This Special Collection aims to gather innovative scholarship in demography that emphasizes the 
role of kinship as a basic unit of societal organization. As such, it seeks to call attention to 
heterogeneities in kinship structures and dynamics and their implications for broader inequalities 
and social policies. 

The Special Collection will welcome work on kinship demography, broadly defined. We 
encourage contributions that advance empirical, methodological, and theoretical 
innovation in the demographic study of kinship, including new data sources, modelling 
strategies, and conceptual frameworks that extend beyond household-based approaches. 
We encourage submissions with a strong quantitative component, including relevant 
mixed-methods work. 

We are particularly interested in work that foregrounds variation in kin 
availability, structure, and inequality across social groups, time periods, and geographies, such as 
studies that explicitly link kinship configurations to life-course processes, including caregiving, 
resource exchange, health, and resilience. Submissions that examine how kinship networks 
shape—and are shaped by—redistributive arrangements, demographic change, and institutional 
contexts, as well as those that focus on underrepresented and non-traditional forms of kinship, 
including non-biological, fictive, and LGBTQ+ family forms, or from understudied world 
regions, are especially welcome.

Deadline: 15 December 2026 

Special Collection Guest Editors (alphabetical, by first name): 
● Ashton Verdery, Pennsylvania State University 
● Bussarawan Puk Teerawichitchainan, National University of Singapore 
● Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research 
● Elena Maria Pojman, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

For the full call please see the PDF.