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- Convenors:
-
Aglaia Chatjouli
(University of the Aegean)
Venetia Kantsa (University of the Aegean)
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- Stream:
- Health, Disease and Wellbeing
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel aims at problematizing the ways responsibility of (well)being is informed by changing notions of being related, in an era of awareness of potentially endangered futures and changing connections involving more-than-human relations.
Long Abstract:
Anthropological approaches of kinship as consanguineal, affinal and cohabitation relationships have placed considerable emphasis on the complex web of rights, responsibilities and consequences that result from these relations and inform notions of personhood and the self, as well as assumptions about care and (well)being.In an era of awareness of potentially endangered futures and changing connections involving more-than-human relations, how are assumptions about care and wellbeing within kinship, family and household relations being transformed? How do metaphors about nature and kin relations come into play in the attempt to nurture an interconnection between the human and nonhuman? How do old and new understandings of how everything (human - nonhuman) is interrelated inform responsible living?The panel aims at problematising the ways responsibility of (well)being is informed by changing notions of being related. In what respects do responsibility for personal, familial, collective, and earthly (well)being draw from particular cultural logics and practices of relatedness? How do ways of being related (symbiosis, care, communication, understanding) became key constituents and prerequisites of responsibility which, when practiced, aspire to a restoration of mutual connection? If part of our (well)being in the era of the Anthropocene draws from our overall responsible symbiosis, we need to ethnographically elucidate the analogies at play.We invite submissions that address the interconnections between responsible (well)being and liable relations. Possible topics may include but are not restricted to care for terrestrial, atmospheric, oceanic environment; responsible symbiosis with more-than-human entities (microbes, animals, plants); care for (future) bodily/planetary (well)being as kin work.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores adult guardianship and related nursing home care during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. We highlight how leaders in guardianship communities worked under policy restrictions and publicized invisible relations of care that shaped the health of persons in guardianship.
Paper long abstract:
Under conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing homes have occupied new and increasingly visible terrain in American popular media landscapes. Theorized as “the titanic of cruise ships” (Crotty, Watson, and Lim 2020) replete with staff who “choose” to attend “risky” events (Salcedo 2020), conditions and practices of long term care have once again come to the forefront of a long-standing moral-economic debate about the care of vulnerable adults. In this context, adult guardianship has been reaffirmed as “essential” to meet the basic survival needs of adults in guardianship, while paradoxically the day-to-day work of guardianship has been considerably narrowed. Drawing from dual-sited ethnographic work in Indiana and Tennessee (USA), we explore the transformation of adult guardianship work throughout COVID-19 lockdown phases in America. Using critical regionalism, this paper contextualizes the pandemic within nursing home settings and conditions of guardianship in Midwestern and Appalachian USA. We highlight how leaders in their local guardianship communities endeavored to manage obligations under nursing home visitation restrictions and publicize otherwise invisible relations of care that shaped and, at times threatened, the health, well-being, and quality of life of persons in guardianship. Such an approach spotlights interplay between national and local conditions of guardianship, in turn rendering visible dialectics of capital and culture change in the era of coronavirus (2011:783). We close with a discussion concerning practices and possibilities for the moral transformation of American nursing homes through a critique of moral economy of nursing home care within twinned contexts of guardianship and COVID-19.
Paper short abstract:
This paper studies individual becoming situated in the reciprocity and liable relations of wellbeing as engendered by contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, it compares institutional narratives and implied governmentality with individual subjectivities and perceived kinship.
Paper long abstract:
Institutionalised responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, have evolved from ‘denial and dysfunction’ (The Washington Post 2020), ‘herd immunity’ (Independent 2020), ‘medieval techniques’ (The Telegraph 2020) of ‘social quarantine’ (Foucault 1991a: 216), to panoptic patient-wise ‘case files’ (The Straits Times 2020) and now, contact tracing. In England, narratives around the NHS contact tracing app position it as a ‘choice’ between ‘individual, group and national privacy’ and the ‘minimum information’ needed to ‘manage the spread of the virus’ (NCSC 2020). A vocabulary of an imagined community against an unknown enemy is thus perpetuated, re-situating wellbeing as not only institutional but also that which is embodied by individuals in an imbricated notion of accountability and kinship (Desjarlais & Throop 2011). In this context, the paper asks how individuals define wellbeing and who they include in their web of reciprocal relationships, contra institutional assumptions around family or kinship units and interactions. It interrogates how this Latouresque assemblage of humans, virus and app determines the perception of wellbeing as an object of knowledge, and accordingly shapes liable relations within communities, that is, between ‘small world networks representing households' and a 'second network representing work places, schools or regular social environments' (ox.ac.uk 2020). Additionally, it examines Deleuzian becoming as data, citizen, and virus and who thereby emerges: homo economicus or homo reciprocans. This paper will leverage semi-structured interviews with individual app users in London, social media ethnography of posts, videos and surveys in this period, and textual analysis of communiques by the government, NHS and media.
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims at problematizing formal medical discourses on relational wellbeing in the context of the covid 19 pandemic in Greece. How is personal, national, present and future wellbeing constructed in the context of responsible co-living with human and non-human entities?
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims at problematizing medical discourses on relational wellbeing in the context of the covid 19 pandemic in Greece drawing from official announcements and practices from both governmental and other formal bodies of medical (g)local authority and knowledge.The three governmental imposed rules “menoume spiti” (“stay home”), “atomikh eythynh” (“personal responsibility”) and “kratame apostash”, (“social-physical distance”), construct the discursive landscape of this emergent reality reshaping many aspects of everyday life, and bringing relational responsibility to the forefront of ensuring personal, family, community and national wellbeing. Drawing from the aforementioned formal medical announcements, analyses and instructions, this paper wishes to reflect on wellbeing constructions and potential conceptual shifts in relation to the following trajectories which seem to be of key significance:- wellbeing ensured via responsible and disciplined co-living with humans and non-humans (viruses);- balancing proximity and distance;- associating personal and mutual responsibility with the wellbeing of the soma of the nation, and with sustainable future prosperity;- hierarchies of human wellbeing as they are constructed in terms of family quarantine configurations, access to healthcare, age and gender stratification, economic precariousness;- everyday medical and non-medical materialities and practices of symbiosis and prophylaxis.