Dr Lies Wesseling will be inaugurated as holder of the special “Opzij” chair “Cultural Memory, Gender and Diversity” at Maastricht University on Friday 12 September 2014. On this occasion, an international symposium entitled “The Personal is Geopolitical: Story-telling and Familial Belonging in a Globalising World” will take place at the Groote Societeit, Vrijthof 36, 9.30 – 15.30.
The symposium will revitalise the classical feminist adage that ‘the personal is political’. Nowadays, this slogan seems even more to the point than ever before, in that the personal has become geopolitical. Phenomena such as global surrogacy and transnational families shaped through adoption and migration exemplify the fact that geopolitical inequalities impact directly on the intimate space of the family, reorganising family relationships in both developed and developing countries. This interdisciplinary symposium combines historical, anthropological, sociological and literary perspectives, so as to analyse the complex interplay between age, class, gender, race and nationality in the global reorganisation of the family.
