This seminar will focus on how emotional work and emotions are experienced relationally amongst a group of divorced parents. In this seminar, Dr Moore will present findings from a longitudinal qualitative study on post separation/divorce parenting. She will discuss how the ‘egalitarians', a subgroup of the sample, consciously manage and display a high level of dedication and attachment to the triadic relationship up to 10 years following the breakdown of the marriage.
She will review how these parents continue to share in the day-to-day activities, decision making and responsibilities of parenting post-divorce. In particular, she will describe how this group of parents undertake considerable emotion work, when circumstances change over a 5-10 year period, as they balance their own needs with the needs of the children, ex-partners and other family members.
Further, she will discuss the reciprocal nature of commitment, for a group of parents who pursue a shared parenting arrangement and demonstrate considerable empathy for their former partners. The findings will indicate divorcees’ capacity to commit to others and ‘work at’ their relationships and be used to refute the theory that divorce points to a lack of commitment.
Dr Elena Moore is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology (UCT) and the Director of a Families Research Unit with the Centre for Social Science Research at UCT. She is a sociologist, specialising in the sociology of the family with a Master’s degree in Applied Social Research and a PhD from Trinity College Dublin.
Her principal research interests lie in the field of personal life, gender, intergenerational relations, divorce, family law and policy, feminist theories, biographical methods and mixed methods. She completed a co-authored manuscript on customary marriage, divorce and succession earlier this year and she is currently writing a book on ‘Divorce, Families and Emotion Work’.
Dr Moore currently teaches courses on the sociology of the family, gender, families and the stat, research methods, the analysis of qualitative data.
Read her articles.