NEH Enduring Questions Course on "What Is a Family?"

FAIN: AQ-50833-13

Roosevelt University (Chicago, IL 60605-1315)
Marjorie Jolles (Project Director: September 2012 to May 2015)

The development of an intermediate-level undergraduate course on the question, What is a family?

My proposed course, What is a Family?, offers a sustained examination of key texts in the humanities that have shaped Western thought on the family. Texts by Sophocles, Locke, Engels, Freud, and Steichen comprise the core readings, offering diverse historical and theoretical arguments for the meaning and social value of the family. These texts prompt reflection on such topics as kinship and loyalty; the family as a model for the state; the family as an economic institution; the family as a site of psychological conflict; and the family as keeper of national memory. Students will complete a range of writing assignments, attend film and photography screenings, and produce a comprehensive "annotated digital photo album," analyzing images and stories of family from the perspectives of course readings. The course will include a private tour of the photography and artifacts collection at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, illustrating links between familial and national identity.

Associated Products

"What is a Family? A Materialist Perspective" (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: "What is a Family? A Materialist Perspective"
Abstract: Plenary Address: "What is a Family? A Materialist Perspective." In “What is a Family? A Materialist Perspective,” Marjorie Jolles examines current debates over women’s struggles to achieve equality by highlighting the family’s role in shaping contemporary understanding of women’s work and women’s value. Through a materialist-feminist lens, this presentation identifies some conceptual, political, and economic challenges to agendas for women’s equality anchored in contemporary family formations.
Author: Marjorie Jolles
Date: 4/17/2015
Location: Gender Matters conference, Governor's State University, University Park, IL
Primary URL: http://www.govst.edu/gendermatters/
Primary URL Description: This is the website for the conference for which I was the plenary speaker.

"The Family in Flux: Changing Conceptions of the Family in Theory and Practice" (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: "The Family in Flux: Changing Conceptions of the Family in Theory and Practice"
Author: Marjorie Jolles
Abstract: The family—its purpose, conventions, and importance—is a subject of persistent inquiry in the humanities, and its definition varies notably in central texts of the Western intellectual tradition. In historical and contemporary contexts, the family is construed in remarkably differing ways: as alternately natural and artificial; necessary and unnecessary; rational and irrational; civilizing and corrupting; local and global; and primary and subordinate to the public sphere. As the family is variably defined (and enacted) in different eras of Western thought, so too are concepts of human nature, morality, and the state, for change to the former surely leads to interrogations and re-conceptualizations of the latter, and vice-versa. This seminar will offer an examination of these varying conceptions of family, introduce seminar participants to critical analyses of them, and conclude with a discussion on teaching about the family in both textual representations and personal life.
Date Range: October 3, 2013
Location: Newberry Library, Newberry Teachers' Consortium, Chicago, IL
Primary URL: https://www.newberry.org/10032013-family-flux-changing-conceptions-family-theory-and-practice

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