FALL 2022 CALL FOR PAPERS - Theme: Doing and Undoing “Family” in Uncertain Times
NEOS welcomes submissions for the Fall 2022 issue: Doing and Undoing “Family” in Uncertain Times. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, refugee displacement, border detention, the effects of climate change, U.S. attacks against transgender youth, and the confirmation of unmarked child graves at former Indian Residential Schools, family continues to be a site of uncertainty, struggle, and hope for children and youth. This upcoming issue will reposition classical anthropological questions focused on the formation of family and cultivation of kinship by applying contemporary, critical, and interdisciplinary lenses toward how family is done and undone in highly uncertain and unequal times. We seek pieces that explore the constructions, practices, beliefs, and values that lead to and maintain family formations and configurations and how these may be influenced by historical, cultural, political, and economic structures. We invite pieces on the following themes within family and kinship studies, and we encourage submissions that focus on the perspectives of children, youth, and those who closely engage with them:
1. Reproductive Inequalities, Justice, and Care
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- Reproductive issues in the work of forming families, specifically considering reproductive workers such as midwives and doulas
- Reproductive justice and injustice according to racialized, gendered, classed, age-based, or ability-based disparities
- The distribution of care work within and between households, including the ways the family members may differently enact care and protection
2. Mobility, Movement, and Configurations
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- Childhood mobility and child circulation in and between households in local or transnational contexts including fosterage and adoption
- The formation of families through non-heteronormative and non-biocentric means including “fictive” kinship, queer kinship, non-plenary parentage, and informal fosterage
- Siblinghood and gender
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3. Violence and Persistence
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- Intergenerational trauma that situates contemporary familial life in historical contexts of injustice or inequity
- Forms of and responses to family separation resulting from interaction with state systems such as immigration and child welfare services
- Family reunification following separation
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