06/04/2025

CSCA - Call for Papers ... Special Issue of Communication Studies

Call for papers

Special Issue of Communication Studies

Narratives of Family Caregiving in Later Life

Abstract deadline: August 15, 2025

Special Issue Editors: Melissa Wood Alemán, James Madison University and Alberto González, Bowling Green State University

In the United States alone, family members overwhelmingly provide the primary care for their aging family members. “Family provide 80% of the long-term care in this country” (Montgomery, Rowe, & Kosloski, 2007, p. 426) and the number of family caregivers continues to increase exponentially with 41.8 million adults in the U.S. serving as a caregiver to an older adult (National Alliance for Caregiving and the AARP, 2020). The changing structures of families, the increasing challenges of navigating complex healthcare systems, and the competing demands of work and other family responsibilities situate “family caregiving on the precipice” (Gaugler, 2021, p. xvii). Further, practices and experiences of family caregiving vary among cultural groups and are contextualized by structural forces such as racism and xenophobia (Smith-Ruiz, Watson-Vandiver, & Smith, 2025).

Narratives of family caregiving in later life enable complex and nuanced understandings of the diversity of experiences in the dynamic landscape of care. Narratives play an important role in the sensemaking of caring for an elderly parent or family member (Cooper, 2021) and of negotiating the relationships between siblings and others involved that care (Halliwell, Wenzel Egan, & Howard, 2017). Narratives of caregiving assist the storyteller in navigating their identities and roles through progressive diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia (Golden, 2018; Kruk, 2016) and experiencing what adult children call a role reversal from child to parent (Miller et al., 2008). Examination of narratives can reveal stressors related to caregiving (Kaur-Gill, 2022). Further, family storytelling about later life caregiving and death-and-dying shapes our narrative inheritance and codes for care (Alemán & Helfrich, 2010) and normalizes important conversations about end of life wishes (Alemán & Helfrich, 2019).

This special issue invites papers that adopt narrative approaches that broaden understandings of later life caregiving and advance understandings of the family and cultural contexts that shape our experiences and practices of care. Narratives of the experiences of later life caregiving offer important insights into (1) the diverse cultural codes of family caregiving; (2) the ways in which families navigate the ghosts of their former relationships and form new relations of care, (3) the manner in which caregivers confront and challenge institutional structures and oppressive systems; and (4) the transformation of the family system and caregiver identities at the end of life. Ultimately, caregiving shapes and is shaped by cultural and familial understandings of self, personhood, and culture.

The co-editors invite narratives that ask essential questions about the experiences of caregiving in later life, including but not limited to the following:

• What are the terms for and meanings of caregiving in family settings?
• How do family caregivers navigate complex institutional contexts and competing identities?
• How do family caregivers negotiate dilemmatic tensions among work, childcare, and eldercare?
• How are our cultural identities implicated by expectations and enactments of caregiving?
• How do family members across cultures anticipate and prepare for caregiving roles?
• How can we decenter whiteness and the institutionalization of aging through stories of later life caregiving?

The co-editors are open to diverse narrative approaches including rhetoric, autoethnography and ethnography of communication, qualitative interviewing, critical qualitative, among others.

Authors should first submit an extended abstract (750-1000 words) describing the goals and narrative methodologies by August 15, 2025 to Melissa Alemán (alemanmc@jmu.edu) with a subject line Narratives of Family Caregiving in Later Life Special Issue. After final decisions on the extended abstracts are made (no later than September 15), we will invite authors to proceed with full papers to be submitted on the Communication Studies site by January 15, 2026. We anticipate the special issue to be published in Volume 77 of Communication Studies. Please direct all questions about the special issue to Melissa Alemán (alemanmc@jmu.edu).

Submission Process: 

Please note that final manuscripts will undergo anonymous peer review, and hence acceptance of an abstract is not a guarantee of publication. Page limits and other parameters for the complete paper will be allocated at time of invitation but will generally fall in line with the parameters of the Communication Studies journal.  

References:

Alemán, M. W., & Helfrich, K. W. (2010). Inheriting the narratives of dementia: A collaborative tale of a daughter and mother. Journal of Family Communication, 10, 7-23. DOI: 10.1080/15267430903385784

Alemán, M. W., & Helfrich, K. W. (2019). Making difficult conversations normal in later life: Mother-daughter communication, narrative inheritance, and planning for death. In A. Alford & M. Miller-Day (Eds.), Constructing motherhood and daughterhood across the lifespan (pp. 311–326). New York, NY: Peter Lang. doi:10.3726/b10841

Cooper, A. (2021). “I am a caregiver”: Sense-making and identity construction through online caregiving narratives. Journal of Family Communication, 21(2), 77-89. https://doi.org/10.1080/15267431.2021.1889554

Gaugler, J. E. (2021). Family caregiving on the precipice. In J. E. Gaugler (Ed.) Bridging the family care gap (pp. xvii-xxix). Academic Press.

Golden, M. A. (2018). When the researcher becomes the caregiver. Health Communication, 33(7), 924-926. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2017.1323319

Halliwell, D., Wenzel Egan, K. A., & Howard, E. L. (2017). Flying in a V formation: Themes of (in)equity, reality, and togetherness in adult siblings’ narrative explanations of shared parental caregiving. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 45(3), 256-273. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2017.1320574

Kaur-Gill, S. (2022). The meanings of heart health among low-income Malay women in Singapore: narratives of food insecurity, caregiving, stressors, and shame. Journal of Applied Communication, 50(2), 111-128. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2022.2033298

Kruk, B. (2016). “I can’t bear the thought that he might now recognise me”: Personal narratives as a site of identity work in the online Alzheimer’s support group. Communication & Medicine, 12(2-3), 273-286. DOI: 10.1558/cam.18453

Miller, K. I., Shoemaker, M. M., Willyard, J., & Addison, P. (2008). Providing care for elderly parents: A structurational approach to family caregiver identity. Journal of Family Communication, 8, 19-43. DOI: 10.1080/15267430701389947

Montgomery, R. J. V., Rowe, J. M., & Kosloski, K. (2007). Family caregiving. In J. A. Blackburn & C. N. Dulmus (Eds.). Handbook of gerontology: Evidence-based approaches to theory, practice, and policy (pp. 426-454). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

National Alliance for Caregiving (2020). 2020 Report: Caregiving in the U.S. National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP. https://www.aarp.org/content/dam/aarp/ppi/2020/05/full-report-caregiving-in-the-united-states.doi.10.26419-2Fppi.00103.001.pdf

Smith-Ruiz, D., Watson-Vandiver, M. J., & Smith, D. C. (2025). Older African American women: Systematic racism, health disparities, and caregiving responsibilities. Routledge.