The LIVES Working Group on Family Dynamics brings together researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds interested in family relationships, diversities, configurations, transitions and regulations.
Starting in March 2026, the Working Group will launch a new webinar “Families in Flux: Contemporary Dynamics Across Disciplines”. This online series aims to shed light on the latest research on families. Speakers from different countries, disciplines, and methodological backgrounds will present their findings and discuss them with the virtual audience. Each session will take around one hour, with 30 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes of discussion and questions from the audience.
The online series will take place four times a year:
coming soon
Speaker: Emilie Biland-Curnier
Emilie Biland is a full professor of sociology at Sciences Po, in Paris (France), and a research associate at the French Institute for Demographic Studies (Ined). She has been conducting empirical socio-legal research on straight and queer families in a cross-national perspective for over 15 years. Her work has been published in numerous journals in French, English and Spanish, including: Journal of Homosexuality, Law & Social Inquiry, International Journal of the Legal Profession, and International Journal of Law, Policy, and the Family. Her first monography in English, Family Law in Action: Divorce and Inequality in Quebec and France (UBC Press, 2023), won the 2024 W. Wes Pue Book Prize of the Canadian Law & Society Association. She is currently working on her second book in English, which is devoted to LGBT+ parental rights in France, Canada, and Chile. Following her French book Parents en quête de droits. Minorités de sexualité et de genre d'un continent à l'autre (Presses de Sciences Po, 2026), it will get published by Routledge in 2027.
LGBT+ Parents and the Law. Transnational Perspectives on Kinship and Social Status
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people have long faced not only rejection from their families but also exclusion from forming legal and legitimate families of their own. Since the end of the twentieth century, however, family law has evolved considerably in Europe and the Americas. Discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is now prohibited, and the right to privacy helps to acknowledge sexual and gender minorities and their families. Drawing on in-depth empirical research conducted in France, Canada, and Chile with parents, legal practitioners, and activists, this webinar explores how the gradual, partial, and often controversial recognition of LGBT+ family rights has transformed the social status of this group. It shows how legal ties and family bonds build, differentiate, and hierarchize social groups, and therefore may contribute to social change.
Through two key concepts —social status and the “kinship matrix”— this presentation ties together gender and sexuality studies, the sociology of family, and socio-legal studies. Social status captures the individual and collective dimensions of social position, as well as its symbolic and material components. The "kinship matric" produces a gendered dichotomy between women and men based on bodies, desires, and family bonds. It conceptualizes the normative system that has marginalized LGBT+ people, and that their mobilizations and practices in turn seek—sometimes successfully—to transform.
This cross-continental research leads to the conclusion that legalizing LGBT+ parents reduces their experiences of everyday injustice: it allows more people to envision themselves as partners and parents, to form a family, and to have the latter acknowledged as such. Legal status also reduces interactional uncertainty. While the risk of othering has not disappeared, legal entitlements diminish its consequences. Legal recognition also provides security for the future and potential family crises (illness, death, separation, etc.). Yet, these gains in social status tend to be conditioned by parents’ reflexivity about their minority status, by their conformity to the coupledom norm, and to relatively valued class, gender, and race positions. Relatives, professionals, and strangers often remind them of majority norms, such that their status gains remain fragile.
Venue:
- Thursday, 24 September 2026
- 13:00-14:00
- Online: The Teams link will be provided upon registration
Speaker: Michaela Kreyenfeld
Michaela Kreyenfeld is Professor of Sociology at the Hertie School. Her research is situated at the intersection of social inequality, social policy, and family sociology/demography. A key methodological focus lies in the analysis of life courses using longitudinal data. She is Co-Director of the Einstein Center Population Diversity. Michaela Kreyenfeld is also a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and actively engaged in academic and policy advisory bodies.
Deadbeat after Divorce? Men’s Employment Trajectories and Union Dissolution in Germany
Many studies have shown that divorce affects women’s employment and economic well-being. However, less is known about the impact on men’s employment careers. In this study, we use register data from the German Public Pension Fund to analyse the employment trajectories of men who divorced between 2008 and 2014 (n = 9,580). We employ sequence and cluster analysis to map and categorize men’s employment trajectories, which we follow from two years before to five years after divorce. Furthermore, we apply a matching procedure to construct a control group that closely aligns with the divorced men in key biographical and sociodemographic characteristics. The results show considerable stability in men’s employment trajectories around the time of divorce. However, when comparing divorced men to their matched control group, divorced men are more likely to be in the unemployment trajectory, while they are less likely to be in the employment trajectory with stable and very high income. Overall, divorce seems to mainly affect men at the top and bottom of the income distribution.
Venue:
- Thursday, 28 Mai 2026
- 13:00-14:00
- Online: The Teams link will be provided upon registration
Speaker: Zachary Van Winkle — Sciences Po, Centre for Research on Social Inequalities, CNRS, Paris
Zachary Van Winkle is Associate Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po (CRIS), and associate member of the University of Oxford and the Einstein Center for Population Diversity in Berlin. His research examines the interplay between family demography and social inequality from a comparative life course perspective. He is PI of the ERC Starting Grant project WIDOW on the social demography of widowhood, and has published in leading journals including the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, and the Journal of Marriage and Family.
Contemporary family research has become increasingly interested in understanding how genes and environments interact to shape individual outcomes across the life course. For example, recent studies have shown that parental separation lowers children’s genetic influences on education. However, previous research paid little attention to heterogeneous effects by socioeconomic status or family transitions following separation.
This study estimates the extent that parental separation and re-partnering moderates genetic influences on children’s academic test scores by mother’s level of education. Genotyped data from the Norwegian Mother, Father, and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) linked with administrative registers allow not only the inclusion of household economic resources, but also genetic nurture effects (indirect genetic effects).
In contrast to previous results, no evidence is found that parental separation lowers genetic influences on children’s educational outcomes in Norway. However, findings demonstrate that re-partnering weakens the genetic effect on test scores among lower educated mothers. Results support the argument that stress related with re-partnering suppresses genetic influences on educational achievement, but highly educated mothers compensate for adverse conditions.
Venue:
- Thursday, 19 March 2026
- 13:00-14:00
- Online: The Teams link will be provided upon registration
Register here :