Affinity: Solidarities of reproduction and relationships

1 – 3 September 2026
Future Africa | University of Pretoria | South Africa

Scholars in various disciplines use the notion of “affinity” to describe closeness, similarity, aptitude and attraction. Affinity speaks to the ties that bind: bonds of blood and closeness; the entanglements of partnerships and marriage; the kin we choose, the kin we make, and the kin that choose us. It describes solidarities of ideas, place, and emotion, as well as attachments mediated by care and technology. Across various spheres worldwide, reproductive life – its aspirations, labours, and infrastructures – is increasingly governed through moralising frames. These frames are often divisive, intending to promote difference, discord and inequality.

As a follow-up to the Re-worlding Reproduction conference held at the University of Pretoria in 2024, Affinity, our second conference, considers the ongoing attempts to create, contest, and nurture ideas of similarity, closeness and attraction. Affinity extends the project of re-worlding by taking as a given the multiplicity of reproductive worlds, practices, and futures; it invites us to centre “affinity” in the processes and practices of re-worlding reproduction in times of political upheaval, environmental precarity, and shifting moral worlds.

In Affinity, we gather to remake how reproduction is known, lived and valued through solidarities that transcend blood, extend across relationships, and cross disciplinary divides, including linguistic, geographical, and generational divides. We specifically encourage contributors to reflect on how we can centre knowledges from the South to rethink/reimagine/disrupt/intervene in how we understand, value, and represent reproductive life. Affinity is a call to stand together and think otherwise, to refuse narrow scripts that naturalise certain types of relatedness and universalise Northern theories.

We invite:

• creative, insurgent, and grounded scholarship that centres African and Global South perspectives;
• contributions that are rooted in and foreground care as a social and material practice;
• contributions that trace how kin and connection are forged, refused, and reconfigured in the past, present and future;
• contributions that unsettle the cognitive empires that have long governed reproductive life and that disrupt the naturalisations of narrow models of family and relatedness.

We especially encourage contributions from scholars based in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South, and work that challenges hegemonic frames in research, policy, and practice.