From the Back Cover
Confronting Relationship Challenges moves forward the "Understanding Relationship Processes" series by addressing the difficult side of relationships. This volume, edited by Steve Duck and Julia T. Wood, takes an honest look at what can go wrong with relationships and highlights some of the challenges partners might face while struggling to comprehend their connectedness to each other. Discussion in this volume moves away from any implication that relationships are only good and delightful, because even in the very closest of relationships, pain and suffering are inevitable. The contributing scholars examine the management and tolerance skills required of participants in order to construct meaningful interpretations of themselves, each other, and the relationship while all of the components evolve and interact in continually changing contexts. Issues examined include conflict, enemies, reconfiguring "family" after a divorce, codependency, interpersonal violence, HIV/AIDS, chronic illness, and managing grief over a partner's death. Students and scholars in interpersonal communication, social psychology, clinical/counseling psychology, family studies, social work, and sociology will find this volume to be a valuable resource.
Steve Duck taught in the United Kingdom before taking up the Daniel and Amy Starch Distinguished Research Chair in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. He has been a professor of communication studies, an adjunct professor of psychology, and a former Dean's Administrative Fellow and is now Chair of the Rhetoric Department. He has taught interpersonal communication courses, mostly on relationships but also on nonverbal communication, communication in everyday life, construction of identity, communication theory, organizational leadership, and procedures and practices for leaders. More recently, he has taught composition, speaking, and rhetoric, especially for STEM students. By training an interdisciplinary thinker, Steve has focused on the development and decline of relationships, although he has also done research on the dynamics of television production techniques and persuasive messages in health contexts. Steve has written or edited 60 books on relationships and other matters and was the founder and, for the first 15 years, the editor of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. His book Meaningful Relationships: Talking, Sense, and Relating won the G. R. Miller Book Award from the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association. Steve cofounded a series of international conferences on personal relationships. He won the University of Iowa's first Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in 2001 and the National Communication Association's Robert J. Kibler Memorial Award in 2004 for "dedication to excellence, commitment to the profession, concern for others, vision of what could be, acceptance of diversity, and forthrightness." He was the 2010 recipient of the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Helen Kechriotis Nelson Teaching Award for a lifetime of excellence in teaching, and in the same year was elected one of the National Communication Association's Distinguished Scholars. He received the NCA's 2019 Mark L. Knapp Award in Interpersonal Communication for career contributions to the study of interpersonal communication. He hopes to make it to the Iowa State Fair one day.
Julia T. Wood (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University) is Professor of Communication Studies and Lineberger Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She teaches and conducts research on personal relationships, intimate partner violence, feminist theory, and the intersections of gender, communication, and culture. She has authored or edited 23 books, including Who Cares?: Women, Care and Culture, and Gendered Lives, now in its 7th edition. In addition, she has published more than 70 articles and book chapters. During her career she has received 12 awards for scholarship and 11 for teaching.
