Speaker: Kathryn Goldfarb, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Colorado Boulder

Overview:
Child welfare systems do not always generate well-being. This is true across the world, as it is in Japan. Policymakers, caregivers, and people with experience in state care endeavor to imagine—and implement—child welfare systems that are genuinely supportive. Yet despite these efforts, social welfare systems too often produce people who are alone.

In Japan, there are culturally and historically specific challenges to the development of child welfare systems that support well-being. This presentation introduces central arguments of my recently published book, Fragile Kinships: Child Welfare and Well-Being in Japan. Based in ethnographic research in Japan between 2008 and 2023, this study is rooted in lived experiences and culturally contextualized narratives, and places relationality at the heart of our understanding of social forms of care. Most centrally, the book demonstrates why welfare systems must support relational well-being.

Moderator: Robert Dujarric, ICAS co-director