Release date: May 1, 2002

Conference to Focus on Working Families May 9-10

WHO: Researchers at Emory’s Sloan Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL) and five other national Sloan Centers on Working Families

WHAT: Conference on "Families That Work: Crosscurrents in Research on Working Families"

WHEN: 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. (Conference), 6:30 – 9 p.m. (Banquet), Thursday, May 9
9 a.m. – 5 p.m., Friday, May 10

WHERE: Emory Conference Center Hotel, 1615 Clifton Road, Emory campus

PARKING: Available at the Emory Conference Center Hotel

How today’s modern families balance the obligations and demands of the workplace and home will be the focus of an Emory University conference featuring researchers from the six Sloan Centers on Working Families located across the country.

The conference, "Families That Work: Crosscurrents in Research on Working Families," will be held May 9 – 10 at the Emory Conference Center Hotel. Emory’s Center on Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL) is coordinating the meeting.

Some of the session topics include:

• Emotional and spiritual dimensions of work/family life, including a look at the 170-year-old Salem Camp Ground family reunion and revival tradition in rural Georgia;

• Stress in the lives of working families and how they manage their time at home and at work;

• The life course of the working family (or how the family develops as children get older);

• Volunteerism, children’s activities and the ideology of involvement; and

• The changing role of fathers, how the workplace affects their involvement in child rearing, and how they are affected by the birth of a second child.

In addition to Emory, the Sloan Centers on Working Families are located at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Michigan. The research at each center is focused on a different aspect of challenges facing today’s dual-income, middle-class working families.

Emory’s MARIAL Center was founded two years ago by a $3.6 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. MARIAL researchers include faculty and students in psychology, anthropology, political science, sociology and religion. They are studying ritual and myth specifically in Southern, middle-class working families, with the aim of understanding how family cultures are produced and reproduced under conditions of modern life.

The conference is open to the media. For information, contact Elizabeth Kurylo, MARIAL Center communications director, at 404-296-2480.

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