Family and Kinship Network (GSA) (Web)

Time: 01.-04.10.2020
Venue: Washington
Proposals by: 31.01.2020

The organizers of the Family and Kinship Network would like to propose two sessions for the German Studies Association meeting in Washington:

1. Family and Separation

Recent events across the globe, such as refugee crises in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, have placed the family front-and-center of current debates surrounding national borders, national belonging, citizenship, and composition of modern societies. The far-right Alternative for Germany, for instance, has called for only permitting heterosexual families of „German“ origin in Germany. Meanwhile, as a point of comparison, the Trump administration has pursued punitive policies separating children from their parents at the US-Mexican border.

While both cases have capitalized on short-term anxieties about integrating foreign populations, they are often fueled by deeply entrenched anxieties about population displacement, demographic shrinkage, and the destruction of the „traditional“ family–a unit often touted as a source of stability in changing societies. This panel asks, then, how politicians, actors in society, and producers of culture in Germany and German-speaking contexts have contributed to and represented the issue of separating families in their works, discourses, policies, and laws.

This panel furthermore interrogates the creation of new family units in the wake of the destruction of former family units. LGBT individuals or displaced persons, for instance, have  … read more and source (Web).