TY  - CHAP
AB  - Abstract The author’s story of a familial connection on the move was part of the research process of an ethnographic project about a demolished ex-industrial village. Growing up in the 1970s, the author’s fatherless childhood was silently lived out in its spatial geography. The author’s proximate, unknown father was a potent figure that the author would glimpse in the street spaces but was never allowed to acknowledge. Twentieth century accounts of working-class life have little to say on the personal stories of families where ‘father’ was rarely present (Steedman, 1986). Here the author offers a daughter’s emotional geography of fatherlessness. To sketch a socio-cultural backcloth to the personal subplot, the author draws on scholarship about fatherhood, fatherlessness and lone motherhood as a way to discuss men’s involvement in fathering in relation to the author’s own experience of living without a father in a paternalistic company village. Turning to the author’s return in 2015 as a researcher, the author uses autoethnography to explore the personal familial subplot bubbling underneath the main project. The author charts how the methodologies used held affordances which offered a process of coming to terms with the inter-connections of spatial and familial absence and loss: the loss of author’s home-village where memories of an absent father were played out and the revelation of the loss of an already absent father through a DNA test. In this way, it traces the shifting movements of a familial (dis)-connection through memories, photographs and mobile research encounters against the backcloth of the absent spaces of an ex-industrial community.
SN  - 978-1-78769-416-3, 978-1-78769-415-6/
DO  - 10.1108/978-1-78769-415-620191011
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78769-415-620191011
AU  - Taylor Lisa
ED  - Lesley Murray
ED  - Liz McDonnell
ED  - Tamsin Hinton-Smith
ED  - Nuno Ferreira
ED  - Katie Walsh
PY  - 2019
Y1  - 2019/01/01
TI  - Losing a Father in an Ex-industrial Landscape: A Researcher’s Emotional Geography
T2  - Families in Motion: Ebbing and Flowing through Space and Time
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 177
EP  - 194
Y2  - 2024/04/25
ER  -