Charities as symbolic families: ethnographic evidence from Spain

Jorge Grau Rebollo is Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) and Senior Researcher at the Research Group of Fundamentally Oriented Anthropology (GRAFO). He has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), the Universidad Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and the Universität Wien (Austria), as well as seminars and short courses at various Spanish, European and American universities. He has authored several articles and books on Family and Kinship.

Paula Escribano Castaño is Part-Time Teaching Fellow and PhD Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelon (UAB), Spain. She is young Researcher at the Research Group of Fundamentally Oriented Anthropology (GRAFO). Paula received the Master’s Degree in Ethnographic Research, Anthropological Theory and Intercultural Relations at the UAB, where she wrote the thesis ”Utopias in post-socialism: The case of a Hungarian ecovillage”. Her research areas include livelihood strategies in times of crisis in Catalonia and environmental grassroots movements.

Hugo Valenzuela-Garcia is interim Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, UAB (Spain). He is the Director of Egolab-GRAFO Research Group and Convenor of the EASA Anthropology of Economy Network. He has conducted fieldwork in Malaysia, Mexico and Barcelona. His main area of research is economic anthropology. Some of his recent publications include (2017) with JL Molina (2017) “Economic Anthropology,” UNESCO EOLSS Publishers Co Ltd; (2018) “Barter,” in Callan H. (ed.) (2018) “The International Encyclopaedia of Anthropology.” John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; with Molina, J.L. M.J. Lubbers, and S. Gómez-Mestres (2017) “Cooperation and competition in social anthropology,” Anthropology Today, Vo. 1 (33).

Miranda Jessica Lubbers is Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelon (UAB), Spain, and the Director of the Research Group of Fundamentally Oriented Anthropology (GRAFO). She received the PhD Degree in Social Sciences from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her research areas include poverty and livelihood, migration and transnationalism. Her research has been published in journals such as Ethnicities, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Social Networks, International Sociology, The Journal of Research on Adolescence.