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Constructing Motherhood and Daughterhood Across the Lifespan explores the complex dynamics between mother and daughter over the lifespan. The editors believe that these vital family roles are socially and communicatively constructed, shaped, and molded as mothers and daughters navigate, respond to, and negotiate cultural and familial discourses. Aimed at undergraduate students, this timely book includes course activities and discussion questions in every chapter and a complete term syllabus to enhance a professor's teaching, providing a smooth route for adoption as a course text. The book also builds on and contributes to the critical and theoretical research in family communication, media studies, and gender studies, delving into the nuanced communication surrounding motherhood and daughterhood in the United States.
About the author
Allison M. Alford
(Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin) is Clinical Assistant Professor of Business Communication at Baylor University. She has been teaching communication courses at the post-secondary level since 2005.
Michelle Miller-Day
(Ph.D., Arizona State University) is Professor of Communication Studies at Chapman University. She is the recipient of the 2015 Bernard J. Brommel Career Award for Outstanding Scholarship and Distinguished Service in Family Communication by the National Communication Association.
Report
"In this volume, editors Allison M. Alford and Michelle Miller-Day and the chapter authors explore communication and negotiating mother-daughter dyads in a breadth of family types and across all points in the lifespan. This insightful array of chapters points to the centrality of daughters and mothers in the network of primary and external family relationships and the different challenges of family identity and enactment from parenting, to navigating change, to later years as families, and often daughters, provide care for family members. Editors Alford and Miller-Day share a goal of stimulating courses focused on the topic and end the volume with practical resources as a starting point. Whether adopting the book for a whole course or a specialization within a family course, this collection will be a treasure for students, scholars, and practitioners." Dawn O. Braithewaite, Ph.D., Willa Cather Professor of Communication Studies and Chair, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
