Fragile Kinships

In Fragile Kinships, Kathryn Goldfarb shows how child welfare systems do not always generate well-being. This is true across the world, as it is in Japan. Policy makers, 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 socio-emotional 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, Kathryn 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 well-being.

Auteur

Kathryn E. Goldfarb is a cultural and medical anthropologist. Her research focuses on the ways social relationships shape embodied experience, intersections between public policy and well-being, and the coproduction of scientific knowledge and subjective experiences, including narrative creation. She is the coeditor of Difficult Attachments.