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A personal narrative of my escape with my mother and siblings from South Sudan as refugees is presented. The narrative then chronicles the time in Egypt applying for refugee status and eventual resettlement in the United States. In the United States, resettlement began in Newark, New Jersey. I then document my move from Newark to San Diego, California to, eventually, New York City. In New York my life as a model, DJ, actress, and founder of Stand for Education is narrated.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Purpose – The overall aim of the chapter is to explore how disputes between family members are accomplished and how the actions of copresent members (the mother and elder brother) contribute to the unfolding dispute.

Methodology – Selected from video recordings of the family breakfast, three extended sequences of mealtime talk were transcribed using the Jeffersonian system and analyzed using the analytic resources of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology.

Findings – This analysis establishes how both the mother and elder sibling intervene in matters to do with who has access to some bookclub brochures. Appeals to rules such as “you’ve got to share” are used by the mother to manage the local issue of the dispute. In intervening to resolve and settle disputes, the mother makes visible particular moral orders, such as sharing. Intervention is accomplished through directions, increasing physical proximity to the dispute, topic shift, and physical intervention in the dispute, such as gently removing a child's hand from the brochures. Justifications for sharing proffered by the mother that work to establish an alignment with one child are challenged by the other sibling, thus contributing to an escalation of the dispute. Also explicated is how an older sibling buys into the dispute, making visible his view about how sharing is accomplished; that is, you “just cope with it.”

Practical implications – This chapter has some practical implications for adults who interact with children (teachers, parents) highlighting that in some way, adults, through their actions may contribute to the continuation of a dispute and second, how adult attempts to settle or end a dispute may result only in a temporary settlement rather than a cessation of the dispute.

Value of chapter – The chapter contributes understandings about how family members manage disputes interactionally and how social and moral orders are accomplished during family mealtime. Additionally, it shows how some disputes are temporarily settled and connected across a section of action rather than ended.

Narrative, autoethnographic portrait depicting a “hardened” soldier's return home from military stint. By following Dig through quotidian routines – and what seems to become his search for meaning in them (as well as the narrator's search for meaning in that) – this chapter explores challenges to re-assimilation into civilian life and family dynamics for one a recruit and his family who prove semper fideles to the core.

While Hemingway noted that all stories end in death, this story begins with a death in the family. I recount my mother's (Ma's) death from a sociological point of view, making use of an autoethnographic perspective. Such a perspective encourages a frank portrayal of my involvement in the story as well as more detached reflection of various behaviors (enacted by Ma, her children, her grandchildren, and her friends). I also focus on Ma as a child of the Depression, a young adult during World War II, and a casualty of a middle class lifestyle. Her death, while unwanted, allowed her to create and construct authentic encounters with her children, grandchildren, and friends – encounters that she had avoided while living the middle class life. Her story allows me to reflect on her death as encouraging an authentic understanding of my emotions.

Drawing on accounts from 22 lesbian couples with children conceived using donor insemination, this chapter explores how the respondents’ selection of parent terms, such as “momma” and “mommy,” influences day-to-day negotiation of parenthood. Term selection was affected by personal meanings respondents associated with terms as well as how they anticipated terms would be publicly received. Couples utilized personalized meanings associated with terms, such as terms used by families of origin or reflected in a parent’s cultural background, to help non-biological mothers feel comfortable and secure in their parenting identities. Some families also avoided terms that non-biological mothers associated too strongly with biological motherhood and felt uncomfortable using for themselves. Families also considered whether parent terms, and subsequently their relationships to their children, would be recognizable to strangers or cause undue scrutiny to their family. However, not all of the families selected terms that were easily decipherable by strangers and had to negotiate moments in which the personal meanings and public legibility of terms came into conflict. Overall, these accounts illustrate the importance of parent terms for lesbian-parent families, and other nontraditional families, as a family practice negotiating both deeply personal meanings surrounding parent–child relationships and how these terms, and the families, are normatively recognizable in public spaces.

Traditional visions of masculinity are inextricably linked to some tropes believed as ‘essential’ in men such as valour or strength. If a man fails in comply with these ‘essences’, then he fits into a form of deviant masculinity that transforms him into an Other.

Now, what happens with the issues of ageing in masculinity? The ageing man slowly but naturally loses all the aspects that made him ‘manly’ enough, becoming instead a double of himself. Men are doomed to fail as their bodies start to malfunction.

Two horror films highlight ageing and failed masculinity as a way to engage with these new concerns. Bubba Ho-Tep (Don Coscarelli, 2012) and Late Phases (Adrián García Bogliano, 2014) revolves around two aged heroes (Elvis Presley in the former, an ageing war veteran in the latter) who live within retirement communities. There, in the last years of their life, both men must face supernatural menaces: a walking mummy and a werewolf respectively. Facing supernatural horror, the ageing heroes must compensate their failing masculinity – a body that does not work as well as it used to do – with new forms of empathy and manliness.

Uniting film studies with investigations on masculinity and ageing, we propose to read these two films to point the ways in which both stories engage with the cultural politics of ageing masculinity.

The purpose of this case study is to highlight the importance of empowering and meeting the “higher needs” of the very old, which prolong a fulfilling life. Frailty in old age need not be feared and abhorred if society would accept that all of us need to live our lives as we wish until the end, and value those who assist us to do this. With the right attitudes to ageing and death and with the appropriate investment for a seamless care system that listens to, and functions well for those who need it, old age should be as enriching as any other time in life.

Personal narrative of the author's parents ageing, this paper gives the background and personality of the frail older person and his wife, that contextualises the challenges they face in his very old age. The professional and personal experiences of the author as she tackles the obstacles to support them are drawn from her career in social care with memories from diaries written, as she accompanies her parents on their journey of physical and mental deterioration along with a quest for realising what they have and making the most of it.

Given how challenging this journey is for an informed family, the implications are that in 2013 our “civilised” society still misunderstands the special and complex needs of frail older people, devalues them, and writes them off with institutionalised, rigid attitudes and services instead of working creatively to improve their lives. The paper observes how deeply rooted this is in us all.

The combination of the author's background in social work and expertise in health and care with living so close to relatively unusually long-lived parents, offers a unique insight into why it is so challenging to achieve quality of life for very older people needing care and should be of interest to CCGs, social services departments, older people's care providers and carer and user organisations.