DIALOGUE - Thursday, July 29

Antropólogas, familias y maternidades en contextos cambiantes

Moderation: Telmo Caria (UTAD)

MARíA ISABEL JOCILES

Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España

María Isabel Jociles is a researcher, professor and chair in the Department of Anthropology and Social Psychology of the Complutense University of Madrid. She is the co-director of the APSYC research group (Anthropology of Social and Cultural Politics), and serves as managing director of the journal Política y Sociedad. Her research is oriented to new family models, international adoption, assisted reproductive technology with donors, childhood and juvenile socialization processes, epistemology and methodology of ethnographic research.

Publications:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maria_Jociles 

https://ucm.academia.edu/MaribelJociles

LUZIA OCA

UTAD, Portugal

Luzia Oca González (Ribadeo, 1971), PhD in Social Anthropology (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 2013), and BA in Sociology (Complutense University of Madrid), is an assistant professor in the University de Tras-os-Montes and Alto Douro since 2004. She is also a researcher in the Centro Transdisciplinar de Estudos para o Desenvolvimento - CETRAD.

Previous to her career in academia, she worked in several social research projects, such as in the Cape Verdian Community of Galicia, where she coordinated an initiative for integration, and she worked as equality agent in 2002-2003 for the municipality of Camariñas (A Coruña).

Luzia has a close relationship with Cape Verde, and she has worked since 2006 in the implementation of cooperative projects for the development of the area in the ACCVE (Association for Cooperation in Cape Verde). The projects were oriented to the participative empowerment of women in Ribeira Grande de Santiago.

She is the author of several publications related to the Cape Verdian community in Galicia, such as the book "Caboverdianas en Burela (1978/2008). Migración, relaciones de género e intervención social”. This book was based on her doctoral dissertation, that received the Vicente Risco Award of Social Sciences, 2014.

Her research areas consider gender and migration, participative intervention based on feminists proposals and recently in the intersection of gender and tourism.

Anthropologists, families and maternity in changing contexts

The dialogue wants to take as a starting point the cross-linking that, in the case of research on families and maternity schools, takes place between personal and professional life of the dialoguing anthropologists, whose own families have much to do with their ethnographic research. Often it is the personal experiences of the researchers that lead them towards certain thematic areas, to focus their work on certain aspects of these and to adopt a committed or political position in front of them; other times it is the terrain that ends up being part of the personal life of the researcher.

And this can happen not only from the practice of a feminist ethnography, which expressly supports that cross-linking and that commitment, but also from a "conventional" ethnography that does not oppose the methodological principles of this research strategy (such as that of "anthropological estrangement") to a job involved, which is embodied and corporeized.

Ethnographing, for example, transnational families, mixed families, maternity alone or in a non-heteronormative couple, experiences in processes of adoption or medically assisted reproduction, allow anthropology not only to "document" those realities or question ideologies (about kinship, Gender relations, motherhood, fatherhood, love, family, migration, etc.) deeply rooted, but also provide tools to contribute to their transformation.