Alessandro Pratesi (Phd) is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Chester (UK), Department of Political and Social Science. His research interests include: Relationships, Intimacies and Families; Care, the ethics of care, and care related technologies; the Sociology of Emotions; Citizenship Studies; Qualitative Methods; and Social Change. Recent research outputs include: work on the emotional dynamics of inclusion/exclusion produced through care; the concept of the ‘productivity of care’; the relationship between same-sex parenthood and anti-assimilationist forms of citizenship; the application of micro-situated and emotion-based models of social inclusion to ethnic/cultural minorities; and the exploration of the concepts of intimacy, happiness and subjective well-being in the neoliberal state. Some of his recent publications appeared in the International Journal of Sociology of the Family, Ethics and Social Welfare (Special Issue), the International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Journal of GLBT Family Studies, The Innovation Journal: the Public Sector Innovation Journal. Alessandro worked for many years as a researcher in several international contexts. He developed his research interests and expertise in Italy, at the University of Florence, in France, at the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), in the UK, at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and in the USA, at the University of Pennsylvania (UPENN). At the University of Pennsylvania, where he was awarded his PhD in Sociology, he worked with Professor Randall Collins on a broader phenomenological analysis of informal care that included non-conventional families and carers. From the theoretical point of view, the empirical study drew on those aspects of the sociology of emotions that explain inequality in terms of emotion-based processes which occur at the level of micro-situated interactions.