Congrulations to Kat from the department of Film and Television Studies!

The conference ‘Forms and Feelings of Kinship in the Contemporary World’, funded by the Humanities Research Centre, took place on 27^th April 2024 at the Wolfson Research Exchange. This event provided a platform for an interdisciplinary dialogue between screen studies and kinship studies, bringing together researchers from both anthropology and film and media studies. Professor Janet Carsten from the University of Edinburgh gave the keynote address, titled ‘Creative Kinship: Extending Familial and Moral Imaginaries’, proposing that cinema can open up an expansive and imaginative terrain to explore kinship issues. In accordance with this topic, the conference was organised into three panels: ‘Creatures and Landscapes’ examined how we can make kin from both non-human and ecological perspectives; ‘Queer Families and Communities’ addressed the new visions of queer families and communities in terms of today’s geopolitics; ‘Kinship and Genre’ obtained a critical viewpoint to reconsider the representations of familial relationships in mainstream films. Professor Alastair Phillips, Professor Catherine Constable, Professor Karl Schoonover, and Dr James Taylor chaired the keynote address and panels. Additionally, Dom Thornton gave a paper on the ‘fast family’ of the Fast and Furious franchise.