Keynote Speakers
Allan Westerling
Interdisciplinary European Family Research – past, present and futures?
Allan Westerling, PhD, is associate professor in social psychology of everyday life in the Center for Childhood, Youth and Family Life Research (Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Denmark). His main area of research is individualization and family life in the context of the welfare state. This includes work on social networks and new patterns of cohabitation. He has worked on fatherhood and fathering and is part of the Oxford Network of European Family Researchers (ONEFAR). He is the coeditor of Doing Good Parenthood (2017) and is currently involved in studies of Early Childhood Education and Care and parenthood, including comparative studies of Denmark and New Zealand. Allan Westerling has served as a member of the scientific committee of the ESFR from 2012-2016, and will be president of the organization from 2018-2020.
Ana Cristina Santos
Intimate Monsters speak back: Intimate citizenship and monstrous kinship in Southern Europe
Ana Cristina Santos is a Sociologist and holds a PhD in Gender Studies by the University of Leeds, UK. Since 2001, Cristina is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, having coordinated a number of research projects on LGBTIQ, gender, sexual citizenship and the body. Between 2014 and 2019, she was awarded a Research Grant by the European Research Council to lead the cross-national study INTIMATE - Citizenship, Care and Choice: The micropolitics of intimacy in Southern Europe (www.ces.uc.pt/intimate). Since 2013 she is also Director of the International PhD Program Human Rights in Contemporary Societies. Significant publications include Social Movements and Sexual Citizenship in Southern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Sexualities Research: Critical Interjections, Diverse Methodologies, and Practical Applications (Routledge, 2017, with A. King and I. Crowhurst).
Ana Berástegui
Family and diversity: navigating through disadvantages, stigmas and opportunities
Ana Berástegui is PhD in Psychology and Master in Counseling and Family Mediation from the Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid. From the beginning of his career, she develops her work at the University Institute of Family Studies at this university. The main focus of her research has been family diversity and the role of the family in the development of children. Her principal research focus on adoption and the psychosocial, family, racial and cultural adjustment of children and their families. She has founded and coordinated the Spanish Adoption Research Network between 2008 and 2010. She is the Head of the Family and Disability Chair: Foundation Repsol-Down Madrid and the DEMOS Programs of post-secondary education for young people with intellectual disabilities in the university context. She also co-founded the First Alliance Program, a project to strengthen early attachment in families at social risk. Finally, she is professor of Psychological Intervention in exclusion and usually collaborates in the training of psychosocial intervention professionals.
Fiona Tasker
Today’s Family Maps & Tomorrow’s Possibilities: Family Formations and LGBTQ Parenting
Fiona Tasker, PhD, is a Reader in Psychology at the Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck University of London, UK. Fiona specializes in family psychology and affirmative systemic family therapy. She has published on the psychosocial implications of non-traditional and new family forms in heterosexual and LGBTQ-parented families, e.g. Tasker & Golombok 1997 Growing Up in a Lesbian Family. Currently, Fiona is working on several studies employing quantitative, qualitative and family mapping research techniques to investigate aspects of individual and family related life course histories considering prospective parenting, adoptive parenting, and embryo donation.
Karin Wall
Fathers and work-family balance: challenges, policies and practices
Karin Wall, Ph.D in Sociology (Université de Genève, 1994) is a Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences (University of Lisbon), where she coordinates the research group on “Life course, Inequality and Solidarity: Practices and Policies”. She is director of Imprensa de Ciências Sociais (Social Sciences Press) and coordinates the Permanent Observatory on Families and Family Policies (OFAP). Her main areas of expertise are comparative social policy analysis and sociology of families and gender. Her research and publications focus on changes in families and gender relations in Portugal and in Europe, work-family balance, family interactions and social networks over the life course, migration and transnational living, developments in family policy in Europe and the impact of the crisis on children and family life. She is a founding member of Portuguese Sociological Association (1985) and the European Sociological Association (1992).
Michael Ungar
Pathways to Resilience Among Diverse Family Systems
Michael Ungar is the founder and Director of the Resilience Research Centre and Canada Research Chair in Child, Family and Community Resilience at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. He received his PhD in Social Work from Wilfrid Laurier University in 1995 and is the former Chair of the Nova Scotia Mental Health and Addictions Strategy, executive board member of the American Family Therapy Academy, and a family therapist who works with mental health services for individuals and families at risk. He has held over $10,000,000 in research funding over the past decade in support of an international series of studies spanning six continents. That research has changed the way resilience is understood, shifting the focus from individual traits to the interactions between people and their families, schools, workplaces, and communities.
