Fragile Kinships: Child Welfare and Well-Being in Japan

In Fragile Kinships, Kathryn E. Goldfarb shows how 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. By centering relationality in theorizing social forms of care, Fragile Kinships offers key insights into embodied and socioemotional well-being. Goldfarb analyzes both the feelings and effects of lacking kin, and the transformative energy people invest in creating new forms of kinship and relatedness.

Fragile Kinships demonstrates why welfare systems must support relational well-being. In her contributions to anthropological theories of kinship, embodiment, and the field of Japanese studies, Goldfarb also speaks to academics, practitioners, and policymakers in Japan and globally with ethnographically grounded perspectives suggesting ways that child welfare systems might truly achieve wellbeing.

Kathryn E. Goldfarb is a cultural and medical anthropologist. Her research focuses on the ways social relationships shape embodied experience, intersections between public policy and well-being, and the co-production of scientific knowledge and subjective experiences, including narrative creation. She is co-editor of Difficult Attachments.