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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.