Send message to Contributor

Contribution short abstract

The paper explores care as an affective infrastructure shaping (in)communicability within vernacular humanitarianism. Focusing on refusal, silence, and opacity, it shows how affective demands produce hierarchies while opening fragile spaces to rethink care, responsibility, and relation.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution explores how affective infrastructures shape practices of care, refusal, and relationality within contexts of vernacular humanitarianism. Drawing on ethnographic research in Brazil, it approaches care not as a moral ideal or institutional framework, but as a relational regime through which proximity, obligation, and legitimacy are negotiated. In such settings, care is mediated through expectations of gratitude, transparency, and emotional legibility, and thus becomes a key site where racialized and classed distinctions are produced and sustained. Focusing on everyday encounters within humanitarian and bureaucratic assemblages, the paper examines how care functions as an affective infrastructure that organizes (in)communicability—determining who is heard, whose suffering is rendered intelligible, and whose opacity becomes suspect. These infrastructures do not merely enable support; they also expose subjects to moral evaluation and affective discipline, revealing how care can operate as both relation and regulation. Against this backdrop, I attend to moments of refusal, withdrawal, and silence as situated responses to such affective demands. Rather than treating these as communicative failures or forms of disengagement, I approach them as practices of affective self-protection that complicate dominant humanitarian grammars. In dialogue with emerging debates on incommunicability, I suggest that breakdowns in communication are not simply signs of polarization but key sites where the limits of care become visible. By tracing how care and its others are negotiated in everyday interactions, the paper reflects on how fragile and often ambivalent forms of relation may nonetheless open spaces for rethinking ethics, responsibility, and relationality within contemporary regimes of care.

Send message to Contributor

Contribution short abstract

This paper asks questions about the transmission of situational affect in contexts of caregiving amongst Kurdish refugees in London. I will talk about reported speech, quotation as an object of exchange and yardstick for the study of (in)communicabilities.

Contribution long abstract

In a recent book called ‘Endurance’ (Brill, 2024) I studied the affordances of Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) embedded in the representation of human rights abuses and crimes against humanity. This study included a chapter on affective paradigms. Here I mobilized the work of Catherine Lutz, Don Brenneis, Judith Irvine, Benedicte Grima and Seyda Türk Smith. As a shorthand to refer to this body of work I used the term ‘situational affect’. When situations that elicit affect appear more salient than inner subjective experience and emotion words this term is apposite. For this conference paper I take this argument a step further and ask questions about the transmission of situational affect.

Such questions are linked to the construction of voice amongst Kurdish refugees in London, questions about who speaks, who gets heard, and who becomes silenced. Communicative and affective contestations in the Kurdish community in London concern diverse caregivers. This concerns the institutional contexts in which chronic pain becomes articulated. Equally important are caregivers within the extended family. Children and grandchildren may have been raised in Turkish or English and are attuned to a divergent affective paradigm. In this paper I focus on the reported speech clause, as an opaque form in language, a distinct shape, and object-like sound. I build upon the French linguist Josette Rey-Debove’s work on meta-language. The quotation is hereby interrogated as the affect itself, a speech object to be exchanged, transacted for the transmission of situational affect. This raises further questions about (in)communicabilities.

Send message to Contributor

Contribution short abstract

Drawing on racialised encounters within UK NHS mental health services, this paper asks why healthcare bureaucracies elicit affective responses between humour and fury. How can the anthropological response move beyond the black and white and attend to what lies in-between such affects?

Contribution long abstract

What is it about healthcare bureaucracies that elicit affective expressions between humour and fury, and who are ‘the others’? This paper recounts racialised encounters with service users and clinicians in UK NHS mental health services, drawing on ethnographic research conducted by a team of anthropologists and clinicians on the UK’s recent randomised controlled trial of the psychiatric intervention ‘Peer-supported Open Dialogue’. As examples, what of the white service user who mocks refugees for gaining easier access to social housing than psychiatric service users, with her immigrant clinicians in the room agreeing? Or the black service user who refuses to recount the incommunicabilities of her refugee journey to the white clinician she casts as ‘interrogating policeman’? Or the mildly intoxicated clinician who quips at another for having ‘white male privilege’ during a residential training party? Or the team manager who announces that she actively recruits clinicians from a specific minority ethnic group, which angers those from other minority groups?

