Paper short abstract:

What temporalities at play in the healthcare of marginalized individuals, both dependent on the welfare State and seen as hard to reach? Based on a study of trajectories of ill inmates in France, this paper describes two of processes that structure the government of marginalized populations.

Paper long abstract:

The biographical trajectories of Iliès, and the other 18 men living with the hepatitis C or HIV I met in prison, are rife with the effects of addiction, including incarceration and precariousness. Through series of individual interviews before and after prison release, a survey and observations of the work and interactions in the healthcare and charities they frequented, I became interested in the role of time as a practice and a system of power in the evolution of their social situations. Temporalities, as in what we do in and with time, became one of the main foci of the biographical analysis.

What are the temporalities at play in the healthcare of marginalized citizens, as a group both dependent on the welfare State and its institutions and considered as hard to reach? Based on a study of the health and care trajectories of incarcerated men living with the hepatitis C virus in France, this paper shows that the experiences of patients and the expectations of professionals diverge, creating asynchronies and discriminating categories of treatment. These categories emerge as individuals are unable to respond to the conflicting demands of State health and welfare institutions. This paper will show these demands are the sign of the broader political processes of subjectivation and injunctions to autonomy and responsibility that structure the government of marginalized populations. This paper uses temporalities as a social analyser, not only as a driver of power hierarchies and inequities, but also as a social system of power itself.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the dynamic interplay of care within the supplements market in China, where salespeople and senior customers establish connection that transcend transactions. Within this context, care emerges as a medium through which seniors navigate familial, state, and market relationships.

Paper long abstract:

This research explores how urban seniors in China actively participate in the supplements market as a form of self-care during a historical juncture when traditional family support systems are receding, and once-promised state eldercare services are limited. In such a care vacuum, the local supplements market has stepped in and provided health products, emotional support, and social assistance, all of which I refer to as “care in demand.” These supplementary services, alongside excessively priced health products, extensively fulfill seniors’ desire to be cared for, fueling their aspirations for self-care. Many senior consumers, through their participation in the health product market, undergo a process of learning how to nurture themselves and cultivate self-care attitudes previously lacking in their lives.

During my eighteen months of fieldwork, I focused on senior customers in Zhejiang, China, local inhabitants grappling with the profound impact of globally transmitted commodities, ideas, and cultural practices on their living environments. As the first generation (primarily born in the 1940s) to face solitary lives due to their children’s translocal mobility, these seniors utilize every available tool to plan for a better life. This study explores the transformative nature of care practices in the supplements market in China, investigating how caregiving intentions, initially profit-driven, transcend mere business transactions in practicality. The daily practice of care not only forges fictive kinship between the salespeople and senior customers but, more significantly, reshapes senior people’s perceptions of health, aging, and the societal upheavals they have lived through.

Paper short abstract:

An autoethnographic research on the difference between care and control in the treatment of Type 1 Diabetes during the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the epistemological, ethical and political commitment of the research and its implications, it was written in an unconventional genre: the dialogue.

Paper long abstract:

Is it time to reveal: the dissertation is written in the form of a dialogue, because it deals with a topic that is so sensitive to me that I don't have the courage to talk about it looking into anyone's eyes? Do I say: “I needed to invent a character, who is not really anyone other than a companion, to be able to describe and analyze my feelings and my experiences of suffering”? Do I reveal that I purposely place whoever reads me in the position of someone who listens to a conversation between strangers and enters an intimate place that they might not have entered if it hadn't been from the corner of their eye? Describe the attempt to account in an academic text, with its format and requirements, of these many levels that constituted the experience: professional, personal, collective, subjective? That was the only way I could write what I concluded about my particular experience: the impact of social isolation on the population considered a “risk group” was not a practice of care, but of control and moral adherence, leading to social exclusion and the subjective production of dead-lives? Could it be, finally, that I assume that this was, for now, the only way I was able to scientifically write down my own fragility? That I could sensitively communicate my research results maintaining a epistemological, ethical and political commitment?

Yes, I think it is.

I wrote an anthropological scientific research as a dialogue.

Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic study investigates how cancer patients and their families managed the financial burden of breast cancer treatment in Central Vietnam. It provides conceptual thinking of chronicity in the context of breast cancer as one that is construed by political and economic facts.

Paper long abstract:

Breast cancer is the most frequent cancer among Vietnamese women, causing tremendous emotional, social, and financial burdens for patients and families. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in Central Vietnam, we investigate how cancer patients and their families managed the financial burden of breast cancer care. Our findings suggest that many patients must rely on informal arrangements, partly on support from their social network but heavily via detrimental strategies such as borrowing high-interest loans to settle the enormous medical and non-medical expenses associated with cancer treatment. Cancer care is largely about managing the health and social security systems, as women proactively researched available information and took enormous work to prove their deservingness for some types of assistance. This type of ‘work’ often required women to disclose their cancer status to people in the communities or use tactics such as paying a bribe to accelerate the application process. Affected families must make hard calculations to prioritise the pressing health need of a member diagnosed with cancer and in many circumstances, forfeited the education of their young children. This article emphasises the need to attend to how living with ill health for people in under-resourced settings is shaped by and amplifies social and economic vulnerabilities, and provides conceptual thinking of chronicity in the context of breast cancer as one that is construed by political and economic facts.