Paper presentations, BSA (British Sociological Association), 11-13 April 2012

Jacqui Gabb has been invited to participate in a prestigious international symposium Beyond the East West Divide: Gender, Intimacy and Modernity at the University of Hong Kong, 24-25 May 2012.

Her paper will introduce the Enduring Love? project large scale (online and face-to-face) survey and the qualitative methods that are being used. These data, she will argue, allow us to examine the patterning of relationship experience and perceptions of the ‘relationship work’ that goes into making a relationship work. In particular, Dr Gabb will illustrate the kinds of data that are produced through qualitative methods and how these can advance understandings on the ordinary relating practices of couples and where different kinds of interactions occur. Through this she will examine how the home is both a place where ‘relationship work’ takes place and also a space where couples negotiate togetherness, separateness and ‘living together apart’. This requires us to rethink meanings attached to the couple (dyadic) relationship and its slippage into and conflation with cultural understandings of the Western heteronormative ‘couple norm’.