Intimate Geographies of Family Fracturing

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) states that “the family is the fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State”. Research has highlighted the state’s uneven attention towards families as state policies consider only some families as deserving of rights and care from the state. In particular, families suffering multiple discriminations face more difficulty claiming their reproductive right to parent their child/ren in enabling conditions free of (institutional) violence. Many of these families are subject to being torn apart either through exclusive or absent state policies. Family fracturing refers to the unwanted separation – whether temporary, long-term or permanent – between mothers/parents and child/ren as a result of state policies. Research on family fracturing has mainly focused on Black communities in the United States, but we know little about different forms of family fracturing and their consequences especially on families facing multiple discriminations in Europe. Departing from the intimate experiences of affected mothers/parents facing multiple discriminations, the project investigates on an empirical level, processes of family fracturing through a “generative comparison” (Robinson 2016) of four subprojects: (A) the separation of children and mothers/parents during imprisonment in the Swiss carceral regime, (B) the placement of children in foster care in France’s child protection regime, (C) hindered family reunification within Germany’s border regime, and (D) the stigmatization and denial of motherhood/parenthood for sex workers in Spain’s labor regime. While each subproject focuses on a different form of family fracturing, a generative comparison of the four subprojects seeks to decipher how different policy regimes – understood as the assemblage of institutional actors, practices and discourses situated on different political scales – shape the intimate experiences of mothers/parents facing multiple discriminations of being involuntarily separated from their child/ren. On a methodological level, it develops a transscalar methodology that seeks to capture how intimate family life is shaped by policy regimes articulated at the local, national and European levels. To do so, it combines affectual methods and institutional ethnography to reconstruct the cases of affected mothers/parents with an inductive intersecting regimes analysis that studies political institutions, practices, and discourses of the different actors involved in the selected cases. It works with participatory and artistic cartography to visualize the transscalarity of family fracturing. On a conceptual level, we develop family fracturing as a spatial and transscalar concept to ex-plain different forms of family fracturing resulting from the interactions between policy regimes and intimate life. Expected results and impacts: The project develops the concept of family fracturing on a theoretical level and designs a novel methodological framework to study different types of family fracturing across sites and scales. The project reorients scholarly and political debates on the contested nature of “the family” by focusing on the reproductive right to mother/parent child/ren in enabling conditions. The transscalar analysis of how different policy regimes intersect in complicating the necessary conditions to guarantee this right is an essential step toward providing empirical evidence for public and scholarly debate.