- Convenors:
-
Paulina Kolata
(Harvard University)
Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko (Kyoto University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how everyday, slow violence takes shape within economies of care and neglect and through the moral and material infrastructures that sustain and erode social worlds. We invite papers that trace how violence folds into care and how people make sense of its slow demands.
Long Abstract
In polarised worlds, violence does not only erupt in spectacular acts of conflict: it seeps through the quieter logics of abandonment, extraction, and excess that contour everyday life. This panel explores how everyday, slow violence (Das 2013, Nixon 2011) takes shape within economies of care and neglect and through the moral and material infrastructures that sustain, and sometimes erode, social worlds. Everyday violence surfaces in gestures of maintenance and bureaucratic procedure, in moments of endurance and improvisation, and as people navigate uneven terrains of care and responsibility. Violence is not always visible: it hides in the work of keeping things going, in the distribution of care, and in the exhaustion of those who tend to what is left behind.
We invite ethnographic contributions that trace how violence becomes ordinary, how it folds into care, and how people make sense of its slow demands. How do acts of repair or attention intertwine with exclusion or depletion? What does it mean to study violence not as rupture but as rhythm, a way of inhabiting worlds structured by asymmetry and fatigue, yet still animated by fragile human and more-than-human attachments?
By attending to the ordinary as a site where both destruction and endurance take shape, this panel asks what possibilities anthropology might open by revealing the generative and corrosive potentials of violence. How might ethnographic attention to the slow, the residual and the entangled help us think otherwise about the possibilities of enduring within an increasingly fractured yet still shared world?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
In Mayotte, women’s cancer trajectories reveal how care is rationed through poverty, borders, and bureaucracy. Underfunded hospitals and anti-immigration policies turn cancer into slow violence, where neglect is not accidental but structurally produced in a postcolonial health system.
Paper long abstract
This article examines women’s experiences of cancer care and neglect in Mayotte through the analytic lenses of slow violence, structural violence, and postcolonial biopolitics. Based on ethnographic interviews and observations within clinical and bureaucratic settings, it explores how cancer trajectories are shaped less by individual pathology than by historically produced public health policies and an underfunded health infrastructure, widespread poverty, and exclusionary anti-immigration policies. As a French overseas department, Mayotte occupies an ambivalent position within the Republic, where universalist ideals of care coexist with racialized and moralized regimes of access.
Women’s accounts reveal how diagnostic delays, fragmented treatment pathways, and everyday experiences of neglect accumulate over time, producing forms of suffering that are gradual, normalized, and often rendered invisible. Cancer emerges as a condition of prolonged waiting—waiting for referrals, medical evacuations, documentation, or institutional recognition—during which disease progression becomes more visible. Drawing on theories of care as a political and moral practice, the article shows how distinctions between deserving and undeserving patients are enacted through administrative procedures and clinical triage, disproportionately affecting women racialized as migrants, even when they have long-standing ties to the island.
By conceptualizing women’s cancer experiences as embedded in slow violence, this article argues that scarcity and neglect in Mayotte is not episodic or accidental but structurally produced within a postcolonial regime of care. Women’s bodies become sites where colonial histories, contemporary border politics, and misguided health policies converge, revealing the gendered and embodied consequences of enduring inequalities in access to life-sustaining care.
Paper short abstract
This paper dissects the 'unequal ordinary' in global health by showing how waste products from pharmaceutical manufacturing become the raw materials for the careful reproduction of everyday life (fences, firewood, etc) in central Madagascar.
