- Convenors:
-
Barbara Pieta
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Paolo S. H. Favero (University of Antwerp)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 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 Wednesday 8 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
In a Lisbon senior day center, the staff and elderly members care for each other in ways that reimagine active aging campaigns in Portugal. With visual media, they illuminate how communal care produces a process of intersubjective self-making through reflections on friendship, loss, and mortality.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I show how intimate relationships built on communal care are integral to the everyday life at the Santinhas Senior Day Center in Lisbon, Portugal, and that the use of visual media by staff and elderly members complicates and deepens the significance of communal care. The act of filming and photographing daily life and events (to both keep an active archive of the Center’s activities and goings on, and to refresh the members’ memories) at the Day Center allows for an intersubjective self-making.
Confronted communally with images of the self and of each other, the members and staff reflect on their relationships to each other, to care, to loss, and to their own mortality. Watching themselves care for each other serves to refract moments of daily life, rendering visible the nuances, ambiguities, and the depth of communal care in the Day Center. It allows for further visibility into the ways a shared local identity is reified as something gendered, racialized via collective memory. Altogether, this creates the conditions of possibility for an intersubjective notion of a “good life” beyond the one imagined by the state and inscribed in active aging campaigns (Lamb 2017). Communal care, especially among the elderly themselves, allows us to consider new ways of flourishing in old age, while reconfiguring care, everyday intimacy, and visual methods used by our own interlocutors (Mattingly 2014; Nakamura 2013).
Paper short abstract:
Fusing film and game theory with affects of care, this art-based project celebrates and breaks down Queer Joy as a point of representation for Queer people. Culminating in a short film, ongoing workshops and the current creation of a haptic game, this project aims to inspire Queer Joy in audiences
Paper long abstract:
When was the last time you saw a joyful queer on TV (or for that matter a queer character that actually lasted for a few episodes and didn't die)? Can't remember? Don't worry, this project has got you covered!
Inspired by and working with Black Joy, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Toi Dericotte, Jack Halberstam, and a dash of Rupaul's Drag Race, this art and film based research explores what Queer Joy can be, using methods of care as it's main point of navigation. Breaking down the beautiful twinkling experience that is Joy into Self-care, Care, and the messiness of Joy, this research uses methods of films and games to take such a study out of the academic field, instead aiming to create ways in which Queer people can experience and be reminded of their capacity for Joy in their every day lives. Fusing methods of care within the Queer community, affects of care for Queer people, and Queer game and film theory, this research employs these methods into the ongoing creation of a tangible haptic sensorial game, queer joy workshops, and previous creation of a short film, in order to inspire joy in audiences outside of academia. Providing an antidote to so called "queer" media's prevailing narratives of shame and trauma, this project aims to reinterpret (or fix) current representations of Queer people in media, using care and the joy it brings for Queer people to create healing representations made for and by our community.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the possibility of ethnography in the absence of an idea of "the self" as a coherent stable and rational entity. Building upon the incorporation of meditation in ethnography it address the possibility of research in a terrain informed by non-Western, non-dualistic epistemologies.
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary neurosciences still have one fundamental riddle to solve today. Having been able to identify where most of our sensory and perceptive capacities are located, they still have not found the location of “the self”. Could be it be that this is because the self is not something internal to the human being? If this is true, then we ought to also re-think some key pillars of ethnography. Participant-observation, image-making, interviews and other ethnographic techniques all build upon the assumption of the existence of a coherent, stable, contained, permanent and rational self. Reflexivity, the key distinctive feature of anthropological research, is about the act of making ourselves (and our viewers and readers) conscious about the consequences of our own positionalities; of being acquainted with the extent to which the images (mental or material) that we collect and produce during fieldwork are caused by the particular vantage point from which we observe the world. Yet, what happens in the absence of the certainty of such a point of view? What if we were to realize that our perceiving subject is nothing but one of the images that we create? In other words, that “the self” does not really exist? Building upon experiments with the incorporation of insights gathered from meditation into the act of conducting ethnography the present paper will address the possibility of an ethnography enacted in a terrain informed by non-Western, non-rationality based epistemologies. One informed by non-dualism, by the Buddhist principle of double-negation, by intuition and affectivity.