Hello all,

明けましておめでとうございます（＾＾）

(With apologies for cross-posting:) I wanted to announce the publication of my solo-authored book, Fragile Kinships: Child Welfare and Well-Being in Japan, which technically releases January 15  (Discount code 09BCARD for 30% off)

My edited volume with Sandra Bamford, Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, came out mid-October-- situated in cultural anthropology and kinship studies, it includes three Japan-related chapters: my own and chapters by Jason Danely and Sonia Zhang. (Code RUP30 for 30%)

Best wishes,

Kate

Fragile Kinships: Child Welfare and Well-Being in Japan, by Kathryn E. Goldfarb

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501778247/fragile-kinships/#bookTabs=1

In Fragile Kinships, Kathryn E. Goldfarb shows how child welfare systems do not always generate well-being. This is true across the world, as it is in Japan. Policymakers, caregivers, and people with experience in state care endeavor to imagine--and implement--child welfare systems that are genuinely supportive. Yet despite these efforts, social welfare systems too often produce people who are alone. By centering relationality in theorizing social forms of care, Fragile Kinships offers key insights into embodied and socioemotional well-being. Goldfarb analyzes both the feelings and effects of lacking kin, and the transformative energy people invest in creating new forms of kinship and relatedness. Fragile Kinships demonstrates why welfare systems must support relational well-being. In her contributions to anthropological theories of kinship, embodiment, and the field of Japanese studies, Goldfarb also speaks to academics, practitioners, and policymakers in Japan and globally with ethnographically grounded perspectives suggesting ways that child welfare systems might truly achieve wellbeing.

09BCARD

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Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, edited by Kathryn E. Goldfarb and Sandra Bamford

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/difficult-attachments/9781978841420/

Anthropologists have long considered kinship as the basis for social solidarity. Indeed, the idea that kinship is grounded in positive sociality has found its way into most anthropological accounts and has served as an orienting framework directing decades of scholarly research. But what about when it is not? What about instances when kinship is anything but 'warm and fuzzy' but is characterized, instead, by neglect, violence, negative affect, or a lack of nurturance and care? In the three interlinked sections of this volume, the view that kinship is about "solidarity" and "care" is challenged by exploring how kin relations are not only about connection and inclusion but also about disconnection, exclusion, neglect, and violence. Kinship relationships that feel "positive" and "good" take a great deal of perseverance and work; there is nothing "natural" about kinship ties as being based on positive sociality. In these chapters, the contributors take seriously the contingency of kinship relations (the moments when kinship breaks down or is a source of suffering) and how this prompts scholars to develop new theoretical and methodological perspectives.

RUP30

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Kathryn E. Goldfarb

Associate Professor of Anthropology

University of Colorado at Boulder

Traditional Territories of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations

 

Mailing address:

Campus Box 233 UCB

Boulder, CO 80309

 

Office: Hale Science 466

Office phone: 303.492.1589