Paper long abstract
In Fianarantsoa region of southern-central Madagascar, a pharmaceutical factory produces necessary antimalarial ingredients from the leaves of the Artemisia annua bush. Finished antimalarials often leave the island, an enduring symbol of global health inequality and the slow violence of resource extraction. But much is left behind in the villages where these medicinal plants are grown – like artemisia’s dried stems, which remain heaped up behind local houses once the valuable leaves are beaten off and sold to the drug company. This paper follows what that waste wood becomes: a woven fence protecting a village garden, struts for a new roof after cyclone damage, firewood for daily pots of rice and greens. In showing how medical industries furnish the raw materials for the fabric of everyday life in zones of production, it argues for ethnographic methods that decenter the consumption of therapeutic commodities or practices as core objects of analysis. Nuanced methodological attention to biomedical industries’ enmeshment with unfolding ordinariness – to how making medicine is in some ways also always making and remaking banal inhabited landscapes – in turn enables new theorizations of the relationship between medicine, global health inequality, and ‘the normal.’ Dominant conceptual toolkits focus on the ways that modern medicine expands modes of being deemed pathological and shrinks modes of being deemed normal. But medicinal-wood fences, roofs, and fires from Madagascar instead suggest the many ways that medical industries open unexpected grounds for the reconstruction of ordinary life even as they maintain conditions of profound inequality.
Paper short abstract
This talk will explore the ambiguity of surfaces as they preserve and disrupt life on Christmas Island. It will explore how animals engage petrochemical surfaces, specifically plastics and asphalt. These surfaces can provide infrastructures of care, whilst simultaneously enacting everyday violence.
Paper long abstract
A large portion of the Earth is now covered with artificial, petrochemical-derived surfaces. Asphalt carries people at speed from place to place, while plastic materials afford new possibilities including in the manufacturing of these vehicles. During the rainy season on Christmas Island, an Australian external territory, the red crab migration sees hundreds of millions of endemic red crabs move across the island to mate and lay their eggs. Adept at climbing improbable rock faces and negotiating demanding surfaces, the crabs meet difficulties when traversing asphalt. Crabs are frequently crushed under the semi-synthetic wheels of passing cars and, if trapped on the road as the sun comes out, they can bake in their own carapace. To limit crab fatalities during the migration, slippery vertical surfaces have been introduced to channel the crabs away from the roads and to stop them from entering buildings wherein they often die. As plastic tyres crush crabs they also abrade on the roads, spreading novel pollutants into nearby ecologies. Looking at how people on Christmas Island create, negotiate, and alter surfaces during the crab migration this talk will explore artificial surfaces as both a near ubiquitous form of everyday violence and a means of enacting care.
Paper short abstract
Ethnography of an NHS greenspace linked to homelessness care in Edinburgh shows how everyday violence makes longing a form of ethical practice. This exposes the limits of inclusion healthcare and opens speculative possibilities for care otherwise.
Paper long abstract
The Access Place (TAP) is a health facility in central Edinburgh that offers integrated “inclusion” services of housing, health, and social work for people experiencing homelessness with multiple and complex needs. This paper is situated in the NHS greenspace behind TAP, where gardening and food distribution projects operate as preventative community care programmes. Here, TAP patients speak about their lives and the structural violences that accompany inclusion healthcare, making the garden a threshold space: adjacent to biomedical care yet loosely regulated, where experiences of abandonment, longing, and bureaucratic exhaustion are felt, storied, and embodied.
Reflecting the social transience of the gardens, I draw on encounters with three TAP participants: Tree Man, whose ecological cosmologies render him “mad” within clinical frames; Roy, whose labour sustained the garden until he was banned from TAP grounds for violent outbursts; and Wolf, whose itinerant refusals of work, citizenship, and normative productivity disclose a longing for forms of care that exceed present institutional logics. Across their encounters with both the violences they endure and the violences they enact, notions of longing expose the affective and moral costs of inclusion healthcare in Scotland.
Bringing longing into conversation with everyday violence at TAP, I argue that longing-in-violence functions not as nostalgia nor individual therapeutic need, but as a future-oriented ethical practice: a refusal to be reduced to dysfunction or disdain, and a shared desire to be recognised as fully human. In this sense, longing makes visible the limits of inclusion whilst opening speculative possibilities for care otherwise.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines disruptive demographics in rural Japan as slow-moving disasters and a modality of everyday violence. Focusing on Buddhist temples, I show how care obligations intensify amid institutional inertia, and ask how decline is endured and reworked through uneven practices of care.
