This class will engage with and challenge our taken-for-granted understandings by introducing a critical perspective on families. Approaching families as social institutions that are constructed, contested, and transformed in relation to larger social forces such as globalization and gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and class-based inequalities, we will explore families in their diversity and complexity. We will learn about the different ways in which families reproduce the societies they are part of, through the literal reproduction of human beings and the provision of their everyday needs, as well as through the reproduction of social inequalities. We will also examine the labors this reproduction recruits, with an emphasis on the increasingly commodified and transnational flows of reproductive labor. At the end of this class, you will be familiar with the contents and discontents of the multiple family arrangements that characterize contemporary American society.