Short Abstract:

In a context of environmental, economic and political crisis the panel explores the ways that kinship ideologies inform ethical and politicised notions of responsibility to articulate demands for individual and collective liveable futures, bringing into focus the political dimensions of kinship.

Long Abstract:

This panel engages with potentially competing ethical and political demands underpinning claims related to the future. In the light of climate change, ongoing crises of welfare and care and struggles over sexual and reproductive rights, we explore how kinship ideologies may allocate responsibilities ‘ethically’ with reference to collective futures. Anthropologists show how kinship creates structural and ideological dispositives, while also being shaped by everyday experience. A focus on relatedness shifted attention towards practice but arguably ‘domesticated’ kinship in the process. The panel interrogates how kinship moralities may allocate responsibilities oriented towards imagining and creating liveable futures differently from legal and political institutions, but also how these structural givens shape the processes by which kinship become as main site for a politics of the possible in the light of existential threats and engagement with politics in accordance with gender, race and class intersections across generations and the lifecourse. Such negotiations of responsibilities and the experience thereof are often contrasted with what is understood as (i)responsibilities by the state and legal discourses, especially where gender, race and class are bases of exclusion and disenfranchisement. The panel asks what kind of effects policies and politics have on the way individual and collective responsibilities are understood, and what a recourse to idioms of responsibility related to kinship may contribute to anthropological understandings of democratic struggles for better futures, such as movements concerned with livelihoods, housing, reproductive rights, and environmental justice.