Emergent Forms of Relatedness: Complex family forms, policing and incarceration in a poor urban neighborhood of Santiago, Chile

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

Dr. Clara Han, Johns Hopkins University, will conduct ethnographic research on the changing contours of kinship networks and norms in relation to the incarceration process and neighborhood-level policing in a poor urban neighborhood in Santiago, Chile. By conducting longitudinal fieldwork in a poor urban neighborhood where intensive policing has led to high rates of incarceration, this study will document: 1) how kinship networks and moral obligations are taking shape in relation to incarceration; 2) how and to what extent criminal procedure takes into account kinship obligations in sentencing; 3) how neighborhood social and ecclesiastical organizations morally and materially provide possibilities for new vertical and lateral kinship relations (for example, parenting, grandparenting, and siblingship) and how the varying realization of these relations reshape the neighborhood as an actual social form. This study will employ a range of ethnographic fieldwork methods, including participant-observation in diverse neighborhood organizations, life histories and kinship charts, and longitudinal interviews of women with incarcerated kin. Primary field research will be supplemented by observations of public court hearings in the criminal court that serves this neighborhood, archival research on legal disputes regarding kinship care for children of incarcerated kin as well as the wider processes of legal and penal reform. Findings from this study will complement macro-level quantitative studies on the social effects of incarceration on families and neighborhoods by contributing an understanding of the practices and ideas of kinship from the perspective of those who live in neighborhoods with high rates of incarceration. Given the contemporary policy debates on penal reform due to increasing prison populations across the Americas, this research can offer a timely contribution to these debates by illuminating alternative responses to poverty-related violence and insecurity, responses generated and imagined by neighborhoods themselves.