- Convenors:
-
Barbara Pieta
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paolo S. H. Favero (University of Antwerp)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Monday 6 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Re-imagining care is key in creating better futures. Building on this belief, while also directing attention back to it, we invite papers that explore the intermingling of care with imagination, images and image-based technologies. How are care relations transformed by visual (research) practice?
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists increasingly think of care as a speculative practice, involving activity that is more-than-human. Plants, microbes, animals, water and soil as well as technologies, ghosts, songs, and images are now recognized as agents of care. Caring has broken away from previous oversimplified associations with protection, affect and doing good as well as from fixed notions of personhood and individualized non-permeable bodies. Our common futures are now understood as being anchored in the capacity to reimagine and responsibly intervene in current relations of more-than-human care.
This panel will interrogate these efforts to reimagine care. We will ask how care is or can be related to imagination and more broadly to imagistic (technology- assisted) practices embedded in multisensory experience. If care and vision are intertwined, in what past and current regimes are these intertwinements grounded and what futurities do they generate or limit? How, and to what extent, can images and image-making transform the power asymmetries and epistemological tensions that shape the experiences of illness, healing, ageing, caregiving, care-receiving or death in the multispecies world? If images or visual technologies can be phenomenological lenses through which we "open up" care, what new possible (or existing but marginalized) meanings emerge? Finally, to what extent are both emic and anthropological image-making shaped by ethics of care? We invite ethnographically-inspired contributions and experiments that allow us to think with and beyond these questions. By doing so, we hope to probe the potential and limits of care as an embodied visual (research) practice.
This panel is sponsored by the EASA's Age and Generations Network (AGENET) and Visual Anthropology Network of EASA (VANEASA).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 6 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This contribution creatively explores the ways in which a somatic mode of attending to the body, as complemented by multimodal strategies, can yield corporeal images that are alternative to biomedical ones, for supporting caring and self-caring routines.
Paper long abstract:
This paper problematizes biomedical imagery by contrasting it with the skilled visualizations of the lived/living body as cultivated by somatic movement practitioners. Biomedical imagery ‘from within’ the body, while widely available, is barely scrutinized phenomenologically (van de Vall 2009) and conceals the relational basis of health (Cohn 2010). Meanwhile, the sufferer’s self-perceptions are seldom, if ever, visualized. This epistemological imbalance hinders the development of potentially generative and transformative corporeal images as developed by the sufferers themselves.
This paper argues that a dialogue between these alternative visual regimes may ‘open up’ caring and self-caring trajectories as supported by an expanded, dialogic imagination of the cared-for-body. Based on a series of auto-praxeo-graphic self-care experiments that the author (an anthropologist and somatic movement practitioner) conducted during the Covid-19 lockdowns, the paper proposes a multimodal phenomenology of a body-with-chronic pain, which is grounded on the cultivation of enhanced kinaesthesia - as mediated by somatic movement attentiveness - and ‘visualized’ by means of sensory analogies (Harris 2021).
Drawing on recent scholarship on care as crafting (Hsu 2022), and art practice as a style of anthropological inquiry (Ingold 2013), this research offers a strategy of creative speculation whereby a corporeal imagination that is grounded in sensory intermodality can engender novel and caring images ‘from’ and ‘through’ the lived/living body.
Paper short abstract:
Through photography workshops, participants in this study engage with existential questions raised by the experience of living with multiple health conditions. Image-making allows for narrative experiments and a re-framing of what good care for people with multimorbidity would look like.
Paper long abstract:
People with (multiple) chronic conditions often find it hard to imagine the future. Chronic disease (self-)management is dominated by (pharmacological or behavioural) therapies that are focused on the present, leaving specific biographical etiologies unaccounted for. These approaches do not support people to sustain hopeful future imaginaries. Instead of being encouraged to strive for flourishing in a metaphysical sense, people spend most of their time and energy on maintaining a biological level of health. The ideal of cure, upheld in most biomedical settings, is unattainable for people with chronic conditions, which often leads to feelings of failure and guilt.
Based on photography workshops with people who have a combination of mental and physical long-term health conditions, I argue for the potential of image-based storytelling practices to draw out new, meaningful perspectives on depression and anxiety as “comorbidities” of physical chronic illness. Depression and anxiety are, in the context of multimorbidity, often framed as pathologies rather than emotional responses to the experience of long-term illness.
With the images created by participants in this study, I will argue that pathologising existential fears suppresses the social critique they could otherwise potentially fuel. The photography workshops are a space for participants to engage narratively with the emotional struggles that come with living with traumatic past events and uncertain futures. I will draw on the notion of “flourishing” to suggest a more sustainable form of care, emerging from participants’ image-based practices, that can better accommodate experiences of suffering.
Paper short abstract:
Despite diagnostic criteria of autistic people as lacking emotional capacity, many autistic people have topics that they care deeply about. Such passionate interests are visualized through an ethnographic knitting project to reveal modes of caring and collective futures outside of curative violence.
Paper long abstract:
Dominant models of autism advocacy in the contemporary US present autism as a topic of care and concern in need of early detection, intervention, and eventual cure. This trajectory of care works toward a future where autism, and by extension, autistic people, no longer exist. In the context of such pervasive ableist violence, considering autistic futures is crucial. Taking anthropology as a project of making more possible futures, this project examines autistic adults’ interests to explore how autistic people create meaning around things that matter to them. Examining what autistic people care about illuminates pathways through the life course that challenge neuronormative futurities.
By using the autistic ethnographer’s interest of knitting, this project presents visual methods that are grounded in autistic ways of knowing and doing. Knitting is offered as a form of image-making and ethnographic method that expresses a caring with interlocutors, while encouraging viewers to care about neurodivergence and ableism. Knitting materializes autistic experiences that highlight joy, sociality, and wellbeing that exceed diagnostic knowledges of what it means to be autistic. This suggests that we should care about autism, but not necessarily in the ways that one might think. New modes of caring can make autistic lives and futures more possible.