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- Convenors:
-
Yang Yang
(Nanjing University)
Catrin Evans (University of Bedfordshire)
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- Discussant:
-
Ana Gutierrez Garza
(University of St Andrews)
- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Focusing on the affective labour of marginalised people in diverse contexts, this panel will critically discuss a less explored dimension of hope/aspiration. How are 'who fails' and 'who refuses to fail' contested when struggling persons refuse to perform their labouring role?
Long Abstract:
Various forms of deprivation, from lack of citizenship to economic disempowerment, leave a vacuum of rights and capital in many people's lives. These people are engaged in political, economic and affective struggles. In these moments 'hope' has been argued to provide a method (Miyazaki), a futural momentum (Knight), an intentional ethical action (Zigon), and intersubjective bonds between individuals (Marcel). 'Aspiration' has also been positioned as a site for psychological deliverance and potential empowerment (Appadurai) and contested thereafter. Drawing on these discussions on hope/aspiration and Andrea Muehlebach's notion of 'affective labour' as an exploitable pathway to belonging, this panel will explore how the regimes of hope/aspiration can dismiss marginalised people's affective labour as their means of coping with vulnerability and marginality. Examples might be the empathic labour enacted by individuals within the UK asylum system as part of a performance of integration, or the aspirational labour undertaken by art practitioners against a backdrop of precarious living and economic austerity in the UK. We invite contributions exploring the following questions: 1) How and where do various forms of affective labour manifest themselves, responding to various forms of institutionalised marginalisation? 2) How are 'who fails' and 'who refuses to fail' contested when struggling persons refuse to perform their labouring role? 3) What are the limits of terms such as 'hope' and 'aspiration' in understanding the life-projects and life-struggles of our contemporaries?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
In this paper I examine labour of hope for upward social mobility through employment and marriage as it comes to be embodied in and through photographic performances that young women stage in the photographic studios in Yaounde, Cameroon.
Paper long abstract:
Against the backdrop of patriarchy, gerontocracy and economic and political decay in Cameroonian postcolony young Bamileke women are struggling to attain upward social mobility through employment and marriage. As they are stuck in what Honwana called waithood (2012) they navigate their everyday through work and leisure. One form of leisure are photographic performances staged in front of a camera of their phone or at a photographic studio. During such performances young women dress up and pose so as to resemble wealthy and married women; that is, as having attained social adulthood through work and marriage they are in pursuit of.
As young women perform various desired social roles in photographic performances they learn to embody a particular orientation to the future that moves the present moment forward (Miyazaki 2004). In other words through these performances young women embody the hope that their desired futures and aspirations for wealth, employment and marriage are actually possible. Yet in the economic, social and political context such aspirations are not close at hand. Thus embodied hope emerges as a form of affective labour that molds female subjectivities; and makes young women attached to compromised conditions of possibility that typify affective landscape of late capitalism (Berlant 2011).
Paper short abstract:
In our analysis of the 'self-making projects' of recently arrived Afghan asylum-seekers and refugees in the UK, Germany and Switzerland we demonstrate the affective and ethical dimensions of inclusion and integration.
Paper long abstract:
This article explores the self-making projects of recently arrived Afghan asylum-seekers and refugees in the UK, Germany and Switzerland. We define 'self-making projects' as what our participants want in their lives for themselves, families or persons they care for and the ways in which they pursue these hopes and aspirations. Research on what constitutes self-making in migration is often subsumed under processes of negotiating legal status and their engagements with formal integration processes. While recognising the structural impositions of these policies in framing self-making, we draw on the ethical turn in anthropology as our theoretical grounding for the understanding of self-making beyond migratory trajectories and legal positioning in host societies. Our participants' accounts of their 'self-making projects' illustrated the affective demands of participating in integration in host societies. Service providers' expectations of participants and the bureaucratic requirements of reception systems often collided with participants' moral responsibilities such as supporting family members and broader ethical projects of becoming. Participants were often advised to 'lower their expectations' upon discovering that their previous qualifications and work experience were not transferrable to host countries. Inclusion and integration thus emerged as reflexive and ethical processes whereby participants were expected to make adjustments in their attitudes and beliefs towards their aspirations and hopes of their lives in host societies and relationships with members of their communities afar. These restrictive demands were countered with affective dispositions such as 'confidence', 'belief' and 'strength'.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the emotional labour revealed when integration is approached as a lived practice. I offer an analysis of how 'New Scots' compromise, negotiate, perform and adapt themselves across everyday encounters, within a societal context underpinned by a welcome-unwelcome dialectic.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the emotional labour revealed when integration is approached as a lived practice, rather than a policy objective. With a focus on better understanding the 'micrology of life' (O'Neill, 2020) I argue that the experiences of asylum-seeking 'New Scots' are framed not just by one but two, often opposing, national narratives about Britishness and Scottishness. Akin to Khosravi's 'hostile hospitality' (2009), I suggest that a 'welcome-unwelcome dialetic' (Evans, 2020) is being played out at a political as well as local level. In light of this, I offer an analysis of how individuals compromise, negotiate, perform and adapt themselves across everyday encounters as a way making oneself legible (Cummings, 2016) to those perceived to have the power to judge one's efforts at integrating. Moreover, I draw attention to the consequences that can occur when individuals present an unwelcome performance, as well as how a sense of integration can be abruptly interrupted by public actors. I suggest that emotional and 'empathic labour' (Cummings) is not just undertaken for the sake of an audience but is part of a set of 'reactions and patterns of resistance' (Scott, 1990) that operate as a means of ensuring individual dignity and survival, and as a way of bearing a form of representational burden (Mercer, 1990). Finally, I position hope as a form of labour being actively worked at and (re)produced by individuals within the asylum system, not solely as a means of looking towards the future but as an integral form of self-preservation within the present.