School of Social and Political Science

Description

The fields of international development and global health are increasingly promoting parenting interventions as a strategy to optimize human capital and economic growth in the Global South. By changing the way parents interact and relate to their children, such interventions aim to improve cognitive and socio-emotional development in early childhood, and thus school performance in middle childhood and productivity in adulthood. However, the underlying scientific evidence is biased as it is largely drawn from research in Western middle-class contexts and excludes ethnographic research in diverse settings around the world. A crucial but missing area of expertise is the anthropology of kinship. Parenting interventions assume a particular family model (nuclear family), particular relationships (parent-child), and particular practices of relationship formation (responsive care), while ignoring the social diversity documented in anthropology at all these levels. In this seminar I will introduce the field of global parenting interventions, point out the relevance of the anthropology of kinship and encourage a critical exchange between these fields.

Gabriel Scheidecker is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. He received his PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Free University of Berlin in 2015. Before that he graduated in Philosophy and Historical Anthropology from the University of Freiburg, Germany.

A cross-cutting theme of his research is childhood, which he explores in various settings. Currently he is conducting research as a principal investigator of the project “Saving Brains? Applying Ethnography to Early Childhood Interventions in the Global South” (2023-2028), funded by an SNSF Starting Grant. The project aims to do both, conduct ethnographic research about early interventions and initiate cross-disciplinary debates about the scientific and ethical validity of such interventions. During his postdoc he focused on children and families in Berlin with a Vietnamese migration history, and their interaction with institutions of childcare and parenting support. For his PhD he conducted research about emotion socialization and relationship formation in a rural community in Madagascar.

For questions about this event, please contact kinshipmoreorless@ed.ac.uk