Paper long abstract
Everyday life in rural Japan is increasingly organized around what has been lost: departed kin, empty houses, interrupted ritual calendars, institutions kept going with fewer hands. This paper examines disruptive demographics as a slow-moving disaster and a modality of everyday violence. Rooted in ethnography in Buddhist temple communities, I explore how population loss, ageing, and outmigration are lived as conditions that erode social ties, ritual rhythms, and care infrastructures. I argue that this attritional devastation differs from the immediacy of earthquakes or tsunamis not in its effects but in its tempo: here, devastation unfolds through closures, absences, and the thinning of everyday life. Depopulation and ageing are experienced as slow processes of disappearance, abandonment, and futures rendered uninhabitable, yet the quiet violence of decline remains largely unnamed, folded into ordinary maintenance and moral obligation.
Focusing on temples as sites of care, I trace how religious professionals and lay practitioners sustain institutions built for absent populations. Demographic decline redistributes care unevenly, intensifying responsibility for those who remain, while normalizing abandonment. This violence is also institutionally mediated: temples and denominational headquarters, slow to adjust organizational structures, financial models, and ritual expectations, stabilize obligations that outpace shrinking communities. Tending graves, maintaining buildings, and performing memorial rites mitigate and reproduce this violence, binding people through duties that are increasingly difficult to sustain. By framing demographic decline as the everyday violence of slow disasters, I ask what it means to inhabit decline as moral and affective conditions in which care is both endured and reworked.
Paper short abstract
Environmentally displaced Bengali Muslims in Assam, India, face precarity, state neglect, and everyday slow violence. Through an ethnographic account of a wedding, the paper shows care as resistance disrupted by infrastructural failures, and minority citizenship shaped by ‘soundscapes of violence’.
Paper long abstract
Precarity and material dispossession is a part of everyday life for people displaced by floods and riverbank erosion by the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India. Over and above environmental displacement, ethnic minority Bengali Muslims encounter state discrimination and neglect while accessing material infrastructures. The everyday slow violence inhabits various arenas of social reproduction, eroding social worlds and curtailing infrastructural citizenship (Lemanski,2020).
In times of everyday structural violence, economies of care through rituals of social reproduction become important sites of resistance, to hope for stable futures. Through an ethnographic account of a Bengali Muslim wedding celebration, this paper reflects on the roles played by family elders to ensure social mobility for their future generation. By creating spaces of care at the wedding, they attempt to elevate their status via symbolic means. However, their celebrations are interrupted with the fear of right-wing Hindutva violence and censorship. Intermittent functioning of electric infrastructure interrupt wedding rituals. Simultaneously, a diesel-generator powered loudspeaker nearby overpowers conversations and prayers at the wedding, with persistent Hindu devotional songs. Celebratory feasts are held in silence with careful utterance of categories of meats served at the table.
Analysed through the lens of ‘soundscapes of violence’, the paper focuses on amplified sounds, noises, silences, and interruptions to reflect on minority populations’ experiences of infrastructural citizenship, while extending care. While doing so, it emphasises the quiet, private, secular citizenship that Muslims must perform in contemporary India, to make sense of everyday slow violence at the eroding riverbank, while aspiring for stable futures.
Paper short abstract
Focusing on women living with the aftermath of uranium mining in former Czechoslovakia, the paper examines how everyday practices of gendered care, fear for one’s family and bodily strain are forms through which the social and health costs of extraction affect women in a postsocialist mining region.
Paper long abstract
Analytically, this paper traces how the material and social residues of uranium extraction – health legacies, polluted environments, reconfigured welfare provisions and uneven reciprocity – persist through gendered divisions of labor and moral expectations in a former mining region in western Moravia. It then examines how women living with these long-term social and health consequences manage and live through them via everyday practices of gendered care, fear for one’s family and bodily strain.
