Demographers have repeatedly confirmed that the nuclear family is on the decline. Yet when Americans are asked about their ideal family, the nuclear family emerges as the most valued kind of family. Members of families that do not match this cultural ideal face a discursive burden to legitimate their identity as a «family.»
This volume gathers together communication scholars who are working on the many kinds of alternative family forms, from, among others, grandfamilies, diasporic immigrant families, and military families to in (voluntarily) childless families and stepfamilies.
The organizing question for the volume focuses on resistance, reconstruction, and resilience: how is it that alternatives to the traditional family are constructed and sustained through communicative practices? Several chapters adopt a global perspective, thereby framing the issue of legitimation of «family» in a broader cultural context.
None of the family forms described in this volume meets the ideological «gold standard¿ of the nuclear family, and in this sense they all represent a remaking of the family in profound ways.

Leslie A. Baxter (PhD, University of Oregon), is Collegiate Fellow and Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. She received the 2007 Bernard J. Brommel Award for outstanding scholarship in family communication from the National Communication Association (NCA) as well as the 2011 Family Communication Division Outstanding Book Award, among others. In 2008 she was given NCA¿s highest honor by being named an NCA Distinguished Scholar.

Contents: Kathleen M. Galvin: Blood, Law, and Discourse: Constructing and Managing Family Identity ¿ Leslie A. Baxter: Theorizing the Communicative Construction of «Family»: The Three R¿s ¿ Tamara D. Afifi, Shardé Davis/Anne Merrill: Single-Parent Families: Creating a Sense of Family from Within ¿ Melissa W. Alemán: «I¿m the parent and the grandparent»: Constructing the Grandfamily ¿ Devika Chawla: Remaking Hindu Arranged Marriages in the Narrative Performances of Urban Indian Women ¿ Keli Ryan Steuber: Life without Kids: In (Voluntarily) Childless Families ¿ Elizabeth A. Suter: The Adopted Family ¿ Paul Schrodt: Discourse Dependence, Relational Ambivalence, and the Social Construction of Stepfamily Relationships ¿ Dawn O. Braithwaite/Rebecca DiVerniero: «He became like my other son»: Discursively Constructing Voluntary Kin ¿ Erin Sahlstein Parcell: Military Families: Remaking Shared Residence, Traditional Marriage, and Future Communication Research ¿ Karla Bergen: Discourse Dependence in the Commuter Family ¿ Chitra Akkoor: «Is he my real uncle?»: Re-constructing Family in the Diaspora.