Contribution short abstract

I compare fatigue and coping among displaced Syrian mothers in Lebanon and Finland, showing how exhaustion is entangled with care across contrasting socio-material conditions. When endurance is valued as strength, caring for others emerges not only as strain but also as a source of relief.

Contribution long abstract

In this contribution, I compare sources of fatigue and everyday coping strategies among displaced Syrian mothers, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the capital cities of Finland and Lebanon. In both contexts, exhaustion was often entangled with domestic and self-sacrificing forms of care, which I approach not as mere burdens but as practices meaningful to the women themselves and analytically central to feminist care ethics.

In Beirut, Syrian mothers strove to sustain everyday life and care for their families amid severe economic collapse and infrastructural breakdown. On top of having experienced the trauma of war, they now lived under extreme scarcity in a country where, amid growing anti-Syrian sentiment, they felt increasingly unwelcome. Many described suppressing their own needs and shielding close family members from their worries, finding moments of relief instead in bringing joy to others and in female sociability—cooking, laughing, and dancing together.

In Helsinki, within the context of the Nordic welfare state, Syrian mothers aspired to learn Finnish and enter paid work in order to feel a sense of participation in local society. Combined with high standards of domestic labour and childrearing as expressions of care, and unwilling to compromise on either domain, many internalised these demands and pushed themselves harder, resulting in exhaustion. Most also reported physical symptoms and chronic illnesses, intensified by the long Finnish winters of cold and darkness. Some felt this coldness extended beyond the climate to the introverted social life of locals, which they experienced as contagious.

Contribution short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in Indigenous villages of central India, this paper examines how climate uncertainty and microfinance reshape women’s care labour. Framed through fatigue and debility, it shows how debt becomes an embodied strategy of survival rather than empowerment.

Contribution long abstract

This paper examines how fatigue and care become embodied terrains of survival at the intersection of climate variability and financialization in Indigenous communities of central India. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in villages located near the Pench Tiger Reserve, it explores how erratic rainfall, crop failure, and declining soil fertility intersect with the expansion of microfinance to reshape women’s everyday lives.

While microcredit is widely promoted as a tool of women’s empowerment and climate resilience, the paper argues that it instead produces feminised burdens of debt. For women whose livelihoods are already destabilised by ecological uncertainty, microfinance functions less as a pathway to autonomy and more as a precarious strategy of endurance. Women become responsible not only for accessing and repaying loans but also for sustaining household care economies amid chronic scarcity. Credit thus binds together climate adaptation, reproductive labour, and moral obligation.

Situated within feminist political economy, the paper mobilises fatigue and debility as analytic lenses to trace how the costs of climate adaptation are transferred onto women’s bodies. Anxiety around repayment, affective labour within self-help groups, and the intensification of unpaid care work reveal how exhaustion accumulates as a slow, embodied form of violence rather than an episodic crisis.

By foregrounding Indigenous women’s everyday negotiations of care, debt, and uncertainty, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on fatigue, polarisation, and survival in contexts of uneven development. It shows that credit intensifies exhaustion as women absorb the ecological and economic risks of climate variability within their bodies and relationships.

Contribution short abstract

This study examines how elderly villagers in a post-industrial Yangtze Delta community normalize non-stop laboring bodies while denying fatigue. The ethnography explores how the exclamation "Sǐrén hún!" reveals everyday care ethics and how shared vulnerability can foster relational care practices.

Contribution long abstract

Rapid urbanization and marketization left villages behind in China, while villages are living in their temporal rhythms under uneven development. Even after reaching retirement age, elderly villagers kept taking on different kinds of work, stopping only when their bodies began to hurt, or when illness finally forced them to. Labor and rest, health and illness, vitality and fatigue, these tension-filled moments often coexist in the same field scene, in the same non-stop laboring body, and even at the same moment. Beyond polarization, the paper asks why fatigue is not legitimized as something one could openly claim, entangled with labor history and care ethics, in a post-industrial community in the Yangtze River Delta with agriculture activities still existing. Based on participant observation and interviews with elderly villagers and some women caregivers, a recurring refrain is “Why do that? Sǐrén hún!” (What the hell are you doing that for? Just stop working.), a local fixed expression combining a literal “death” expletive with a half-teasing and half-sympathetic admonition, manifesting everyday relational care in rural China. Drawing on feminist and post-humanist care theories, the paper shows how elderly villagers, who have experienced the rural collectivization period, shape ethics by neglecting or even denying fatigue during everyday labor work and care practices. What’s more, this research also reveals how fatigue sometimes operates as a possible turning point, where sisterhood and the whole community are interconnected through shared vulnerability, mundane relational support, and a contested future imagination.

Contribution short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research with Senegalese families in France and their relatives in Dakar, I analyze everyday requests for assistance—money, goods, or luggage space— as a site for collective negotiations of care, which redistribute fatigue across wide networks.

Contribution long abstract

This paper examines fatigue as a relational and political condition that structures transnational economies of care. Drawing on ethnographic research with Senegalese families in France and their relatives in Dakar, I analyze everyday requests for assistance—money, goods, or luggage space— as a site for collective negotiations of care, which redistribute fatigue across wide networks. During fieldwork for the JustRemit ERC project (2022-2025), I travelled between Lyon and Dakar every three to six months and was regularly recruited to perform the role of “suitcase courier” for my hosts in Dakar and their relatives in Lyon. Examining requests to transport food, cash, cloth, shoes, medicine, beauty products, and important documents between France and Senegal, I examine how people attempt to gauge their own and others’ fatigue and capacity to give. Focusing on queries about “how many kilos” I had left in my suitcase (an entrée into requests to carry something on someone’s behalf), I explore how people assess one’s capacity to carry goods, give money, or otherwise exert effort for others. I analyze how questions about the weight of one’s suitcase index deeper politics of exhaustion, organized by inequalities of gender, age, race, and geography. In a context where state welfare is quasi-inexistant and family obligations are paramount, care circulates through bodies that are already stretched thin by economic precarity, global inequalities, migration regimes, and social expectations. I argue that fatigue is a socially distributed condition, negotiated in everyday requests and reflections on one’s own and other’s capacity to give support.

Contribution short abstract

This contribution examines the care itineraries of transmasculine people in Brazil. Using ethnography in "local initiative" clinics, I analyze how the gap in federal funding and institutional inertia transform professional commitment into a depleting labor of survival and institutional fatigue.

Contribution long abstract

In Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS), trans healthcare is often relegated to specialized centers. While only 10 hospitals are federally funded for surgeries and 12 for hormone therapy, over 100 clinics operate as "local initiatives," lacking institutional standardization or federal support. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork regarding the care itineraries of trans men and transmasculine individuals, I examine how access has relied on the ethical-political commitment of professionals rather than robust policies. One of my fieldsites is precisely one of these clinics, functioning through "local initiative”. This reliance on individual "caring" creates a profound paradox. While it fosters a sense of belonging for a marginalized population, it generates intense institutional fatigue. In team meetings, exhaustion is omnipresent; phrases like "this clinic is not a place where you work until retirement" signal the limits of endurance. This fatigue is exacerbated by a broader healthcare network that reflexively redirects any demand involving a trans body to these specialized units, regardless of clinical necessity, overwhelming the staff. I contend that "caring" as a personal-political project is insufficient to sustain a healthcare system. The daily reality of these clinics reveals how institutional inertia transforms care into a depleting labor of survival. Truly transformative care requires moving beyond the "sensitization" of professionals toward public policies co-designed by trans populations, managers, and the frontline workers who navigate the ambivalence of exhaustion and resistance in their everyday practice.