We would like to address the balance of power in the family and late modern masculinity (critical masculinity studies, concepts of hegemonic masculinity, caring masculinities) in gendered institutions. We can talk about men and women in the military in the context of the divergence between the combat masculine warrior (Dunivin), militarised masculinity (Moelker) and committed, working and caring masculinity (Hanlon).
4. Finally, we would like to discuss the work-life conflict in the military in comparison to other institutions, including in the private sector, and thus place the military greedines in a broader context of late modernity. Negotiation on different fronts.
 
For the upcoming conference, we are looking for all contributions, regardless of whether they relate to the above themes or not.

 

Paper room