Short Abstract

How do migration, generational succession, and political-economic change reconfigure moral worlds? This workshop examines how transformations of family relations, broadly understood, reshape moral life.

Long Abstract

Much of the anthropology of morality treats moral change as unfolding within an already-formed subject who encounters disruption and reflects on it. This workshop reverses the perspective: how do relationships reconfigured by migration, generational succession, or political-economic change remake the moral worlds people inhabit?

Family relations, taken broadly, are a privileged site for this inquiry. Parent-child ties, intimate partnerships, gender relations, kinship obligations, and care are reconfigured as people cross borders, generational positions shift, and inequalities widen. These changes unsettle collective understandings of responsibility, intimacy, and the good life, both within and beyond families. State projects of moral and civilizational regulation, international development interventions, and religious or therapeutic institutions promote particular moral models of childhood, gender, and family life. Affective dynamics and material conditions, including geographical separation, remittances, communication technologies, and legal status, mediate how large-scale transformations translate into moral change, often without deliberate ethical reflection.

We invite ethnographic and theoretical papers on parent-child and intergenerational relations, intimacy and sexuality, gender, care, migration and transnational families, and political projects that seek to reshape family morality.