An Interdisciplinary Workshop on Kinship and Community

March 25–26, 2010
The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Ave, NY, NY 10016, USA

Organized by:
Alyson M. Cole & Kyoo Lee
Resident Mellon Faculty Fellows,
The Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center

Co-sponsored by:
The Andrew Mellon Foundation
The Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center
philoSOPHIA: A Feminist Society


A 250-300 Word Abstract by 01/15/2010 to: kinshipandcommunity@gmail.com

Today, notions and forms of the family are being challenged on a global and epochal scale. In response, this workshop aims to bring scholars into an interdisciplinary fold that critically explores the edges of the familial.

Preference will be given to proposals engaging the following four themes, which will function as the organizational grid for the four break-out sessions, each followed by a keynote panel discussion. (The questions next to each theme are meant to be simply suggestive.)

• Birth/Genealogy: How is natality tied to family and other forms of non/human association? How do technologies alter notions of reproduction? Where is my “gene?” Whither “family resemblance”?
• Family Work/Care: What is the business of families? What models of interdependence do families nurture? Can househusbands be unhappy? What is responsible parenting? Why “maid to order”?
• Family in Transition/Trans-Family: What are the problems & promises of “non-normatively” reconstructed families; adoptive, community-based, multi-lingual, transnational, transgender, etc.?
• Death/Legacy: How does death reunite or reform family, personally or politically?—loss in the family?—family secrets? etc. How do classical examples illuminate contemporary phenomena?

Submit a proposal by emailing kinshipandcommunity@gmail.com. Please include the following:
• In the subject line: Session Theme: Your Name, Title of Your Proposal:
(For example: Birth/Genealogy: Jane Smith, “The Womb is not a Tree.”)
• Then in the body of the email message: A 250-300 word abstract; Name, Title, and Institutional Affiliation

• The programming decision will be made by mid-February, 2010.
• A possibility of publishing some of the work from this workshop is being currently explored.
• Confirmed participants include: Carlos Ball (Law, Rutgers School of Law), Lynne Huffer (Women’s Studies, Emory), Kathleen Gerson (Sociology, NYU) and Kelly Oliver (Philosophy, Vanderbilt).