(Re)Generating Kinship: Intimate Encounters and the Making of 'New Worlds' in Canada's Climate Crisis
Dr. Koreen Reece (University of Bayreuth)
Canada currently faces unprecedented climate disaster – from devastating wildfire to drought and flooding. Evoking a global array of other crises, from pandemics to war, the climate crisis also confronts Canadians from diverse backgrounds with the nation’s settler colonial histories. Together, these crises have inspired a critical reassessment of what Canada is, has been and could be. This talk will describe a new research project, '(Re)Generating Kinship', which hypothesizes that Canadians experience and respond to the climate crisis primarily through their kin-making and family lives. The talk will explore the regenerative potentials of kinship practices, ethics, and encounters, undertaken by settler, migrant, and First Nation communities alike - in their relations to and through land during a climate crisis; in family histories of forced and voluntary migration and mobility; and in confronting colonial legacies and experimenting with decolonial alternatives. This project asks: how does kinship settle, unsettle, and regenerate Canada as a ‘new world’ in a time of climate crisis?
Koreen M. Reece is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. She conducts research on families, non-governmental organisations, and the state, and the ways they manage - and create - change in times of crisis. Her monograph, Pandemic Kinship: Families, Intervention and Social Change in Botswana’s Time of AIDS (Cambridge University Press, 2022), explores how crisis creates kinship for families navigating the AIDS epidemic and its associated interventions in Botswana. She is developing new research on how kinship settles and unsettles Canada as a settler nation in a time of climate crisis.