Care, Kinship, State: (Re)producing Belonging and Difference

Internal webseminar by Tatjana Thelen, 2020-2021 Paris IAS Fellow
Her presentation will be discussed by Ahmad Moradi, post-doc researcher-in-residence at EHESS.

Care, kinship and the state are deeply entangled. Technologies that underlie paternity and genomic testing, for example, build on shared ideas about the importance of descent as constituting kinship and then translate them into various rights and obligations to give and receive care as well as forms of belonging, including citizenship. These understandings generate inclusion for some individuals – but also difference, exclusion or marginalisation of ‘other’ internal and external populations. Despite social scientific critiques of essentialising concepts such as kinship, ethnicity and the nation, naturalising belonging remains very prominent in political and public discourses. This research project will explore how kinship and state are mutually constitutive and emerge through negotiations of care.