“Make kin, not babies!”, Donna Haraway provocatively demands in her most recent book (2016), in an attempt to offer new and creative ways of thinking what kinship might mean in an age of ecological devastation. At the same time, the emergence of a seemingly new culture of public protest and political opinion have provoked scholars such as Judith Butler (2015) to address the contexts and dynamics of public collective action. In this conference, we would like to explore the dynamic relationship between structures of kinship and the (material) conditions under which collective action emerges. Since this both occurs in and is relevant for many different fields and areas, we are interested in examples of this relationship from a literary and cultural studies perspective. How are kinship and collective action negotiated in literature, the arts, or in specific historical moments, and how does this change the role of representation? How have conceptualisations of both concepts developed over time, and what can we infer from this for questions of kinship and collective action today?