Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Diego Maria Malara
(University of Glasgow)
Koreen Reece (University of Bayreuth)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Tatjana Thelen
(University of Vienna)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Location:
- Facultat de Geografia i Història 222
- Sessions:
- Friday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
In times of social crisis, both the problem and the solution are often framed in terms of care – seen as at constant risk of failure and collapse, but also prioritized as an ethical way to address inequalities and injustice. How does care undo and re-do history and futures, and shape social change?
Long Abstract:
In public discourse and the social sciences alike, care marks a long-standing and expanding preoccupation. Whether in the ‘crises of care’ that multiplied during Covid-19, concerns with social care for the elderly, or urgent calls to care for the earth in a time of climate crisis, care figures strongly in shaping popular imaginations of the contemporary threats we face and the responses available to them. In contexts of precarity, austerity, and rampant inflation, or displacement, pandemics, even war, care is often framed as both the problem and the solution: it is at constant risk of failure and collapse, of being undone; but is simultaneously prioritised as an ethical way of creating change in lives, bodies, relationships, and communities, of bridging inequalities and addressing injustice, of doing the future and also undoing problematic pasts.
Debates on care have established its relevance to most aspects of social life, but have not fully engaged the capacity of care to generate social, political and economic change – on which public imaginations of care are so focused. While we have rich ethnographic accounts of how ideologies and practices of care are shaped by governments, markets, and historical processes, we have seldom explored how care is transformative of those macro-dynamics in its own right.
How does care undo and re-do history and futures, and shape social transformation? And in its capacities to refigure pasts, presents and futures, how does care undo and re-do anthropological understandings of time – and suggest different disciplinary approaches to creating change?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 26 July, 2024, -Paper Short Abstract:
In my research on "forced marriage" in the UK, informants sought to preface talk about their marriages with accounts of prior abuse. This paper seeks to contextualise cases of “forced marriage” within other forms of force and abuse both before and after the act of “forced marriage” itself.
Paper Abstract:
My paper begins with a difficult and troubling question. It concerns the distortions that arise from a temporal privileging of the UK’s Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act 2007, designed as it is, to prevent a “forced marriage” in its run-up, rather than to offer redress where one has already taken place, often many years ago. In effect, the law demands a discrete “time event” (for marriage, force) to be recognised, whereas the experience of these sits on a continuum that track retrospective and prospective temporalities to apprehend the subjectively lived past and to project forwards into future projects. This paper raises questions around contextualising the “forced marriage” within other forms of force and abuse both before and after the act of “forced marriage” itself. Such context is called for particularly because I was presented on numerous occasions by informants who sought to talk about their marriages by prefacing them with narratives about prior abuse. The argument of this piece is to find ways to think with my informants about this abuse, to present it ethnographically, and to navigate through their accounts the ways in which these experiences of abuse have propelled them towards making decisions and choices with regards the care of their own children in order to engage and remake those histories and generate alternative futures.
Paper Short Abstract:
The paper offers insight into the private hosting of almost 100 Ukrainian refugees in a Polish village. It asks whether this bottom-up care has transformative potential, particularly in the context of the UE’s plans to develop an alternative form of refugee reception beyond collective accommodation.
Paper Abstract:
The residents of Poland, who often had no activist background or intercultural competence, spontaneously hosted hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the 2022 war in Ukraine. This is an unprecedented phenomenon, given the previous, rather unwelcoming attitude of Polish society towards refugees, which was the result of anti-refugee discourse developed since 2015. This care at the village level was even more unexpected given the lack of resources and expertise in assisting refugees in this humanitarian crisis which required not only hosting refugees but also providing them with both instrumental and psychological support.
The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a village in Western Poland that hosted almost 100 refugees. Its objective is not only to scrutinise the motivations of the particular actors involved in providing this care – among others, the village head, the rural women association, and the host families – but to explore the dynamics, advantages, and limitations of this bottom-up and spontaneous response in the face of the State’s negligence. The category of care is analysed here within the framework of “everyday humanitarianism” (Richey 2018) and “encounters across difference” (Tsing 2005, Bloch 2021), and poses the question of whether it has had the transformative potential for both the hosts and hosted refugees. This question is particularly relevant given that the European Union foresees the development of a European model of the so-called refugee sponsorship (Reynolds, Clark-Kazak 2019) as an alternative form of refugee reception beyond collective housing, the latter being criticised for its counter-integration results.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper explores how care practices of climate-concerned individuals reshape the future by developing alternative forms of parenting. The child figure is not only a symbol used by environmental movements, but it materializes into new ways to parent and disrupts the nuclear family.
