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- Convenors:
-
Giuseppe Troccoli
(Universidad Católica de Temuco)
Angélica Cabezas-Pino (Universidad de La Frontera)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
Assumptions of care as inherently good have been unsettled, revealing its entanglement with its apparent opposites. It is time to place the care–violence nexus centre stage. What theoretical, analytical, and methodological possibilities emerge when they are examined explicitly together?
Long Abstract
Anthropologists have long engaged with the concept of care, exploring its relationship with abandonment, neglect, harm, exclusion, suffering, and control. These dynamics emerge both when care is reduced or absent, and as intended or unintended consequences of practices and discourses centred on care itself. Such work has deepened our understanding of care by revealing its complexity and contradictions. Yet, while care has been directly linked to its apparent opposites, it has been less frequently examined in relation to violence.
Now that care is no longer unequivocally associated with the “good”, it is time to advance an understanding of care—and of violence—that addresses these two concepts directly. We ask what possibilities emerge when violence is seen as manifesting through the absence of care, through care itself, or even as care. This is not only to unsettle assumptions about care, but to extend our understanding of both care and violence, each with longstanding anthropological trajectories and distinct theoretical lenses for capturing human experience.
This panel invites theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that centre on care and violence, including those engaging with the following questions:
– How might care and violence offer new perspectives on a world increasingly polarised, where care often becomes a language of sameness and violence an act directed towards otherness?
– What insights into care and violence arise from ethnography, given the often ambivalent and unsettling lessons from those who practise or receive them?
– What methodological innovations are needed to confront the conundrums of researching care and violence?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Based on ethnography in a primary healthcare facility, this presentation examines how care and violence intertwine in the treatment of a chronic condition such as hypertension. It shows how moral judgments, racialization processes, and routine delays turn care itself into a form of violence.
Paper long abstract
This presentation examines the intimate entanglement of care and violence through the ethnographic case of Geny, a non-white woman living with hypertension and severe circulatory complications in the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024 in a public primary healthcare service, it explores how violence emerges not only through the absence of care, but also through care practices themselves, particularly in the management of chronic illness. Geny’s condition, ischemia progressing toward cyanosis and requiring urgent surgical intervention, was repeatedly acknowledged as severe, yet systematically treated as something that could wait. Despite formal referrals and clinical recognition of urgency, hospitals refused to admit her, sending her back home to “await” specialized care. This repeated deferral shows how chronicity can operate as a temporal form of violence, in which deterioration unfolds through delays framed as routine care management. Engaging María Puig de la Bellacasa’s question “how to care?”, the presentation interrogates not how to provide more care, but how care is enacted, withheld, or transformed into harm within unequal healthcare systems. Violence here is neither exceptional nor external to care, but it materializes through everyday clinical routines, moral judgments, and classificatory practices that racialize patients and legitimize inaction. By foregrounding ethnography, this presentation contributes to anthropological debates on care and violence, showing how their entanglement reshapes experiences of chronicity and raises ethical and methodological challenges for studying care in contexts where harm is produced through its very practices.
Paper short abstract
In this paper, I examine the kinship relationship between mothers and daughters in southern Chile through what I conceptualize as “violent care.” These forms of care are significant insofar as they are activated when daughters confront situations of violence in adulthood.
Paper long abstract
This paper seeks to complicate and move beyond the dichotomy that frames gender violence research in terms of a female victim versus a male perpetrator. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in southern Chile, I analyze the relationship constructed between women identified as victims of gender-based violence and their mothers. Within a sociocultural context marked by impoverishment, racialization, and persistently tense gender relations, mothers and their daughters creatively weave and unweave their kinship ties. Among the main findings, I argue that the continuity of various forms of violence operating at the social level can be transformed into “violent care” practices enacted by mothers toward their daughters. These “violent care” practices—or their lingering effects—are reactivated in daughters’ adult lives, playing a crucial role when they confront gender-based violence and evaluate how to position themselves and how to act in response to these experiences.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines care not as the moral opposite of violence, but as one of its most legitimate and durable forms. Violence is enacted through everyday languages of concern and responsibility, where caring becomes a means of control.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines care not as the ethical opposite of violence, but as one of its most durable and socially legitimate forms. Drawing on long term research on coercion in mental health systems in Southern Europe and ongoing fieldwork on pasung in Indonesia, it analyses how practices framed as protection, treatment, or responsibility systematically enable domination, silencing, and bodily harm. In these settings, violence is rarely articulated as such. It is instead embedded in everyday languages of concern, duty, and benevolence, where to care for someone becomes synonymous with controlling them for their own good.
