Event

Forging Kinships invites scholars from multiple disciplines and academic institutions to think upon how the bonds of kinship are created, lived, and realized. The organizing theme of this day-long symposium focuses on exploring the dynamic processes which shape and define kinships in the historical past and contemporary moment, and the complex sociopolitical and liberal entanglements with which kinships are often viewed. To this end, Forging Kinships will feature four panels (Substance, Temporalities, Archives, and Mobilites) and a roundtable discussion, bringing in speakers from Anthropology, History, Gender Studies, Classics, and East Asian Studies to dynamically examine kinships from multiple perspectives.

9:00-9:30 am | COFFEE + REGISTRATION

9:30-9:40 am | OPENING REMARKS
Karen Redrobe (Director, Wolf Humanities Center)
Raquel Fleskes (Graduate Research Assistant, Wolf Humanities Center)

9:40-10:45 am | SUBSTANCES
Chair: Gregory Callaghan (Graduate Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center)
Respondent: Liana Brent (Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center)

• Jake Nabel (Classics, Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Penn State)
  “On Dynasties and Fosterage: Kinship as a Feature of Interstate Relations between Imperial Rome and Pre-Islamic Iran”
• Bradley Ensor (Anthropology, Eastern State University)
  “Kinship and Prehistory”
  

11:00 am-12:05 pm | TEMPORALITIES
Chair: Raquel Fleskes, (Graduate Research Assistant, Wolf Humanities Center)
Respondent: Danielle Taschereau Mamers (Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center)

• Amy Borovoy (East Asian Studies, Princeton)
  “Containing Modernity: Gender and Labor in Japan’s Public Sphere”
• Mark Rifkin (English, UNC Greensboro)
  “Kinship’s Past, Queer and Indigenous Futures.”
  

1:45-2:50 pm | ARCHIVES
Chair: TBD
Respondent: Alyssa Miller (Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center)

• Angela Garcia (Anthropology, Stanford University)
• Margaret Bruchac (Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania)
  "Reverse Ethnography: Strategies for Recovering from Anthropological Search and Rescue"

3:05-4:50 pm | MOBILITIES
Respondent: Sarah Franzen (Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center)
Chair: Helen Melling (Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center)

• Rachel Sarah O’Toole (History, UC Irvine)
  “Coded Patriarchs and Shadow Matriarchs: Claiming Freedom in Colonial Peru” 
• Riché J. Daniel Barnes (Gender Studies, Mount Holyoke)
  “Schools as Kin: Black Strategic Mothering in the ‘school choice market place’”

4:50-5:00 pm | CLOSING REMARKS
Ramya Sreenivasan ("Kinship", Topic Director, Wolf Humanities Center)

5:30 pm | RECEPTION

For more information, see: https://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/forging-kinships