Navigating the Modern Family: Kinship, Care & Reproduction

The institution of the family is undergoing its most profound transformation in centuries. Once organised around property, inheritance, religious normativity, gender hierarchy and the reproduction of social status, family life is now shaped by individualisation, pluralisation and technoscientific intervention. Fertility medicine, assisted reproduction, genetic diagnostics, cryopreservation and other reproductive technologies are unsettling inherited assumptions about kinship, parenthood, temporality and generational continuity.

At the same time, changing gender relations, diverse household forms, blended constellations, transnational care arrangements and co-parenting challenge any singular model of family life. Today, the family can no longer be understood as a fixed natural institution, but as a mutable social configuration of care, intimacy, reproduction, dependency, autonomy and belonging.

The evening brings together German and Israeli experts for a cross-disciplinary conversation on how science, medicine, technology, culture and society are reshaping the modern family. The discussion will ask how scientific developments enter everyday life at its most intimate points, how they transform practices of care, reproduction and kinship, and how they shape the future of what we see and live as “family”.

Visitors can expect an accessible, thought-provoking panel discussion connecting high-level academic perspectives with questions of broad public relevance. The evening will include a moderated conversation and an audience Q&A, inviting participants to reflect on one of the most profound social transformations of our time.