The analysis combines ethnographic material, institutional documents, and first person accounts to show how care operates as a moral technology that neutralizes contestation. Psychiatric interventions, family mediated confinement, and administrative decisions are justified through appeals to vulnerability, incapacity, or risk, while those subjected to them are progressively deprived of credibility and agency. The paper argues that this configuration produces a specific epistemic asymmetry, in which harm becomes invisible precisely because it is enacted through care.
Methodologically, the paper reflects on the conditions required to study care related violence without reproducing its effects. It addresses the risks faced by researchers working in close proximity to victims, the limits of institutional protection, and the ethical implications of relying on state or medical authorities as interlocutors. By placing care and violence in direct analytical relation, the paper rise awareness of care as a contested social practice whose moral authority demands continuous scrutiny rather than presumption.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research in western Kenya, this paper examines okuseno eshisero, a postpartum ritual, to show how care and violence are co-produced within reproductive practices oriented toward securing fertility under conditions of uncertainty and patriarchal authority.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research in Khwisero, western Kenya during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines how care and violence are co-produced within reproductive practices oriented toward securing fertility under uncertainty. The analysis centres on okuseno eshisero, a postpartum ritual requiring husbands to perform minimal vaginal penetration after childbirth, widely understood as care that "opens the womb," restores reproductive balance, and prevents spiritual affliction. Methodologically, the paper attends to moments of hesitation, delay, refusal, and compliance in ritual practice, treating these not as deviations but as analytical sites where moral evaluations of care and violence become visible. I argue that care and violence are not stable categories but relational effects emerging through enactment, timing, and anticipated outcomes. Whether okuseno eshisero is experienced as protective care or embodied violence depends on how the ritual is performed, who controls its conditions, and whether it secures future fertility.
Theoretically, the paper advances a pragmatic approach to care and violence, showing their inseparability within gendered hierarchies of reproductive authority. While the ritual situates women's bodies within male-mediated moral orders, women actively navigate these constraints through strategic compliance, selective refusal, and alternative therapeutic itineraries. COVID-19 vaccination intensified these negotiations. Many women feared vaccines would "close the womb" prematurely, disrupting temporal and moral sequences through which reproductive futures are secured. Vaccine hesitancy emerges as pragmatic reproductive reasoning rather than misinformation, revealing care and violence as intertwined modes of navigating uncertain reproductive futures under conditions of gendered constraint.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research in the Swiss penal system, this contribution seeks to complicate the relationship between state care and state violence, moving beyond binary conceptions of both.
Paper long abstract
This contribution reflects on ethnographic research into state-provided alternatives to imprisonment in Switzerland. In this setting, “care” has become central for professional practice: sentenced people are addressed as “clients” (Klient:innen), social workers replace the traditional role of wards, and “caretakers” (Betreuer:innen) accompany individuals throughout their sentences. Drawing on ethnographic material from this field—which is inherently punitive and thus retains state violence at its core—this paper seeks to complicate the relationship between state care and state violence, and to move beyond binary understandings. Rather than evaluating whether state servants act in caring ways or exercise violence, it argues for a shift in analytical attention towards how care and violence emerge as relationally, situationally, and practically entangled—or even as the same thing—in the everyday of the penal system.
The paper invites reflection on how we can critically analyse such caring modes of punishment and their role in confronting and addressing precarity and vulnerabilities—precarity and vulnerabilities that the criminal justice system itself simultaneously intensifies, as extensive empirical research has shown. Ethnographically engaging with everyday practices may help not only to grapple with this paradox but also to illuminate this often normalised status quo as a form of slow, ordinary violence; one that obscures the socially selective conditions under which state punishment operates, while maintaining the collective and often hostile fiction of punitive (and no other form of) justice as inevitable and unquestioned.
Paper short abstract
Building on my experience as a prison ethnographer, student activist, and mentor to incarcerated students, this paper offers an intervention on the possibilities of doing ethnography in a way that takes seriously the intricate and immutable intertwining between violence and care.
Paper long abstract
Lebanon’s state institutions are mostly discussed in relation to an absence or lack of care. Yet care is administered by state and non-state institutions in unlikely, contradictory, and subtle ways. These care mechanisms work alongside practices of domination and control rather than countering or undoing them. My paper takes Lebanon’s prison system as a case study towards analyzing how the state’s dual impulses to govern and tend to the population intersect in disturbing ways as well as the implications this may have for anthropological research. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with ten former prisoners in Lebanon, I examine the forms of care that are undertaken by prison authorities to trace how care is experienced, channeled, and reverberated through the state/carceral violence – and what forms of resistance or refusal are subsequently possible. How to conduct fieldwork with and “care” for one’s interlocutors without reproducing or reiterating carceral violence, surveillance, control? What might an ethics of care, reciprocity, and solidarity look like in such circumstances? Building on my experience as a prison ethnographer, student activist, and mentor to incarcerated students, this paper offers an intervention on the possibilities of doing ethnography in a way that takes seriously the intricate and immutable intertwining between violence and care.
