SEAA Reads

Fragile Kinships : Child Welfare and Well-Being in Japan by Kathryn Goldfarb (Duke U. Press) The summer book club was hosted by Merry White for the seven colleagues across several time zones. The idea of "rhetoric versus reality" ran through the pages and the session (what is supposed to be, in this case a model/normal/unremarkable family, versus what is actually experienced and structured, in this case young people fostered from babies in some situations through adulthood or almost adulthood). The earliest field notes go back to 2009 and the book was published in 2024. So the span of long relationships between some of the people interviewed and the author is truly longitudinal. Emotion enters into many parts of lived experience but not so often into social science subjects where it is so central to the larger theme of human development and sustaining a person's well-being in the chapters of this book. Whether similar conversations, and formulating similar questions woul...