- Convenors:
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Sara Bonfanti
(University of Genoa)
Ester Micalizzi (UNIVERSITY OF TURIN)
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- Discussants:
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Anne Sigfrid Grønseth
(Inland Norway University, Lillehammer)
Caroline Gatt (University of Graz)
Annelieke Driessen (University of Amsterdam)
- Formats:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract
This roundtable examines fatigue and care as terrains of struggle and endurance. Drawing on feminist and decolonial thought, it probes how moral polarisation, precarity, and debility (Puar 2020) expose both the limits and creative politics of care in unequal worlds.
Long Abstract
Across crises of health, migration, and welfare, fatigue has become both an everyday condition and a critical lens through which to understand the politics of care. This roundtable examines how exhaustion, affect, and debility (Puar 2020) circulate through polarised institutions, workplaces, and intimacies, shaping the moral and material economies of survival.
We contend that fatigue is not simply a symptom of burnout or neoliberal overwork, but a relational and political force that reveals structural contradictions: between solidarity and self-protection, empathy and indifference, autonomy and dependence. Fatigue, like debility, indexes how violence is differentially distributed across racialised, gendered, and classed bodies—yet also how people generate fragile but vital forms of endurance, repair, and ethical imagination.
Drawing on feminist and decolonial critiques of care (Mol 2008; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Lachenal et al. 2022), this roundtable invites participants to rethink anthropology’s role in grasping ambivalence, depletion, and creativity in social life. We welcome ethnographic cases that reveal how institutional fatigue, bureaucratic inertia, or affective overload manifest in diverse contexts—from healthcare and caregiving to migration, activism, and digital labour. These grounded explorations will open a theoretically engaged debate on the entanglement of care, power, and exhaustion.
By bringing together ethnographers, practitioners, and theorists, we aim to question whether exhaustion can itself become a ground for solidarity and re-imagined coexistence. In doing so, the roundtable seeks to articulate how anthropology might move beyond diagnosing crisis toward cultivating ethical attention, endurance, and transformative possibility.
Keywords: affect; embodiment; fatigue; debility; medical anthropology; moral ambivalence; polarised care.