Drawing on ethnographic-historical research, it combines oral history interviews, archival sources, and local print media to follow women’s lives from the late 1950s through the closure of uranium mines in 2017 and into the post-extraction present. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on social reproduction, slow violence and care in socialist and postsocialist Europe.
In an industrial landscape usually narrated through male miners and underground work, women sustained the community’s social world through auxiliary and service roles within the mining complex as well as through domestic and emotional care in households.
Their oral histories show how care extended beyond households to include managing damaged bodies and uncertain environments, caring for children in households marked by illness and early death, and sustaining fragile community ties, often through uneven and personalized forms of reciprocity. Practices of tending, worrying, managing and compensating, together with the reconfiguration of welfare provisions, shifted additional responsibilities onto women. Gendered care functioned as mechanisms through which these consequences were addressed, redistributed, and normalized in everyday life.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines everyday violence in Karachi's domestic labor through workers' and employers' moral vocabularies. It shows how care and ethical obligation become sites where harm unfolds slowly, producing exhaustion, moral confusion, and precarity within intimate labor relations.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how everyday violence unfolds through moral economies of care in middle-class households employing domestic workers in Karachi, Pakistan. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with women domestic workers and their employers, I trace how relations framed through care and moral obligation simultaneously sustain households while producing slow forms of exhaustion, neglect, and harm.
Rather than appearing as rupture or overt abuse, violence emerges through ordinary expectations: demands that ignore workers’ hardships, moral judgments attached to lateness, food deemed “good enough” only after it has lost its value for the household, house rules that exclude workers’ children while demanding emotional loyalty, and moments where care quietly recedes. In these relationships, workers are held accountable to ethical expectations without secure forms of recognition or support.
Workers articulate these experiences not primarily as economic exploitation but as moral failures. Drawing on idioms such as ehsaas (compassionate awareness), lihaaz (consideration), and izzat (respect), they name moments where relational obligations are breached, revealing how violence folds into care itself. Employers, meanwhile, situate these relationships within moral frameworks of decency and middle-class respectability. As moral managers of the household, women employers understand domestic order as an ethical achievement, mobilizing ideals of care, responsibility, and proper womanhood to justify asymmetries while obscuring the depletion of those who sustain their households.
Everyday violence thus takes shape as a rhythm of endurance, where maintenance, obligation, and fatigue are unevenly distributed. This paper contributes to debates on everyday violence by showing how harm operates through care and ethical expectation.
Paper short abstract
Our paper examines dependent and exploitative relations between madams and women selling sex in the prostitution industry in Hungary. We examine how these exploitative relationships are morally framed and locally legitimised through idioms of care, kinship, friendship, and female solidarity.
Paper long abstract
Our paper examines dependent and exploitative relations between madams and women selling sex in the prostitution industry in Northern Hungary, drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a semi-peripheral region. In such contexts, households are often compelled to develop alternative livelihood strategies (Sassen 2002), rendering involvement in prostitution a constrained strategy of survival despite its exploitative and frequently violent conditions (Dés 2024). Madams operate as female intermediaries within the informal economy of prostitution, structuring access to income for marginalised women while simultaneously exercising control over their labour, mobility, and earnings (Guha 2024). The paper examines local interpretations of the relationships between madams and women selling sex. We examine how these relationships are morally framed and locally legitimised through idioms of care, kinship, friendship, and female solidarity. These moral narratives form part of a local moral economy (Karandinos et al. 2014) through which exploitation is rendered intelligible, tolerable, and at times preferable to alternative forms of dependency, particularly in contrast to male traffickers and violent clients. A central argument of the paper is that madams’ capacity to occupy shifting and ambivalent roles within these relations is not incidental but structurally gendered. By following one case in depth, we demonstrate that the madam’s role is not fixed but situational, shifting between care, control, and coercion depending on relational and structural conditions. This gendered positioning distinguishes madams from male traffickers and helps explain both the moral legitimacy they may hold within local communities and the instability of their authority.