[Air-L] Book Series: Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference

[Schultermandl, Silvia (silvia.schultermandl@uni-graz.at)]

SERIES TITLE: Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference

SERIES EDITOR/S: May Friedman, Ryerson University (Canada); Silvia Schultermandl, University of Graz (Austria)

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 the representations 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, 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;
• queer family creation and representation through technology; making queer family visible through traditional, popular and social media; alternate family connections including nonnormative 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
• technologies of disability: the use of technology to enhance or bolster independence, the ways that disabled people are seen as incapable of parenting; on the other hand, the technologies which come into play around parenting children with disability, both prenatally and once children are born; representation of disability and family (fetishization and the perceived martyrdom of parents)

Please send inquiries to may.friedman at ryerson.ca AND silvia.schultermandl at uni-graz.at