The family is foremost among the fundamental institutions through which a person first makes contact with the world, develops a sense of identity and belonging, and learns values, patterns of behavior, and social responsibilities. Securing the individual's emotional safety, socializing children, transmitting cultural heritage across generations, and sustaining relations of care and solidarity are realized in large part through the institution of the family. For this reason, the family is not merely a form of union to be assessed within the bounds of private life; it is a multilayered structure that directly affects the demographic existence, cultural continuity, moral order, and social cohesion of society.
The family, however, is not an unchanging and homogeneous institution independent of historical and social conditions. Its structure, its functions, the distribution of roles among its members, and the meanings attributed to it are continuously reshaped in relation to economic, political, cultural, technological, and demographic developments. Modernization, urbanization, globalization, secularization, individualization, migration, digitalization, consumer culture, and the transformations in working life all deeply affect the family at both the structural and the value level.
Today, the rising age of marriage, declining fertility, increasing divorce rates, the spread of single-parent and reconstituted families, the growth in single-person households, and the weakening of intergenerational ties intensify the debates concerning the future of the family. Alongside these, problems such as domestic violence, neglect, and abuse, economic deprivation, the unjust distribution of the care burden, digital addiction, the erosion of privacy, migration, and forced displacement turn the family into not only an individual but also a public and political matter.
Idealizing the family solely within a nostalgic discourse of tradition is as inadequate as regarding the changes it undergoes entirely as dissolution or degeneration. Likewise, reducing the family to individual preferences and the sphere of private life leads to the social, economic, and cultural sources of family problems being overlooked. The question of the family must therefore be examined beyond one-sided and reductive approaches, with attention to the multidimensional relationships between historical continuity and social change, individual rights and mutual responsibilities, and traditional values and contemporary needs.
The "International Symposium on the Family in a Changing World: Challenges, Responsibilities, and Strategies," organized by the Faculty of Theology at Dicle University, aims to open to discussion the structural, moral, legal, psychological, economic, cultural, and technological challenges that the institution of the family faces today from an interdisciplinary perspective. The symposium will address the transformations occurring within the family not only in the context of identifying problems but also within the framework of determining responsibilities, exploring possibilities for solutions, and developing sustainable strategies for the future.
Within the scope of the symposium, the family will be examined in light of the theoretical and methodological possibilities offered by different disciplines, including theology, sociology, psychology, law, philosophy, history, educational sciences, social work, economics, health sciences, communication, anthropology, demography, gender studies, and migration and disaster research. In this way, proceeding from the reality that the question of the family is too complex and multidimensional to be explained through the concepts of a single field of study, a foundation for qualified academic interaction among different disciplines will be established.
One of the symposium's core aims is to reconsider the idea of protecting and strengthening the family within the framework of the principles of human dignity, justice, compassion, reciprocity, and responsibility. Accordingly, emphasis will be placed on establishing a sound balance between preserving family cohesion and safeguarding the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals, and on developing the relationships among family members on the basis of love, trust, equity, and mutual responsibility rather than pressure and hierarchy.
The symposium is open to field research, comparative studies, case analyses, policy assessments, and applied work, as well as theoretical and historical studies. Through the contributions of academics, researchers, public representatives, and specialists working in the field of social work from different countries, it aims to advance the sharing of international knowledge and experience on the family.