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SERIES TITLE: Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference
SERIES EDITORS: May Friedman, Associate Professor, Toronto Metropolitan University (Canada); Silvia Schultermandl, Professor, University of Muenster (Germany)

For more information, please look at our series page: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15789

This book series brings together analyses of familial and kin relationships with emerging and new technologies which allow for the creation, maintenance and expansion of family. We use the term “family” as a working truth with a wide range of meanings in an attempt to address the feelings of family belonging across all aspects of social location: ability, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, gender identity, body size, social class and beyond. This book series aims to explore phenomena located at the intersection of technologies including those which allow for family creation, migration, communication, reunion and the family as a site of difference. The individual volumes in this series will offer insightful analyses of these phenomena in media, social media, literature, popular culture and corporeal settings.

Possible book topics include:

• the use of technology and migration and family composition and disjunction; the ways that technologies may both push and pull kin together/apart;
• the range of technology use across literal and figurative space including intersections of geography, race, age, poverty, gender and beyond;
• the impact of technological absence: the ways that technologies may be taken for granted in particular environments (privileged nations; privileged subject positions) and may be denied or inaccessible in other spaces or places;
• technologies of family creation and maintenance: the use of alternate reproductive technologies; the use of communication technologies to share information;
• discussions of race and racialization in the context of kinship relationships and intersected with connections to technologies; hypervisibility of racism including police brutality; activist circles as forms of kinship;
• queer family creation and representation through technology; making queer family visible through traditional, popular and social media; alternate family connections including non-normative parenting arrangements (more than two parents, multiple different shades of parenting); “new” family through donor sibling relationships;
• technologies of class mobility, including the impact of smartphone technology on mediating/curtailing aspects of the digital divide; shifting family relationships through generational moves in class status;
• fat family: the ways that narratives of obesity have had impacts on the creation and representation of family (for example: obese women who are denied reproductive technologies or access to international adoption); the ways these rhetorics have shifted differently in different jurisdictions; representation of fat family; intersection of fat and working class identities in popular culture;
• trans families: both in terms of gender identity but also in terms of other families that “confound”— families that do not “match” one another, or that otherwise transgress normative models;

Please send inquiries to: mayfriedman@torontomu.ca AND silvia.schultermandl@uni-muenster.de

Poetry Parlor Reconvenes!

In the summer semester, Poetry Parlor will meet again Thursdays at 4 PM at the English Department.

As usual, there are only 10 slots available for students who share an interest in reading and discussing poetry and who can attend the meetings regularly. First come, first served. For more information, please read the description on our homepage. Room details will be shared with participants upon registration.

To register, please send an email to gulsin.ciftci@uni-muenster.de.

As part of our 2023 Juneteenth event, we are happy to announce that our conversation with Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton has been published: 

Writing Black Women’s Mythology: A Conversation with Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Gulsin Ciftci, and Silvia Schultermandl. You may find it here.