Synopses & Reviews
The first book on foster care written from foster mothers' perspectives,
They're All My Children voices the often painful experiences of contemporary U.S. foster mothers as they struggle to mother and care-work in the face of exploitative social relations with the state. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Wozniak, herself a former foster mother and an anthropologist, presents and analyzes women's personal stories about fostering to reflect on the larger socio-cultural context of American family life
namely, how we think about kinship, identity, and work. Foster mothers construct enduring kinship relationships with children, and often with the children's biological families. These relationships enhance children's chances to growth and thrive and in turn extend women's kin relationships into often distant and disparate communities. Wozniak also highlights the economic side of fostering to show how foster mothers are both mothers and workers; foster children are both providers and provided for, adored sentimental children and economic figures. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation, Wozniak argues that we have not gone far enough in understanding the experiences of these women whose life work lies outside the usual boundaries. Nor have child welfare gone far enough in revising the theories upon which child welfare policies are based. Foster mothers and their experiences challenge the patriarchal, nuclear family ideals upon which foster care programs are based, a challenge that They're All My Children takes forward.
Review
"[A] thoughtful and well-researched book."-Reference and Research Book News,February 2002
Review
"A foster mother herself, Wozniak brings particular poignancy and insight to this fascinating look at motherhood and social policy. Her interviews with foster mothers are coupled with research on who foster mothers are and why they foster....Wozniak also looks at the larger issues of women's roles in society and how we handle the needs of displaced children. . . an important but little-researched topic."-Booklist,
Review
"[A] thoughtful and well-researched book."
Review
"Wozniak presents a very readable analysis of the broad challenges facing foster families...This book is important for anyone in the social work or family services field." -Choice,
Synopsis
The first book on foster care written from foster mothers' perspectives,
They're All My Children voices the often painful experiences of contemporary U.S. foster mothers as they struggle to mother and care-work in the face of exploitative social relations with the state. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Wozniak, herself a former foster mother and an anthropologist, presents and analyzes women's personal stories about fostering to reflect on the larger socio-cultural context of American family life
namely, how we think about kinship, identity, and work. Foster mothers construct enduring kinship relationships with children, and often with the children's biological families. These relationships enhance children's chances to growth and thrive and in turn extend women's kin relationships into often distant and disparate communities. Wozniak also highlights the economic side of fostering to show how foster mothers are both mothers and workers; foster children are both providers and provided for, adored sentimental children and economic figures. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation, Wozniak argues that we have not gone far enough in understanding the experiences of these women whose life work lies outside the usual boundaries. Nor have child welfare gone far enough in revising the theories upon which child welfare policies are based. Foster mothers and their experiences challenge the patriarchal, nuclear family ideals upon which foster care programs are based, a challenge that They're All My Children takes forward.
Synopsis
General equilibrium economics is among the most challenging fields in modern microeconomic theory. One problem with traditional general equilibrium theory has been that it assumes purely competitive market structures. This assumption limits its usefulness in interpreting modern economies whose dominant form of competition is differentiated oligopoly. This book focuses on this deficiency and proposes a means of moving toward an oligopolistic framework. It also examines the problems of deriving useful insights from large-scale models and explores the application of input-output techniques to empirical large-scale modelling.
The volume is comprised of four general sections of interest. The first provides an introduction to general equilibrium economics, explaining its fundamental structure and uses and presenting a model of general oligopolistic equilibrium. The second concerns spatial interdependence, including the development of exact and approximate solution algorithms as well as an investigation of a Poisson process in space. Part Three examines the attempt by Austrian theorists to build a general equilibrium approach to capital and interest theory. The last area analyzes the integration of money and real sectors in Walrasian and Keynesian models, as well as the conditions for the existence of money in a stationery state and the role of money in an intertemporal general system.Kuenne's volume seeks to encourage efforts both to choose realistic problems for research and to make the results of that research accessible to the economic practitioner.
About the Author
The author of numerous books, ROBERT E. KUENNE is Professor of Economics and Director of the General Economic Systems Project at Princeton University.