A Collaborative Syllabus on Kinship: Feminist Theories of Race & Reproduction

This syllabus centers on the lived concept of kinship. We have developed this collaborative syllabus together in our Kin: Race & Reproduction graduate seminar as a living archive and demonstration of what can emerge from an intentional classroom experience. We are all graduate student scholars and have been able to cultivate a mode of kinship through meaningful discussions; our work and the syllabus we have put forth here is the product of our building community in this space. We view kinship not only as a theoretical concept but a praxis of care that when practiced in the classroom allows students to bring their whole selves into the space, forging meaningful relationships and an intimate engagement with the class readings and assignments. By this we mean to invite students to incorporate their personal experiences, whether it be regarding how they feel about the course materials or applying theory to their everyday lives. The articles and essays appearing before this syllabus are the product of this intentional engagement and kinship positionality.

Through our collaboration, we aim to illustrate how kinship offers a way of navigating the world as an individual and within a community. Through our curated questions, selected readings, and our own experiences reflecting on these themes, our hope is for other students to grapple with the profound ways kinship and relationality shape our lives in both intimate and structural ways. In moving through the syllabus, we begin with large-scale forms of connection, focusing on ecological kinship and community, political structures governing kinship, and the theorizing of experiencing kinship as a spatial, temporal, and material phenomenon before moving into sections which ground these approaches through grounded explorations of intimacy, performance, familial construction, and resistance as opportunities through which to explore how kinship formations shape and inform the everyday, and what our understandings of kinship can mean for moving towards a more relational and communal mode of being-together.

Each theme can be taught as a class on its own, as a sub-section in part of a larger syllabus or combined and extended based on what desire one has for a seminar learning outcome. We must emphasize that this syllabus is unbounded, as mentioned prior, because every theme is entangled in the broader, overall concept of Kinship.