Thinking intergenerationally about motherhood

We are always, already, utterly embedded in relationships. The task of social science has traditionally been to provide us with a limited and limiting set of lenses that helps us to discipline and reduce what we look at and how we look in order to enable a story to be told about relationships and social processes (Law 2004). Depending on how we slice the empirical cake we will see different things. We can broadly distinguish between perspectives that privilege spatiality – exploring the horizontal relationships between the position of things at a single moment of time, and perspectives that privilege temporality – exploring the vertical and processual nature of phenomena, how things follow, pan out (Massey 1994). Some kinds of social science are good at the first (one off studies) and some are good at the latter (ethnographies, case studies, longitudinal studies) (McLeod and Thomson 2009). Very few studies are able to do both well or to explore the articulation of the two – what Dorreen Massey (2004) calls the challenge of a four-dimensional sociology, the exploration of co-existence, coincidence and the relationship between the life that is lived and the other ‘possible lives’ that fall away (Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame 1997, 2003).