Kinship, Care, and Coercion: Historical Narratives of Family and Power in U.S. and Global Contexts

Dear Colleagues,

We invite submissions for a Special Issue that examines how intimacy, family, and kinship intersect with questions of power, justice, and collective life in US and global contexts. At a moment when the boundaries between public and private are increasingly fraught, ethno-nationalism is on the rise, and political polarization deepens. This Special Issue explores how proximity, connection, and belonging operate as sites of both care and coercion, as impetuses for emancipation and resilience and for dominion and negation. We seek contributions that employ interpretive, empirical, theoretical, and/or expressive genealogical approaches, which are broadly construed to trace historical patterns of intimate relations and to denaturalize taken-for-granted assumptions about family, care, and kinship by excavating their historical contingency and the power dynamics that have shaped their evolution.

This Special Issue responds to contemporary challenges in which kinship, family identity, and belonging, assumed as fixed categories, have become central to debates over immigration, reproductive rights, social and racial justice, and human rights, among others. In the face of growing political, economic, and cultural pressures, intimate relationships are both high-salience battlegrounds and spaces for resistance, and this Special Issue aims to critically interrogate the interstitial, evolving spaces between social and political life. It will offer historical insights and narrative-driven analyses of how kinship and family persist, adapt, and resist, as sites of coercion and/or care, in times of crisis, conflict, and political transformation, in both the U.S. and globally.

We hope to deepen scholarly engagement with family narratives that challenge traditional political and social paradigms, exploring how kinship practices and emotional bonds both reflect and shape fluctuations in power relations and in societal change.

Rationale

While scholarship across social scientific and humanistic disciplines has engaged with affect, intimacy, and relationality for decades, questions about how families and intimate networks shape—and are shaped by—historically contingent structures of state power, the law, and public policy remain urgent and under-addressed.

This Special Issue aims to highlight the significance of kinship, family, and relationality as a key heuristic frame that spotlights the imbricated intimate spaces between social and political life, between care and coercion, and between justice and impediments to its realization.

We seek work that considers how relationality is produced, regulated, and experienced through political time, across diverse US national, subnational, and global contexts. We especially invite contributors to critically examine the impact of formal and informal institutions—such as the state, law, capitalism, slavery, prisons, welfare, immigration, art, music, and architecture—on the formation and experience of evolving kinship practices, family narratives, and relationality.

We welcome submissions that engage with one or more of the following themes:

• Belonging and its boundaries: How do intimacies create conditions for collective, social, and/or national and transnational belonging and non-belonging?
• Family as political formation: In what ways does family function as a model for public living? How do familial structures reproduce or resist dominant political arrangements over time?
• Proximity and control/coercion: How do closeness, care, and connection within family or kinship units operate as technologies of governance? What forms of power circulate, and/or are reproduced, within intimate relationships?
• Care ethics and interdependence: How might care-based approaches challenge or complement traditional political or social theories? How have state and legal interventions in family and kinship (e.g., marriage laws, reproductive rights, welfare policies, property laws, slavery and servitude) shaped intimate practices of, and access to, care?
• Affective networks, memory and strategies: How does affect move through and constitute relational dynamics? What roles do emotions, feelings, and memory play in the evolution of family structures, lived experience, social kin-based practices, and intimate bonding?
• Justice and intimate life: How do families and intimate relationships serve as sites where justice is imagined, experienced, reproduced, and/or foreclosed? What tensions or synergies exist between kinship ties and broader collective commitments to social justice?
• Narratives, discourses, and scripts: What stories do we tell, explicitly or expressively, about family, identity, and belonging? How do dominant narratives shape lived experiences of relationality, and how are these narratives imposed, contested, or reimagined?
• State, law, and the regulation of intimacy: How do legal structures and state technologies produce, constrain, or transform intimate relationships? How do stratifications of social life—such as along lines of race, gender, class, or sexuality—embed and/or engender such state regulation?
• Historical Institutionalism: How do dynamics of macro and micro historical change impel how institutionalized systems such as immigration law, policing, and prisons impact familial ties, lived experience, and kinship networks?

Scope and Approach

This Special Issue is intentionally multi-, cross- and inter-disciplinary, with an intentional focus on genealogical modes of inquiry that trace the ideational, discursive, or expressive development of kin-based relations and narratives over time. We actively seek perspectives from across the social sciences and humanities, from disciplines such as politics, law, sociology, history, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, cultural and literary studies, and visual and performing arts. We welcome theoretical, empirical, and interpretive work, including conceptual development and exploratory research.

We are particularly interested in scholarship that:

• Centers marginalized voices and experiences, including work on Black families, queer kinship, Indigenous relationality, trans parenthood, and diasporic intimacies;
• Engages with historical, global, and transnational contexts, within and beyond the United States;
• Employs rigorous qualitative methodologies, including ethnographic, archival, genealogical, narrative, interpretative, and arts-based approaches;
• Troubles or reimagines conventional categories of "family," “kinship”, "intimacy," and "relationality";
• Bridges scholarly conversations that have remained siloed across disciplinary boundaries;
• Considers the epistemic messiness of kin, family, and intimate relations and its significance in building durable structures of care, emancipation, and resilience.

We aim to build a cross-disciplinary dialogue that allows for deeper reflections on how family and kinship are contested and evolving concepts, experiences, and practices. By so doing, this Special Issue hopes to generate a breadth of insights into family, intimacy, and kinship that can reconfigure and reanimate existing siloed and stalled conversations about power, justice, dominion, and care.

Interested authors should submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors, Gwendoline Alphonso (galphonso@fairfield.edu) and H. Howell Williams (williamsh@wcsu.edu) for priority consideration by April 15, 2026. Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Dr. Gwendoline Alphonso
Dr. H. Howell Williams
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.