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- Convenors:
-
Nicholas Long
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
CARUL Collective (Various)
Sharyn Davies (Monash University)
Susanna Trnka (University of Auckland)
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- Stream:
- Health, Disease and Wellbeing
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
COVID-19 restrictions have confronted many people with new patterns of dependency and obligation in both their public and domestic lives. How, and to what effect, have they engaged with these? What are the implications of such material for anthropological theorisations of care and responsibility?
Long Abstract:
During the coronavirus pandemic, physical co-presence has become a possible vector of contagion and thus subject to restriction. Such restrictions have had far-reaching effects, disrupting care relations that extend beyond the household, whilst intensifying the pressure to care or be cared for by those with whom one shares a household.
Moreover, restrictions only work if adhered to collectively and are therefore subject to formal, social and internalised policing. Given the coronavirus's invisibility, however, such policing is necessarily mediated by (often contested) social imaginaries that mark certain people and actions as disproportionately 'irresponsible' or as people who 'don't care'. Meanwhile, whilst some citizens can care for each other simply by staying at home, others must provide public care via essential services, despite this potentially putting them and their loved ones at risk.
For many people, the pandemic has thus been characterised by: a) the emergence of novel dependencies and responsibilities; and b) heightened reflexivity regarding their multiple obligations, and the tensions between them.
Welcoming papers from diverse theoretical perspectives, this panel examines how, and to what effect, people have responded to these aspects of life under lockdown. How do they decide between competing responsibilities? How do they distinguish responsibility from sanctimony; care from control; duty from domination? What political and moral subjectivities are arising from their engagement with questions of care, responsibility and dependency? How is this shaping their social relations and wellbeing? And how can such ethnographies of the pandemic contribute to anthropological theorisations of care and responsibility?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
COVID-19 stories from Aotearoa New Zealand require us to think about the (alter)narratives of winning alongside the narrative of winning over COVID-19. We propose (alter)narratives as a frame not as counter or anti to the nation’s winning narrative, but rather essential and adjacent.
Paper long abstract:
COVID-19 stories, especially from Aotearoa New Zealand as one of the leading nations ‘winning’ over the virus will be important historical documentation. The ‘team of 5 million’ is writing its narratives of life with/out COVID-19 – stories of ‘living in bubbles’, of ‘being kind’ and ‘being in it together.’ These are narratives of success which need to be examined alongside the narratives that have been absent from public national discourse but complicate understandings of ‘winning.’ To that end, in this article we map out (alter)narratives from supermarket and healthcare workers and highlight their stories of living and caring under lockdown. We posit that we need to pay attention to (alter)narratives of winning over COVID-19 in order to pay attention to the bodies and spaces that are often invisible but make winning possible. Thus, we see (alter)narratives not as counter or anti to the nation’s winning narrative, but rather essential and adjacent.
Paper short abstract:
COVID-19 threw work-family conflict into sharp relief for doctors. Called on to provide vital patient care, many faced challenges in their caregiving responsibilities at home. Using interviews with doctors in Ireland, we examine experiences of competing care responsibilities between work and family.
Paper long abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown work-family conflict, already highly problematic in the medical profession, into sharp relief for hospital doctors. They have been called on to provide vital frontline patient care, placing themselves at increased risk of contracting COVID-19, despite precautions and PPE (personal protective equipment). Yet the societal changes brought about by the pandemic and lockdown responses in Ireland have cause dilemmas for many doctors in meeting caregiving responsibilities outside work, for their children, spouses or parents. School and creche closures, regional travel bans, stigma and fear of COVID-19 transmission have all greatly impacted doctors’ personal lives, and many have struggled with competing professional and personal obligations and the tensions between them. The stress of these struggles has greatly impacted doctors’ social and emotional wellbeing, increasing their risk of burnout as the pandemic has continued. Drawing on interviews with 48 hospital doctors working in Irish hospitals about their experiences during the first COVID-19 wave (March-May 2020), this presentation explores dilemmas of caregiving they faced and the effects on their identities and wellbeing. COVID-19 has illustrated the contrast for the health system and society between seeing doctors as “essential workers” – reducing them to “labour units” (as per Humphries, Brugha and McGee, 2009) understood and valued in terms of the caregiving labour they do – and seeing them as human beings with families, relationships and obligations that are part of their total life space, in order to facilitate their work in the fight against the pandemic.
Paper short abstract:
COVID diaries of young urban women show how their concerns to avoid contagion have encouraged extensive reflection on personal responsibility but also highlight the complexity of entanglements between everyday mobility practices on city streets and negotiated relations of care in the household.
Paper long abstract:
This paper draws principally from COVID diaries written by young women whom we had trained as peer researchers in a mobility study of low income neighbourhoods of Abuja, Cape Town, prior to the pandemic. Some still live with parents or older extended family members, while others have children in their care, but concerns around maintenance of physical distancing to avoid contagion (and other potential penalties) have forced all to reflect to some degree on their everyday socio-spatial mobility practices: whether/how much they need to travel [for work/income, food/water provisioning, family/social cohesion, religious observances; to allay boredom etc.] or can substitute virtual mobility for physical travel; which transport mode to take and when [walking, on public transport, or in private vehicles]; what precautions they and fellow travellers must take on the move; what strategies of engagement are required to cope with externally imposed rules and contingencies - and the potential impact of their negotiations, decisions and experiences on the health of those dear to them at home. Reflections on the new pandemic-induced responsibilities range from social distancing, mask wearing and sanitising practices to issues around handling cash, modes of greeting and travel to funerals. The personal interpretations of responsibility that are reported in individual diaries point to the complexity of entanglements between everyday mobility practices on city streets and negotiated relations of care within the household (and other relational settings) that have emerged and deepened as the COVID story unfolds.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how volunteers in a community garden for refugees and asylum seekers balance care and responsibility in discussing how to operate safely in the time of Covid while continuing to support participants, whose challenges have been severely exacerbated by the pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
Growing Together is a community garden in Manchester offering therapeutic gardening for asylum seekers and refugees. Asylum seekers in the UK often lead precarious lives, facing periods of destitution, exclusion from vital services and often living in fear of the Home Office. In this context, Growing Together creates a therapeutic space operating on an ethic of care: caring for people through caring for plants.
The project has been closed since lockdown was imposed in March. The challenges facing participants have worsened dramatically because of Covid, so support for participants, practical and emotional, has continued, but remotely. In this paper, drawing on ongoing ethnographic engagement, I explore how the project has been transformed, focusing especially on volunteers’ discussions about reopening the space. I examine the balancing of care for participants’ wellbeing, which would benefit from access to the site, with a sense of responsibility to minimise public transport use that could exacerbate transmission. Since the project remains closed, I also look at the creative efforts to care for participant wellbeing in a ‘responsible’ manner. Finally, I explore discussions about risk of transmission on-site in the event of reopening: how far should participants, who may justifiably fear the state, be encouraged to engage with test-and-trace (run by Serco, the security giant that also, notoriously, provides asylum-seeker housing)? As volunteers weigh concerns about public health, participant safety, and an opaque, chaotic, increasingly privatised state, they negotiate the fraught terrain of how to be responsible citizens and activists in the time of Covid.