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- Convenors:
-
David Colon Cabrera
(Monash Health)
Lewis Johnstone (Monash)
Narelle Warren (Monash University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Vitality
- Location:
- NIKERI KC1.211
- Sessions:
- Friday 25 November, -
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
Short Abstract:
This panel extends theorising on carescapes and caringscapes to emphasise the place of agency, imagined in diverse ways, and how physical geographies and social spaces of and for care are transformed, resisted, or accepted by those who operate within these scapes.
Long Abstract:
Concepts of carescapes and caringscapes (Bowlby 2012; Bowlby & McKie 2019) offer an avenue to elucidate the complex contexts of care and how these shape - and are shaped by - the lives of those who are actively engaged in it. Attention to carescapes requires a consideration of the broader structural and cultural influences that shape how care is understood, realised, and experienced. Although care has long been thought of as relational - as a form of affective and embodied labour provided from one person to another - these concepts draw attention to its spatial and temporal dimensions, as well as to questions of power and privilege. Caringscapes invite a consideration of how care is organised socially (Bowlby and McKie 2019): who provides care, for/to whom, and when (in a lifecourse, but also across a day/week/month/year) often reflects sociocultural faultlines, as does the nature of that care.
Yet, while these two constructs appear complementary, they intersect in ways that prompt a consideration of the processes and prospects involved in de/re/territorializing care. Carescapes do not always act in support of caringscapes but instead may undermine or compromise the lived experience of care (Lau et al., 2021). This panel extends theorising on carescapes and caringscapes to emphasise the place of agency, imagined in diverse ways, and how physical geographies and social spaces of and for care are transformed, resisted, or accepted by those who operate within these scapes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 November, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The study aims to understand the transformation of domestic work in the changing urban Indonesia, marked by the growing numbers of babysitters in uniform in Jakarta. They shed a light on the persistence of gender, power relation, and class differentiation despite the transforming care job itself
Paper long abstract:
The baby sitter in uniform has been visible in Jakarta, Indonesia, performing child caring tasks for middle-class and high-income families. The uniform symbolises a pseudo-professional job of domestic child carer, as they look like nurses in uniforms. The uniform is also a class marker of baby sitter, because it means they are trained domestic workers who provide care in the family, unlike the other untrained domestic workers. They are recruited, trained and channeled by an agency, having a signed work agreement, and a fixed salary each month. This arrangement is different from those domestic workers who are informally recruited by word of mouth or from friends or relatives. The baby sitter is a phenomenon of paid care work in urban Indonesia.
While there are transformations in the child care job, there are paradox of this pseudo-professional work. The employers of baby sitter are in fact prefer a loving carer instead of a trained one, because the earlier gives them confidence in caring for children - the loved one in the family. The pseudo-professionalism is also facing the persisting class differentiation between employers and employees, mostly shown in public areas.
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses settings of migrant-targeted care that are organized around biopolitical modes of risk assessment in Melbourne, Australia. It examines how direct service practitioners learn to produce truths about migrant familial relations through nationalist imaginaries of good citizenship.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses institutional settings of migrant-targeted care that are primarily organized around biopolitical modes of risk assessment. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Melbourne Australia, and in the wake of a 2013 federal law outlawing forced marriage that disproportionately targeted Muslim migrant communities, I examine how direct service practitioners, through undergoing scenario-based trainings, are taught to produce standardized truths about who the typical victim of a forced marriage is. More specifically, I analyse how family violence case workers learn to interpret scenario fact patterns to determine migrant women’s risk of coercion into marriage. By examining how practitioners move from discussions of the scenario itself to discussions of migrant assimilation, I show that scenario trainings are powerful pedagogical spaces that sediment moralizing narratives about Australian citizenship and migrant deviance. Borrowing from Lakoff and Collier’s notion of the sentinel subject (2013) and Reva Jaffe-Walter’s concept of ‘figured identities’ (2015), I argue that scenario trainings treat migrant women as sentinel figures, whose familial relations prefigure their trajectory toward good or bad citizenship. In doing so, such trainings also function to assess how migrant marital practices deviate from settler nationalist paradigms of healthy family relationships. In introducing the concept of the sentinel figure, the paper begins to think about how anthropological theories of risk and threat, which have tended to emerge from studies of biosecurity, militarization, and war can be useful to understanding the governance of migrant behavior in spaces of care and social welfare.
Paper short abstract:
Exploring caringscapes and how couples where one is diagnosed with young onset Parkinson's navigate multiple future ways of life to ensure a shared narrative. This paper argues that both time and spaces require continued renegotiation to create carescapes, which rely predominantly on the carer.
Paper long abstract:
Due to the unpredictable prognosis of YOPD, multiple 'caringscapes of alternative future ways of life' (Bowlby, 2012) are required to ensure a shared narrative. A sense of temporality becomes apparent through a chronic illness diagnosis and may need to be managed to cope with the illness and emotions. In interviews with those diagnosed with YOPD, several interlocutors suggest they occupy a liminal space to manage the relationship with their body and others. This paper argues that as those diagnosed push the future away, carers are thrust into the future. It is, therefore, often partners tasked with maintaining carescapes to ensure the continuity of a shared narrative. Although anticipating futures is collaborative, much of this work is done by partners due to the biological imperatives thrust upon those with YOPD and interpretations and anticipations of futures rest on uncertainty regarding the prognosis of YOPD.
Relying upon prognosis to create carescapes now and for the future revolves around expectation. However, a YOPD prognosis is unpredictable and may not happen linearly. With this comes a shifting of time and space, a precarious carescape. In this sense, carer and cared for live in prognosis, anticipating and acting upon what might not happen. Therefore, the performance of informal care may require the anticipation of multiple futures of care, but also to act upon these imagined futures of care in the present. This is complicated by shared pasts, previous and existing carescapes for children, or elderly parents, along with the realities of gender.
Paper short abstract:
This research concerns public hospitals’ practice of coping with COVID-19 in a medical plural context. I argue that COVID-19 as a state of exception reshapes the institutional carescape temporal-spatially and that the agency of medical professionals in a bounded space is correspondingly performed.
Paper long abstract:
This research concerns public hospitals’ practice of coping with COVID-19 in a medical plural context. I ask how different medical systems work in responding to emerging infectious diseases. I argue that COVID-19 as a state of exception reshapes the institutional carescape temporal-spatially and that the agency of medical professionals in a bounded space of medical pluralism is situated performed. In the first part, I start by illustrating the cooperation of a biomedical hospital and a Tibetan medical hospital in a county in the Tibet Autonomous Region to show the collaboration in the official and formal carescape in the county. In the second part, I discuss that different strategies to cope with this emerging infectious disease are deployed by the two hospitals respectively based on resource availability and pre-assumed roles their medical systems are tagged with. I examine how constantly being in the state of exception reflects on medical professionals’ everyday working and living experiences in this particular locality. I conclude by discussing the concept of “the normalization of a state of exception” and its influence on the collective health system arrangement and individual coping strategies.