Paper short abstract
Considered both a risk and at risk, young urbanites of colour are subject to both violence and care. This paper theorises violence-care nexuses by exploring the tensions that emerge when Moroccan-background men try to protect each other’s sons from racist police violence in Antwerp’s public spaces.
Paper long abstract
In postcolonial urban spaces, young men of colour are construed as ‘a risk’ and ‘at risk’ simultaneously (DeBacker2022), thus being subject to dynamics of both racialised violence and care. This paper explores how such dynamics of violence and care relate to one another in Borgerhout, a stigmatised neighbourhood in Antwerp, Belgium. Drawing on fieldwork with Moroccan-background young men and their fathers dwelling in Borgerhout for generations, it considers how intergenerational practices of care can manifest both a response to structural, racialised, exclusionary violence and a rearticulation of this violence (Hobart&Kneese2020).
Excluded from mainstream leisure activities, many Moroccan-background young men hang out daily in Borgerhout’s squares and street corners, serving as their ‘backyard’. Yet, as youths – and particularly young men of colour – in public space are regarded as ‘nuisance’ or ‘security’ problems, they are regularly confronted with angry/anxious neighbours and racist police violence. In response, ‘neighbourhood fathers’ walk through the streets to ‘keep an eye’/‘check up on them’, coordinated by a state-funded neighbourhood centre. Being of Moroccan descent themselves, these ‘fathers’ have experienced similar violence in Antwerp and hope to protect the youths from (police) confrontations. Now, while youths appreciate their effort, they sometimes also experience them as yet another set of controlling-cum-constraining gazes. Moreover, as the neighbourhood father project is funded by the municipality’s Department of Social Security, the state increasingly instrumentalises such (kinship) care for the ‘securitisation’ – or racial sterilisation – of public space. How, I ask, do violence and care ambiguously (re)articulate each other, here?
Paper short abstract
In Rosignano Solvay, care and violence intertwine: industrial paternalism created bonds of belonging that persist even as contamination permeates bodies and landscapes, revealing how violence is enacted and becomes ordinary through care itself
Paper long abstract
Rosignano Solvay is an industrial town in Italy whose social and environmental history has been shaped by a major chemical plant. Decades of production have left enduring contamination that permeates everyday life.
Drawing on ethnographic research with families whose lives have been woven into the factory across generations, I examine how the paternalistic “cradle-to-grave” welfare system structured an architecture of memory mediating between the industrial past and the contaminated present. Welfare and company care produced deep attachment and belonging while simultaneously enabling chronic toxic exposure.
The industrial landscape, place names bearing the company’s mark, and collective narratives construct a material and symbolic geography where past care and present harm are inseparable. These memory structures shape how contamination is perceived and experienced, determining what is recognized as threat, what remains unspoken, and how bodies metabolize the toxic environment.
This contribution explores the care–violence nexus by tracing how welfare infrastructures generate forms of identity, attachment, and belonging that make environmental violence livable and transmissible across generations. Care in Rosignano does not simply mask or compensate for harm; it actively produces the conditions for its normalization, rendering slow, chronic violence imperceptible yet deeply embedded in everyday life.
By foregrounding the entanglement of care and violence, this paper highlights how industrial history, memory, and social structures converge to shape both perception and experience of chronic contamination, offering a lens to understand the ambivalent and enduring effects of care in industrial contexts
Paper short abstract
By looking at the enactment of legal reparation for victims of the war in Colombia, this presentation asks how does the frame of care reframe the injury of war? How does bureaucratic practice shape the possibility of care while obscuring and enacting violence? What is cared for?
Paper long abstract
The Colombian government signed Law 1448 in 2011, offering legal recognition and ample benefits to the victims of the country’s war. Framed in the language of repair, the law created an extensive bureaucratic apparatus to administer the services to which victims are entitled. This presentation looks at the unfolding efforts to access the benefits offered by the law. Following the interactions between a bureaucrat and a claimant, I demonstrate how the Victims’ Law becomes a vehicle for clientelist politics in a marginal neighborhood. Clientelism seizes on new political stakes and the institutional frailties endemic to the country’s system of governance for the poor to manage and sustain existing structures of power. Local political networks dole out state benefits, creating personal ties between clients and their patrons by framing their distribution in the language of worth and care. Care, here becomes not just an enactment of personal relationships of political and social belonging, but are woven into broader discourses of state repair. The outcomes of these practices and discourses for claimants are highly contested, as few benefits ever make it the hands of victims and when they do, they rarely materially improve beneficiaries' lives. Yet, these connections produce enduring ties and forms of sociality for newcomers to the city. This presentation asks, what productive and novel spaces of social belonging are produced through this recourse of care? How does this language reframe and bound the injuries of war, and the war itself as a socio-historical object? What is cared for?