UC Berkeley Hosts Conference: Re-Imagining Race, Kinship, & Care

Families who live on the fault lines of economic insecurity, geographic displacement, and ideological battles over who counts as a "family" are particularly at risk for suffering the fallout of current economic disasters, environmental crises, and local and global wars.  These ruptures present not only profound challenges for the survival of kinship structures, but also opportunities for uncovering new or hidden landscape for notions and practices of family, kin, and care. 

This conference will consider the following issues:

• How is the idea of "family" in flux, racialized, and politicized?
• How do these political fluctuations impact families and kin of color, immigrant families, LGBT families, and other kinship networks?
• How are kinships displaced and how are they reconstructed?
• How do families creatively adapt to radical change?
• How does forced and chosen migration reshape how "family" is considered?
• How is the project of caring for others gendered, classed, & racialized?
• Are there opportunities for coalition building in the face of seemingly unbridgeable divides?
• Are there visions for liberatory kinship structures, principles for caring, and family arrangements in the context of vast instability?

Presentations will interrogate contemporary political debates about race, kinship, and care, such as "marriage equality," militarism, disaster, reproduction, labor, and immigration.  The conference also seeks to  historicize "systems of survival," recognizing enduring legacies of fault line living. 

For a full list of panels and presentations, please visit:
http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/families-schedule

Keynote Speaker:
Cathy Cohen: Black Love, Black Deviance and the Politics of Morality in the Age of Obama
http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/cohen

Register now:
http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/register

Generous co-sponsors include: Gender & Women's Studies, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Berkeley Diversity Research Initiative, Gender Equity Resource Center, Center for the Study of Law & Society, Interdisciplinary Family Studies Working Group, Berkeley Undergraduate Sociology Association, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, Beatrice Bain Research Group, Ethnic Studies Department, Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, Department of Sociology, & the Student Opportunity Fund