Paper Abstract:
Eco-reproductive anxieties have been emerging during these past years and have marked the appearance of environmental crises in reproductive decisions and imaginaries of care. As people refuse to give birth to protect non-humans and parents create new imaginaries of “desirable parenthood”, care is reshaped by environmental futures.
Shifting this focus, this paper explores how practices of care may, in turn, transform the future. It is based on an ethnography conducted in a rural area in France where many climate-concerned individuals move to build alternative lifestyles based on community living, food autonomy, and sustainability. Some migrate especially to raise children in what they imagine are “good conditions” and to live their parenthood peacefully despite their concerns about environmental and social collapse. It usually goes with particular attention to care, education and transmission.
To capture the close relationship between care and future making, this paper asks to what extent my interlocutors’ parenting highlights the emergence of new forms of care and how they participate in shaping new futures. It argues that the child figure – and care for future generations more generally – produces not only symbolic figures instrumentalized by discourses on the environmental crises but also materializes new ways to parent. In a simultaneous movement, these parenting practices disrupt the nuclear family. While these practices may reinforce a gendered division of care, they also breach the nuclear family by opening its entrenched borders.
Paper Short Abstract:
Social movements practice care to produce unmediated political change. Yet, differing temporal understandings of care shape diverse temporal orientations—mutualistic or prefigurative—within direct action. This ethnographic study contributes to theorizing the intersection of care, time, and politics.
Paper Abstract:
Care is arguably the keyword of this decade, both for its absence and its promises. Social movements play a crucial role in making care instigate change, as they embody it through prefigurative politics, mutual aid, and direct action, among other practices. However, these concepts often pose analytical challenges due to constant overlap in the literature. Can taking care as a fundamental lens provide insights into these phenomena? This study draws on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two urban commons in Naples and Barcelona. These settings are compared using the prism of temporalities inherent in their politics of care. The analysis reveals that the conceptualization and practice of care in relation to the past, present, and future contribute to understanding the political orientations of these movements. Specifically, care is shown to be either mutualistic (more present-oriented) or prefigurative (more future-oriented) in its role within direct action. In summary, social movements employ care as a means to effect unmediated political change through direct action. However, the intertwining of care with different temporal understandings shapes distinct political logics. This clarification helps illuminate conceptual differences and commonalities between care politics, direct action, mutual aid, and prefiguration, hence contributing to theorize the political effects of care in relation to time.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper analyses how history is folded into care relations, (re)articulating phantom borders in entangled regions in Europe. It draws on a project which investigates the relocation of seniors from Germany to Poland and Czech Republic where care is more affordable.
Paper Abstract:
Bringing together the personal and the political, the private and the public, care distinctly relates to history. In most European welfare regimes entitlements to care build on past activities: provisioning roles, employment histories and contributions into solidarity funds and insurances. The histories of people and places related to care at first sight appear to be idiosyncratic but at a closer look include collective histories as well.
This paper is based on research conducted by a multilingual team in commercial care homes in Poland and the Czech Republic which recruit seniors from Germany as clients at a third of the costs as compared to the home context. The regions where we conducted fieldwork in Upper Silesia, Poland and the former Sudetenland, Czech Republic, have been subjected to shifting state affiliations. Hirschhausen et al. (2019) suggested the term “phantom borders” to describe how earlier, mostly political demarcations or territorial divisions restrict and enable agency in the present, despite their institutional abolishment. We build on this term to understand how borders that have shifted in the past are built on, re-emerge in, or influence biographies of places and people related to care. We discuss when and how history and care become related in constructions of care entitlements, care infrastructures, and subject positions of care workers and clients. We argue that care relocation in this case expresses the complexity and multiplicity of historical entanglements of the regions rather than representing an easy option for solving the care crisis in Germany.