Relationality in family and intimate practices: Introduction to special issue

This special issue explores the relational ties that shape family practices and decisions, and the ways that scholars work with relationality-theoretically, methodologically, epistemologically, ontologically-in their family research. It emerges out of a symposium at the Work and Family Research Network conference in Washington DC, held in June 2018, on the same theme. Leading that panel led us to reflect that although relationality has emerged as an increasingly popular lens and framework through which to examine family and intimate practices, there are very diverse approaches which come under the rubric of 'relationality'. These iterations have different implications for how we approach the study of families and relationships and the different foci we take up in our scholarship. This special issue of Families, Relationships and Societies brings together a selection of studies that reflect the myriad approaches to mobilising relationality in family and relationship research. In this short introduction, we reflect on the theoretical, methodological and empirical scholarship about relationality, with a particular focus on families, intimacy and gender research.