[URBANTH-L]CFP: Investing in the Future: Marketing, Selling, and Buying Kinship (AAA 2006)

[Teresa Pellinen-Chávez]

Investing in the Future: Marketing, Selling, and Buying Kinship

This panel is interested in looking at communities that pro-actively
and pragmatically defy the course of normative kinship through
creative (and often counter-cultural) economic arrangements. Much of
the impetus for engaging in the work of establishing unlikely kinship
bonds is that these offer the possibility of investing in an entirely
new kind of future than what would otherwise be considered possible.
These arrangements include, but are not limited to partnerships,
parenting, intentional communities, and other "chosen family"
configurations. Specifically, we are interested in how people
literally market themselves – in low- and high-tech ways – to
potential future partners (and community) both around the corner and
across the globe, and through this process attempt to imagine and
manage future lives that are beyond tradition or convention. We are
interested in projects that advance further connections between
kinship redefinition vis-à-vis economic arrangements and  that
investigate kinship-making through deliberate and strategic affinities
and across geographies and/or temporalities.

Please send us a title, a 250-word abstract, and your academic
affiliations for consideration for a proposed panel for the 2006
meeting of the AAA. Abstracts are due Monday, March 27th.

Please email materials to:

Teresa Pellinen-Chávez: teresapc at stanford.edu
Tiffany Romain: tromain at stanford.edu