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- Convenors:
-
Heike Drotbohm
(University of Mainz)
Antónia Pedroso de Lima (ISCTE-IUL CRIA)
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- Discussant:
-
Maria Claudia Coelho
(Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 10 University Square (UQ), 01/005
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel approaches the entanglement between emotions and the political projects of the (un)commoning. At the center are care relations at the intersection between authority and power on the one hand and particular emotions, such as hope, gratitude, sympathy, contempt, fear or shame on the other
Long Abstract:
In times of political transformations and eventually even dystopian times, the provision of care, be it offered by institutions of state welfare, charity, humanitarianism or even individuals, turns into a crucial and powerful domain of social in- or exclusion. Furthermore, under conditions of uncertainty, asymmetric encounters in the context of legal counselling, bureaucracies, or in moments of border control can likewise serve as generators of hope, producing social imaginaries and aspirations. For understanding how the asymmetric quality of care relations is interpreted, the anthropology of emotions since the 1990s has paid attention to the micropolitical dimension of emotions, that is, to the ability of emotions to perform, subvert, alter or reinforce macro hierarchical structures in which interactions between individuals take place. Depending on the respective field of encounter, gratitude, sympathy, hope, contempt, humiliation, shame, guilt and disgust can play that role. This panel proposes to intertwine these two themes through papers reflecting on how emotions elicited by the provision or the reception of care, enable a deeper understanding of how the power asymmetries established by those processes are sensed, judged, made use of and/or rejected among the different actors involved.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the experience of living in uncertain times, focusing on how the articulation between emotions and care produce the possibility a life worth living, while creating asymmetries and power relations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses the experience of living in uncertain times, focusing on how the articulation between emotions and care produce the possibility a life worth living, while creating asymmetries and power relations.
Building on ethnographic work in Portugal I will discuss how people confronted with shortcomings in the state care system - during the austerity crisis (2011-2015) and the pandemic period (2020-2022) - people turned to informal ways of making ends meet. Broad care relations, imbued with emotional sympathy and a morality of “care” and the common good, have made life possible for people in despair.
By focusing on the new regimes of care developed to overcome the challenges of a precarious present, and on the multiple ways by which uncertainty becomes embodied, I will further argue how uncertainty deeply transforms the constitutive processes of being a person, and how the existance of hope is what makes it possible for people in dispair to engage in strategies to make the present possible and envision a future.
Paper short abstract:
Participatory research with children with disabilities enacts field changes. Vulnerability shapes the practice and intersect field interactions from different dimensions and the process of knowledge co-production with children - as selves, is often affected by power relations.
Paper long abstract:
There is an increasing recognition to the need of bringing the diversity of disabled children voices into research and to include their perspectives alongside of those from the ones of other children. Capturing their agency and individuality (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2012) can highlight research with disability-specific views (Wickenden & Gayatri Kembhavi-Tam 2014). The participatory research and the mosaic approach has been broadly adopted to understand children as social agents and experts while acknowledging the diversity of their voices and forms of expression (Goodley & Runswick-Cole 2012). Yet, in our own process of conducting a research in the context of Animal Assisted Therapy sessions at four school contexts co-constructed with 48 children, with multiple and complex disabilities, we found several factors regarding key aspects for accessing children voice´s and voluntary and meaningful participation. A central idea in Participatory research is that participants are empowered, affecting the balance of power relations which are therefore expected to shift (Ajodhia-Andrews, 2016), participatory methods can therefore change the nature of the relationships and power status. By drawing upon concrete examples from our research we expect to foreground the challenges created by the field gatekeepers showing where their impact has delayed accessing children's voices and often (re) introduced power relations that affected children voluntary participation and to shad a new light on the intersections of the different dimensions of vulnerability enacted by research course.
Paper short abstract:
The global event-format 'fuckup' forms a new way of dealing with failure. It provides a stage and a caring audience for speakers who can perform self-care and emotion work against shame. However, the events reproduce powerful logics of the ethics of self-transformation and self-optimization.
Paper long abstract:
The ethnographic research for my PhD (European Ethnology; in Germany, Austria and Switzerland) has given me insights into a field where speakers share their failure stories with an audience, live and on stage. These so called ‚fuckup‘-events aim to work against a hegemonial culture of a stigmatization of failure and oppose an emotional norm that binds shame to failure. Instead, they show themselves with humor, in an entertaining way, and they present and celebrate knowledge about 'good' ways of failing.
For those who perform on this very stage, the events provide a public setting for experiences of transforming their feelings; in co-presence of the audience, that represents an emotional community (Rosenwein 2006). The events provide a certain materiality and sociality and an in-between space that allows and asks for emotion work (Hochschild 1979) and a transformed and (self-)transforming approach to failure.
The events claim to be a global and social ‚movement‘ that cares for the failed and promotes moral ideals that move away from an ethics of money, while at the same operating as a franchise-system that markets failure expertise to companies. My study takes the stance of practice theory and emotional practices (Scheer 2012, 2016) to explain how the events help failed make sense of their experience but also reificate programs of emotional self-optimization (Bröckling 2016; Illouz 2003, 2009; Rose 1999) and ideas about the nature of the body, emotions, the private and the public.