About the speaker

Thomas Meysen is managing director at SOCLES International Centre for Socio-Legal Studies in Heidelberg/Berlin, Germany. The interdisciplinary research at SOCLES covers the diversity of contexts of childhood, youth, family and gender. It combines legal, social and administrative science research, sees itself as an interdisciplinary bridge builder and promotes the transfer of knowledge into politics and practice. The international dimension strengthens the reflexive, discursive and multi-perspective self-conception.

Abstract

Everyone has his*her own experience-based concept of what family is. When law frames family it needs to include the variety of individual understandings. What law itself cannot provide for is a lived family relationship. However, kinship relationships can be established by law. Sociologically, family was and is never a natural but always a social fact, a social and cultural construct that had to be created and realised in its concrete form. Thus, family both socially and individually demands for a relationship. The ‘doing family’ approach can look at the processes of establishing and dissolving relationships in their individual dimensions as if under a magnifying glass and distinguish between formal kinship relationships and the familial practice of closeness or distance. The lecture will reflect the interplay between law and society on the conception of family and kinship in the dynamic development of the societal perspective on family relationships and in reproductive medicine.

Registration

The lecture will be held in the Research Seminar room  (A3.01) and online via zoom. To register online, please click on the button below.