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Paper short abstract

This proposal is based on fieldwork conducted in a breast cancer support group during the pandemic. The unpredictability and non-linearity of this experience managed to update my ethical and epistemological perspective, turning me towards the categories of (self-)care as the vehicles of refusal.

Paper long abstract

This proposal is based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in a breast cancer support group in Poland. The project, carried out in 2019–2022, was unexpectedly affected by the global pandemic and its consequences. The unpredictability and non-linearity of this experience not only had a broad impact on the manner in which my research was (dis)continued, but also managed, in a spirit of anthropological serendipity (Hannerz 2006), to alter my perspective on what constitutes my fieldwork experience and, above all, what my project is all about. Confronted with the pandemic reality while remaining attentive to the emergent, I took on a different perspective on the embodied practices in the association, as well as on my own research and ethical choices. During this extremely difficult, yet eventful time, I turned to the categories of care and self-care, understood both as ways of ‘continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Tronto & Fisher, 1993) and as the vehicles of resistance (Riccitelli, 2025). Those categories and their potential to challenge different power relations (e.g., responsible for the modes in which women’s association 'should be' operating as well as for what constitutes a 'proper' research approach) serve as both ethnographic subjects and modes (McGranahan, 2016).

Considering care as never neutral and self-care as necessarily vulnerable engagement, I thus explore those notions as inherently involving an ethical and political intervention that affects both the researcher and the process of knowledge emergence.