Mommy-Daddy-Me: Social Critique and Kinship

A central image in utopian and dystopian thought, “the family” has a rich and diverse political and philosophical history.  Recent scholarship on models of family, kinship, and care has included historical surveys of how the family has been resituated as the core economic unit in the neoliberal era, experiments with familial structures and alternatives to them, and even direct calls for abandoning hegemonic forms of the family. 

We invite presentations that engage recent scholarship on topics including but not limited to:

●       Historicizing economic, cultural, and geographical iterations of the family

●       Historic philosophical accounts of the family

●       Marxist analyses of the structural role of family forms under capitalism

●       Feminist, queer, trans, psychoanalytic, critical race, and disability theoretical approaches to the study of families and kinship

●       Reflections on family, kinship, and community

●       Exploring alternative forms of care and kinship

Please submit to [email protected] for review either: abstracts up to 800 words; full papers up to 3000 words; or panel proposals. For panel proposals, include a description of the panel alongside one abstract per presentation. Presentations should not exceed 25 minutes. This conference primarily solicits graduate student submissions. We welcome academic as well as artistic submissions. We especially welcome work by scholars from underrepresented groups. The conference will be made accessible for Deaf or HH scholars. For planning purposes, we would appreciate notification of interpreting preferences if possible.

Deadline for proposals: February 14.