- Convenors:
-
Barbara Pieta
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paolo S. H. Favero (University of Antwerp)
Send message to Convenors
- 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:
How can we visually communicate the chronic pain generated by the physical labor of care? How do we link bodily injury to care workers’ narratives about disenfranchisement? This paper explores the possibilities by drawing on the literature on pain’s representation and other films about care work.
Paper long abstract:
My ethnographic research on African immigrant elder care workers in the United States highlighted the labor of care as I met women (and some men) whose care work had disabled them, particularly in causing chronic pain from lifting and moving their patients. Their narratives of coping with chronic pain in their knees and backs were supported by statistical evidence showing the high rate of workplace injury among care workers. In their eyes, their bodily injuries both hindered them and represented more symbolic injuries, such as whether their care labor resulted in their overall wellbeing. For instance, Mariam, who walked unsteadily and with a limp, told me that she had come to the United States as a “young woman full of life” after working as a nurse in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Now, after nineteen years of working in home care and at the age of sixty-four, her body was “broken in two.” As I began to make a film about a particular care worker, whose health problems threatened her continued employment in this strenuous occupation, I thought about how to represent her physical labor visually. Quite quickly, the idea of focusing on her hands came to me. However, my audience found these images opaque. Narrative seemed to be the best, even if imperfect, method for communicating this point. Using the literature on the representation of pain, and examining other films about care workers, this paper considers how we might communicate chronic pain and the labor of care visually.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the ethical productiveness of blurriness in visual anthropology as an interruption in the regime of the transparent. I claim that blurriness allows for an ethics of care to emerge in which the encounter with otherness is based on speculative opacities and transversal relations.
Paper long abstract:
Blurriness often poses a problem for visual anthropology and its inclination towards bearing witness. In this paper, however, I want to stress the potential productiveness of blurriness, that is, as a performative force of interruption in the regime of the transparent, creating generative moments of unsettlement and novel forms of perception, sociality, and collectivity. It is the blur, as I will claim, that allows for a rethinking of care in which the encounter with otherness is not grounded in a violent regime of transparent epistemologies and simplistic delineations but in speculative opacities and transversal relations. Drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant and Fred Moten, as a case in point, I will look at Philip Scheffner's experimental documentary Havarie from 2016, which shows pixelated slowed-down footage of a small migrant vessel, waiting for help amid the blue vacuum of the Mediterranean Sea, whose images are reduced to an opaque blur on a tumbling horizon, while various voices and testimonies can be heard on the soundtrack. Going against the optical logic of the transparent and entering haptic terrain, the film transforms the rational notion of being a witness into, following Sara Ahmed, an embodied being-with-ness. Taking this shift into account, I will ask how blurriness in visual anthropology and documentary practices can engage with the unknowable other without participating in the symbolic violence of the transparent while establishing relations of care grounded in an ethics of the opaque.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (with camera) in a dementia center in Italy, in this paper I propose the concept of carescope as a heuristic tool to explore the politics of seeing and being seen which shaped local care relations and ultimately led to the production of positive dementia imagery.
Paper long abstract:
Overtly positive images of dementia (care) are usually considered problematic because they tend to marginalize suffering and compassion fatigue which often characterizes life with this condition. In this paper I seek to problematize this view by highlighting relational and performative aspects of positive dementia imagery. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (with camera) in a dementia respite center in North Italy, I explore the politics of seeing and being seen which shaped local care relations, including my own camera negotiations. I argue that it was these politics that ultimately led to the production of images which downplayed certain difficult aspects of care and life with dementia. Building on the literature on training attention as well as the local concept of 'fare bella figura' (‘to make good impression’), I discuss what positive images did and what image-makers and image-viewers did with them in my field site location.
This situated analysis of images as agents of care leads me to argue for the notion of carescope (scopein in Greek: ‘to look’), a heuristic tool which allows to be more attentive to variety of ways in which care and seeing are intermingled in different contexts and cultural settings. This theoretical stance is also an attempt to contribute to the emerging – although not yet consolidated – field of visual/multimodal anthropology of care (Pieta and Sokolovsky 2023) - seeking to break away from the tendency, still dominant in anthropological scholarship on care, to treat images as mere representations and vision as an instrument of (biomedical) surveillance.