On Kinship, Race, and Reproduction: Questions and Responses to Matters Expounding on Kinship from Amaryah Armstrong, Balbir Singh, and Andrea Baldwin

Amaryah Armstrong, Balbir Singh, and Andrea Baldwin are assistant professors at Virginia Tech in the Religion and Culture Department who, over the course of a semester, co-taught an ASPECT graduate seminar entitled Kin: Feminist Theories of Race and Reproduction. Throughout the class they each centered on the concept of kinship and critically interrogated sub-concepts that came up around subjectivity, agency, and alienation, identifying implications of a complex network of kinship ties. The following is a dialogue reflecting on their collective expectations and experience of planning and facilitating the seminar, while also practicing the intentional cultivation of a space where degrees of kinship could be formed between themselves and the students.