This paper argues that attending to what is between the humour and fury within such claims gleans anthropological insights that reveal not only complex manifestations of racism, but their intersections with other clinical and gendered hierarchies. How might the anthropologist/practitioner move through these multiple polarisations to stay curious and caring? This author’s multiple positioning as anthropologist, Open Dialogue practitioner and peer support worker translated into an affective response that was necessarily not ‘black and white’ and further, as a person of colour, she was often directly drawn into racialised relational dynamics.

Send message to Contributor

Contribution short abstract

I analyze Norway’s pre‑vaccination COVID debate to show how “culture” marked racialized minorities as risky while majority infections stayed unmarked. I trace how “trust” and mediated voice shaped care, blame, and refusal.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reflects on how race, affect, and (in)communicability were configured in Norway’s public debate on COVID-19 before mass vaccination. In this unsettled moment, “culture” and “trust” became key political idioms for explaining unequal infection burdens and for sorting who counted as responsible, intelligible, and care-worthy. Building on prior collaborative work, I argue that “culture” was mobilized asymmetrically. When attached to immigrants and racialized minorities, culture was repeatedly treated as a bounded collective property that predisposed groups to risk, and non-compliance. By contrast, majority infections were framed as universal biomedical events—even when linked to culturally patterned practices such as ski holidays, Easter travel, or Christmas gatherings. This uneven marking of some lives as culturally “risky” while others remain unmarked enables moral economies of predation and appropriation: statistical “overrepresentation” becomes readable as cultural deficiency, while majority practices retain epistemic innocence. At the same time, “trust” is elevated as a distinctive majority affect, figured as the precondition for collective compliance. I then attend to communicative infrastructures: who is authorized to speak, who is heard, and how speech travels. Majority subjects are commonly individualized and permitted to speak for themselves, with transgressions framed as personal lapses. Minority speech more often moves through spokespersons and community leaders and is interpreted through idioms of lack (language, health literacy, trust). In this mediated economy, “lack” functions as a racialized affective diagnosis that can legitimate intensified surveillance, behavioral correction, and selective withholding of solidarity.

Send message to Contributor

Contribution short abstract

Tenacious Assumptions in Medical Anthropology reframes care as racial grammar and communicability. Naming “ethnography in the wake,” I read worry, silence, gossip, and refusal as ethical practices and how care can slide into extraction.

Contribution long abstract

Tenacious assumptions in Medical Anthropology (riffing on Deborah Gordon) argues that “care” is a stubborn, inherited grammar that sorts communicability: who can speak as a patient, who is heard, and when refusal is pathologized. Writing from anticipatory grief and worry, I read affect as evidence of living “in the wake” (Sharpe) as the ongoing, unresolved afterlife of slavery that saturates health and relation. These are the field’s tenacious assumptions: that care is self-evident, that autonomy is evenly distributed, and that communicative breakdowns are failures rather than sites of ethical possibility.Bringing Black study (Spillers, Hartman, Sharpe) into conversation with medical anthropology, I show how core categories—patient, risk, consent, kin—presume forms of personhood that antiblackness historically withholds. Through scenes of biomedical extraction, including the ethical afterlives of Henrietta Lacks/HeLa, I trace how care can function as appropriation, liability management, and bodily theft, even when framed as benevolence. I propose an anthropology of the flesh and “ethnography in the wake” as method and critique: attending to grammar, silence, distrust, and refusal as data. Recasting care as a problem of thought and communicability, the paper asks what forms of witnessing, repair, and responsibility medical anthropology might cultivate in a polarized present.