Family Matters
Seminar Organizers: Daniel Groll, Associate Professor of Philosophy, and Liz Raleigh, Associate Professor of Sociology
Everyone has a family of one kind or another, whether biological, chosen — or both. Whether you love ‘em, hate ‘em, or both at the same time, families play a huge role in making people who they are and structuring society. But while families are, in a way, totally familiar and so, to that extent, mundane, a little reflection reveals them to be the site of profound and difficult questions about identity, relatedness, authority, justice, race, culture, class and labor. The purpose of this research seminar is to interrogate the notion of family from an interdisciplinary perspective.
As a start, we might understand the basic question we seek to address as “How are families made?” Philosophically, we might ask “What are the grounds of family relations? What makes someone a parent?” Sociologically, we might ask, “How, in fact, are families constituted and how do people who are engaged in different forms of family-making understand what they’re doing?” Historically, we might ask, “How has the conception of kinship and the ‘normal’ family changed across generations and cultures?”
A second fundamental set of questions that we aim to explore is not about how families are made, but how they function: what do parents owe their children? What do children owe their parents? To what extent can parents shape their children, both metaphorically (eg. raising them in a particular religion) and literally (eg. is circumcision justified?)? How should we think about gender and justice in the context of the family?
While all of these questions are intrinsically interesting, they have taken on a special resonance and urgency over the past several years and months. Indeed, as the events of 2020 painfully illustrated, families are a window into how race, class, and gender operate both in the US and abroad. While the pandemic has challenged even the most privileged of families, it also lays bare who are the most vulnerable. Those workers who are “lucky” enough to remain employed often have to put themselves and members of their households at risk of contagion. In tandem to pressures at work, expectations at home have increased, especially for parents with young children. Unsurprisingly, women have been tasked with taking up the slack in terms of caretaking responsibilities. With these additional stresses placed on families, a humanistic examination of how families are made, enacted, and challenged is vital.
2021-22 Faculty Fellows
Lizbett Benge, Robert A. Oden, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow for Innovation in the Humanities in Theater, will work on a verbatim theater piece tentatively titled, “It Prepared Me for Prison: Where is the Care in Foster Care?” based on interviews from her dissertation research. She will also write an accompanying article that explicates the creative process of working with such material. This article will contribute to the body of qualitative and arts-based research practices while centering a critique of foster care from the vantage of those who have aged out of the system.
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, Broom Professor of Social Demography and Anthropology, will be working on a chapter of her current book project. Based on transnational Camaroonian families in Europe and Africa, she will explore disconnections and reluctance to fulfill past norms regarding obligations to send and receive foster children within extended families. A connected project with the Center for Victims of Torture will deal with the importance of family connection (local and long-distance intimacies and support) for the healing and well-being of refugees, asylum-seekers, and victims of torture—a population that suffers disproportionately from depression, anxiety, and other mental suffering that accompany the physical scars of torture.
Jason Marsh, Associate Professor of Philosophy, St. Olaf College, will explore the morality of inheritance: whether, in a social context where inheritance is a major source of wealth inequality, the transfer of resources from parents to children is morally obligatory, forbidden, or somewhere in between.
William North, Professor of History, seeks to examine how people in the Middle Ages (ca. 300-1400 CE) dealt with competing understandings and valuations of family by examining how biblical interpreters (or exegetes) on Scripture interpreted key biblical authorities touching on the subject.
Seminar Directors
Daniel Groll, Associate Professor of Philosophy, is the author of Conceiving People: Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation, published by Oxford University Press in the fall of 2021. During the research seminar, he will pursue broader questions stemming from his book project about the normative foundations of families as well as metaphilosophical questions about how to theorize about those foundations.
Liz Raleigh, Associate Professor of Sociology, will work on a manuscript investigating the role of race among White prospective adoptive parents’ introductory letters to expectant women considering adoption. Comparing two waves of data: the first collected in the spring of 2019 and the second in the summer of 2021, she examines how the nation’s racial awakening post George Floyd permeates how White parents frame transracial adoption. Through a content analysis of so-called “Dear Birthmother” letters, she will analyze whether and how White parents broach race at the early stages of adoption and consider the implications of a colorblind discourse.