(Healing) Broken lineages

Conceptions of power based on so-called bloodlines made genealogical knowledge valuable in the premodern period, while ideals about (the preservation of) blood underpinned the concept of ‘race’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Europe, biological race as well as the significance of genealogy became suspect after the Holocaust and the successful struggle of colonised people against colonial rule. For a long time, genealogy was associated with the search for family trees in archives.

Recently, however, genealogical culture has gone through something of a revival with heritage travel, oral history interviews, digitised archival data, and/or DNA testing. Genealogy has also become a tool in cases of ‘lost ancestors’, colonial child separation, broken genealogies, migration, and cases of error or misconduct in practices of sperm donation.

On the basis of critical Black studies, Indigenous studies or adoption studies, the trauma and impact of forcefully broken (biological) family ties under colonialism, slavery or international adoption have been acknowledged.

In what ways have people tried to heal from that, and what roles have genealogy and biological descendance played in these processes? What kind of relationships with the past are established or broken, which are sought, and which are neglected? And where biological or genealogical ties are at stake, how can the danger of linking identity to biological descendance as ‘race’ or nation be critically distinguished from the longing for reparation of relations with ancestors, family or one’s own people?

The revived culture of genealogy invites questions about gender, race, and power which this workshop will critically examine.

9.00 Arrival, with coffee and tea

9.30 Geertje Mak and Helmer Helmers — Welcome

9.45 Francesca Morgan — Exclusivity and Inclusivity in U.S. Genealogy Practices since 1980: Unfamiliar Aspects (pre-circulated paper)

10.30 Marijke Huisman — ‘It Frustrates Me That These Queer Ancestors Sent the Wrong Message’ (pre-circulated think piece)

11.15 Break, tea and coffee

11.30 Chiara Candaele — Back to the Roots: A Genealogy of ‘The Right to Know’

12.15 Markus Balkenhol and Doelja Refos — Ancestors, Healing and Ethnography (pre-circulated paper)

13.00 Lunch break / walk

14.00 Ayşenur Korkmaz — Genealogy and Genocide: How Do Armenian Family Trees Speak of 1915? (pre-circulated paper)

14.45 Ana Éclair — Intergenerationality as a Decolonial Project: Family Constellation Therapy and Its Discontents

15.30 Break, tea and coffee

16.00 Catherine Nash — Reflections on the day

16.30 Walk to drinks

Public debate at SPUI25

The workshop is followed by a related public event at SPUI25, Roots, Ancestors, DNA: What Are We Looking For?, with:

• Francesca Morgan
• Ayşenur Korkmaz
• Chiara Candaele
• Marijke Huisman

You are welcome to attend with or without registering for the workshop.

This workshop is organised by the NIAS Theme Group Defamiliarizing Geslacht. A limited number of about 8 colleagues from outside NIAS can join. You can register for the morning, the afternoon, or the whole day. Participants are expected to read the pre-circulated papers in advance. Lunch is included, as well as drinks afterwards.

Register here

Francesca Morgan teaches U.S. history at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Her publications include her 2021 book on American genealogy’s political dimensions, A Nation of Descendants, and her earlier monograph on hereditary organisations, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (2005).

Marijke Huisman is Assistant Professor in Public History at Utrecht University. She is interested in the societal uses of the past, with an emphasis on emancipation movements. She recently published Queer geschiedenis van Nederland. De strijd om een eigen verleden / Queer History of the Netherlands: The Battle around a History of Their Own (2026).

Markus Balkenhol is a Senior Researcher at the Meertens Institute and a social anthropologist working on colonial heritage and memory in the Netherlands. Together with Doelja Refos, museum educator and student of cultural anthropology at Vrije Universiteit, he works on the project Afterlives of Slavery, about the role of ancestors in processes of healing related to slavery.

Chiara Candaele is a historian and postdoctoral researcher at NL-Lab. She specialises in the historical intersections of children and colonialism. Her PhD thesis (University of Antwerp, 2023) deals with the history of transnational adoption in postcolonial Belgium. She worked as a scientific collaborator on the research project Resolution-Métis (State Archives), studying the forced displacement of mixed-race children during Belgian colonial rule in Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi (1885–1962). She is currently affiliated with the NWO-funded project Child Separation (2023–2027), researching institutional childcare in the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia (1800–1980).

Ana Éclair, Gender Studies, University of Melbourne. Drawing on queer feminist, decolonial, affect, and care studies, her research examines how colonial violence, trauma, and structural inequality shape bodies, relationships, and memory, with particular attention to intergenerational silence, the unspeakable, and the intersections of therapy cultures with decoloniality and social justice.

Ayşenur Korkmaz received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the afterlives of the Armenian genocide, touching on mass violence, genealogy, and heritage studies. Korkmaz currently works at the Meertens Institute on an ERC-funded project, focusing on Turkey’s immersive heritage spaces and the political imaginaries of neo-Ottomanism.

Catherine Nash is a feminist cultural geographer who brings a critical geographical perspective to her focus on kinship of different kinds. This includes attention to genealogical knowledges and imaginations (of ancestry, descent, and origins), and practices of making relations. She has explored the figuring, ordering, and making of relations in accounts of national, ethnic, and racialised categories of identity and difference, and the significance of breed for human–companion animal kinship. She is currently addressing how ideas of ancestry and kinship are being mobilised in responses to the climate and nature crisis.