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.