Abstract

Past research shows that ecological motives such as the ideological connection between overpopulation and natural resources can influence reproductive intentions. In the past decade, research has increased to explore how environmental changes reshape the desire to become a parent, as well as parenting practices and kinship representations. This presentation is based on an ethnography that generally develops similar efforts to capture the interdependence between the perception of socio-environmental crises and family arrangements to create the “good conditions” to parent.  

In recent years, the development of research on rural alternatives in France has also been prolific. In the wake of communitarian and anarchist experiments led in the 1970s, the settlement of people in the countryside to build alternative lifestyles more recently intensified. Politicizing their daily lives, they develop ecological practices to change how they work, consume, produce food and build houses.

The presentation will focus on people who decide to migrate in a rural area in south-western France especially to be able to parent in what they perceive as “good conditions”. Indeed, the ethnography shows that the quest for a rural environment often conditions parenting, as people are looking for a protected area where children will grow in contact with Nature. In light of intensive parenting culture and reproductive justice frameworks, we will interrogate the tension parents experience between the desire to protect and the necessity to prepare for doomed futures. Exploring parents’ ideas of transmission and kinship shows that they simultaneously reinforce normative and socially situated perceptions of parenting, but also contribute to mutualizing parental responsibility in the face of environmentally endangered futures.

Mathilde Krähenbühl graduated from the Graduate Institute in Geneva in 2021, doing her master's in anthropology and sociology. This is where she developed her interest in reproductive and environmental studies by exploring environmental childlessness. Today, she pursues her research as a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Lausanne. Looking at eco-reproductive concerns among a population of climate-concerned individuals, her ethnographic research focuses on alternative people who move to a French rural area to experiment with community living, food autonomy and sustainability. Asking what arrangements parents make to have children when they consider that the socio-environmental context is inappropriate, Mathilde interrogates how environmentalism and the perception of doomed futures (re)shape reproductive paths and parenting practices.