FAMILIES ON THE FAULT LINES:
Re-Imagining Race, Kinship, & Care
UC Berkeley, Center for Race & Gender
April 29-30, 2010

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 landscapes for notions and practices of family, kin, and care. How is the idea of "family" in flux, racialized, and politicized? How do these political fluctuations impact families & 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?

This conference invites presentations that interrogate contemporary political debates about race, kinship, and care, such as "marriage equality," "welfare reform," reproduction, labor, and immigration. We are also interested in presentations that historicize "systems of survival," recognizing enduring legacies of fault line living.

We encourage conference submissions in the form of critical inquiries, perspectives from community organizing, and artistic responses that expand the political imaginary about what counts as "family" and "care." We are interested in academic, activist, and artistic voices being represented and seek to push at a traditional conference format of exclusively paper presentations.

Possible topics may include:

* marginalized models of family, kinship, care -- historical and present
* disability, interdependency, & caretaking
* disaster, displacement, and diasporas
* marriage equality, race, & nation
* constructing family in the context of violence, disaster, displacement
* eugenics, reproductive technologies, race
* care and love as invisible labor
* queering "family"
* the Obamas and the rhetoric of "black family"
* economic meltdown and family precariousness
* kinship and care among undocumented immigrants
* love and/or money? Paid and unpaid homecare
* transnational/transracial families
* the role of children in defining "family" and "community"
* changing understandings of "home" and the housing crisis
* imaginative responses to family violence

To submit a proposal, please e-mail the following items to familiesonthefaultlines@gmail.com by Thursday, Jan 28th:

Name & Institution
Title of Presentation
250-300 word abstract/description
a CV (if you are an academic)
Tech Needs
Accessibility Needs