Creating Families

Creating Families is a Social Science course taught by Marlene Fried and Barbara Yngvesson.

This course satisfies Division I requirements.

Course Description
This course will investigate the roles of law, culture and technology in creating families. We will focus on the ways in which systems of reproduction reinforce and/or challenge inequalities of class, race and gender. We will examine the issues of entitlement to parenthood, domestic and international adoption, and the uses, consequences and ethics of new reproductive technologies designed to help women and men give birth to biologically-related children. Questions to be addressed include: How does women's status affect their relation to reproductive alternatives? What is the relationship between state reproductive policies and actual practices, legal, contested, and clandestine, that develop around these policies? How are notions of family and parenting enacted and transformed in an arena that is transnational, interracial, intercultural, and cross-class?

Learning Goals

 * Multi-Cultural
 * Project-based
 * Presenting
 * Reading
 * Writing