CALL FOR PAPERS

ASA (Association of Social
Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth)

University of Exeter, UK, 13th-16th April 2015

  

Dear Colleagues,


Please consider submitting a paper proposal to our
ASA 2015 panel entitled ‘Ambiguous,
ambivalent, and contingent kinship: the generative slipperiness of relations
and 'being together'’. 

 

During the session we will probe slippery kin relations within
the contingent circumstances of social change as instances of co-existence that
have the potential for risk, commensality and mutuality. In
doing so, we will ask what is generative about ambivalent, ambiguous,
multigenerational and gendered ideas, practices and configurations of kin.



ABSTRACT
  
The relentless
contingency of relations both enlivens and threatens anthropological projects.
Studying relations makes anthropologists sensitive to the 'relations between
relations': those slippery ambiguities where the terms of newness-oldness and
oneness-otherness are continuously renegotiated through processes of birth and
death, growing-up and aging. Within families, households, kin-networks, and
indeed, within and between academic disciplines, relations compete with and
complement one another, at times placing each other 'at risk'. Yet risk and
contingency are often the essence of lived kinship and engender new and
emergent decisions, experimentations and solutions. This panel asks: what is
generative about ambivalent and ambiguous ideas of kin? And what role do
slippery multigenerational or gendered configurations play in the reproductive,
productive, consumptive and radical intersections of kin? How, for example,
might relations provide succour in times of precarity, shifting living
arrangements, responsibilities, and lifecourse liminality, while becoming
particularly tense as a result of these? We invoke ethnography on kin practices
as an anthropological resource to help us understand symbiotic relations,
extending methodologically from the commensality of the shared meal and the
mutualisms of kinship negotiations. The generative terms of futurity are up for
grabs within contingent relations such as these so how are decisions made in
the presence of those who will bear their consequences? Moreover, how might
ambivalent, ambiguous and slippery kinships produce togetherness and generative
futures?

 

Please follow the link below to propose a paper via the ASA website:

 

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/asa/asa2015/panels.php5?PanelID=xxxx

 

Our panel is P34 and the deadline for paper
proposals is the 1st December 2014.

 

Best wishes,

 

Bethany Honeysett and Siobhan Magee (The University of Edinburgh)

 


 		 	   		  
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