Families on the Margins

Book excerpt: This book focuses on the diverse tapestry of families in contemporary U.S. culture. Each chapter explores a different kind of family and examines their specific communication behaviors. We live in times of increasing diversity that complicate our understandings of ourselves as well as others who may be quite different from us. These complexities also impact our definition of "family" in addition to our interpretation of family communication behaviors. This book provides an examination of family communication practices in families that are underrepresented in the research of the discipline, and underserved in U.S. culture: immigrant families; family members in interracial relationships; LGBTQ families; low-income Latinx families; families with an incarcerated parent; and families headed by grandparents. The book is an initial effort to expand the lens of family communication scholarship to focus on "families on the margins". Through a variety of, sometimes unique, methods including textual analysis, in-depth interviews, and analysis of art projects collected at a Pride festival, each chapter in this collection adds to our knowledge of how we define family and how families communicate in the 21st century. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of Family Communication.