Research considerations

As writer and feminist geographer Sophie Lewis states, “Family abolition is about the proliferation of relationships of care not a destruction of the relationships we already have.”

The alternative family model in “Kin Makers” is a research site for the possibilities for increased quality of life and sustainability for those who have found themselves wanting to transcend the nuclear model. Additionally, “Kin Makers” acknowledges the environmental concerns of applicants and seeks to make visible the making of “family through lateral networks of friendship and community of nonbiologically related individuals (i.e., kin), rather than increase the global population numbers by promoting traditional families based on biologically related offspring through reproduction (i.e., population)” (Banu Subramaniam, “Overpopulation is Not the Problem”).

“Making kin seems to me the thing that we most need to be doing in a world that rips us apart from each other, in a world that has already more than seven and a half billion human beings with very unequal and unjust patterns of suffering and well-being. By kin I mean those who have an enduring mutual, obligatory, non-optional, you-can’t-just-cast-that-away-when-it-gets-inconvenient, enduring relatedness that carries consequences.” Donna Haraway (author of “Making Kin, Not Population”)

“Decolonization is not an individual choice. We must collectively oppose a system of compulsory settler sexuality and family that continues building a nation upon Indigenous genocide and that marks Indigenous and other marginalized relations as deviant. This includes opposing norms and policies that reward nonnative kinship ties ( e.g., monogamous legal marriage, nuclear biological family) over other forms of kinship obligation. It includes living or supporting others in living within nonmonogamous and more-than-coupled bonds. It includes advocating policies that support a more expansive definition of family, and not rewarding normative family structures with social and financial benefits.” - Dr. Kim Tallbear (author, scholar)