Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Diego Maria Malara
(University of Glasgow)
Koreen Reece (University of Bayreuth)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Tatjana Thelen
(Universität Wien)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- 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 alike, 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, -Emilija Zabiliute (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines different and conflicting notions of care in India’s community health programme to show how payments, care labour and time inform notions of social justice and transformation, and health.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork work among Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) working and living in an urban poor neighbourhood in Delhi, this paper examines different and conflicting notions of care in India’s community health programme to show how payments, care labour and time inform notions of social justice, transformation, and public health. Holding community activist but also frontline public healthcare worker roles, ASHAs saw both, monetary payments and community commitments, as central to their roles. Their vision of just and appropriate care and monetary retributions, however, at times was incompatible with the formal protocols of the public health programme. I examine this entanglement of money and care in community health work, and the capacity of money to disturb and unsettle the ethics of care in India’s community health programme. Care and money at times conflicted not because of ethical incompatibility - monetary retributions and incentives were expected and seen as a just reward for their hard caring work. Instead, I argue, the dilemmas about payments and care work they faced, revealed two different forms of time of care in which care labour, its rhythms and money are reconfigured differently.
Sofia Ugarte (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how care practices and household economies shape ageing subjectivities. Considering the temporal rhythms and gender inequalities of Chile’s neoliberal social security system, it argues that care and work patterns impact retirement experiences and families’ subsistence strategies.
Paper long abstract:
How do pensions and social security schemes configure ageing subjectivities and relationships across multiple timescapes? The dramatic rise in living costs starkly highlights the material and emotional effects of financial and retirement insecurity globally. At the same time, retirement schemes are designed to ensure generational continuity and the social reproduction of life beyond work, while pension funds allocate long-term capital across national and global markets. How these impact dynamics of care and capitalist speculation is a question of crucial relevance. This presentation examines the temporal and gendered effects of Chile’s privatised pensions, which, as financial instruments, displace the responsibilities of care and wellbeing from the state onto markets and individuals. Drawing on ethnographic research with older adults and retirement advisers based in Santiago, I explore how the intersections between care practices and household economies shape financialised subjectivities within ageing life courses. I argue that the sedimented histories of care and work among household members, along with the gender inequalities present in the Chilean social security system, impact individuals’ experiences of retirement as well as families’ subsistence strategies. In doing so, I show how older adults and their dependents mobilise pensions’ conflicting rhythms across divergent timescapes of care and social reproduction.
Perveez Mody (Cambridge University)
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 long 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.
JC Niala (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
The case study of 'Rethinking relationships around African collections' project examines how critical appraisal of care in UK museums reshapes practices, addresses exclusions, and impacts contested histories, highlighting care's role in transforming histories and futures.
Paper long abstract:
There is an increasing assertion within the heritage sector that museums holding ethnographic collections should position themselves as spaces of care. This care encompasses wide ranging practices from specific care for objects through to museums locating themselves as sites of encounter. Simultaneously, there routinely exists a gulf between the care museums claim to enact and the lack of care experienced by communities whose material cultural heritage is held in these museums. Interrogating care begins with the negotiation of access community members must undergo in order to engage with the collections that hold great meaning for them. Working with the ethnographic example of Rethinking relationships and building trust around African collections a project which took place across four different museums in the UK, this paper analyses the transformation in museum practice that took place when museum professionals were required to critically appraise their practices of care. It explores the systems that had to be revisited from the ground up as museum professionals and community members alike found themselves by turns restricted or enabled by pre-existing structures. Structures that communities argue that still operate from a temporality that is embedded in colonial legacies of exclusion and inequalities. This paper examines the ideal of care, and what it affords but also obscures in the charged context of contested histories. It works to make sense of the reasons why despite its challenges, the concept of care endures both as an aspiration held by museum professionals and a demand from the communities they serve.
Natalia Bloch (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland)
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 long 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.
Mathilde Krahenbuhl (University of Lausanne)
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 long 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.
Laura Major (The University of Strathclyde, Glasgow)
Paper short abstract:
I compare histories of the care of water and water infrastructures amongst communities in Scotland, with present day proposals for change. Drawing on an anthropology of care and material culture to offer insights into the design of sustainable solutions to Scotland's growing water scarcity crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Scotland is facing a water supply crisis. Many rural communities have longstanding struggles with private water supply quality and reliability and in recent years Scotland’s otherwise efficient public water supply has faced similar problems. These challenges are set to increase as the climate changes. In line with the Scottish Government’s vision of a ‘Hydro Nation’, the country has a growing preoccupation with transforming water supply infrastructures and practices to meet these challenges. This paper draws on my experiences as an anthropologist and applied interdisciplinary social scientist researching the best routes forward for a change to the way Scotland’s water supplies are stewarded by and for communities in rural areas. I compare and contrast the living traces of longstanding practices of care associated with water and water infrastructures amongst communities in Scotland, with present day stewardship of water supplies and proposals for change. These practices are deeply entangled with both the wider stewardship of land and waterscapes in this region, and with people’s efforts to establish and maintain belonging and attachment to place, frequently in fraught circumstances. I bring my observations into conversation with both established and new thinking in the anthropology of care, at its intersection with the study of materiality and material culture, setting out where those insights could help in the design of sustainable solutions. In doing so, I reflect more broadly on the potential futures for anthropology and the care of things.
Lorenzo Velotti (Scuola Normale Superiore)
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 long 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.
Kristine Krause (University of Amsterdam) Matous Jelinek (University of Amsterdam) Mariusz Sapieha (University of Amsterdam) Veronika Prieler (University of Amsterdam)
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 long 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.