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- Convenors:
-
Sarah Kabanoff
(University of Newcastle )
Georgina Ramsay (University of Delaware)
Joanne Grant (University of Newcastle )
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- Napier 209
- Sessions:
- Thursday 14 December, -, -
Time zone: Australia/Adelaide
Short Abstract:
Extreme experiences can compel intervention from State and other bureaucracies that can misrepresent or misinterpret personal experiences by distorting individual subjectivity through objective parameters. This panel invites discussion on how compliant States are produced, imposed, and experienced.
Long Abstract:
Individual, lived states of being develop over time through an intersubjective relationship with equally evolving bureaucratic formations of the State. But they are rarely equal. States of being can be isolating and/or unifying, significantly effected by determinants such as gender, ethnicity, religiosity, sexual orientation, health status, geography and access to economic resources. As a result, health and wellbeing are heavily influenced, even regulated and policed in some circumstances, by State institutions. Even minor deviations or transgressions from these systems and established practices can be treated harshly through techniques of punishment, remediation or stigmatisation. This panel invites researchers to explore examples of institutional processes that necessitate compliance with State-imposed 'norms'. Where lived experience sits outside of these boundaries, how are individuals' responses forced to comply with bureaucratic systems that so often seem incommensurable with their subjective experiences?
Recognising that both subjective states of being and bureaucratic institutions of the 'State' are heterogeneous, complex, and multi-faceted, in this panel we invite papers that consider the following questions: How do (automated, digital, performed, or document-based) bureaucratic systems effect subjective positions when extreme circumstances meet State intervention? What does it mean to be a subject-in-need within a system of support that objectifies? Where do public systems that prioritise equality act to perpetuate inequity? Ultimately, this panel considers how anthropologists can contribute to the development of productive iterative relationships between individuals and the State in ways that recognise personal subjectivities within bureaucratic processes that so often demand compliance and objectification.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 13 December, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses an ethnography of 2 women's shelters. Exploring both the experience of women, and accounts by professionals of institutional processes to 'deal with' domestic violence, the resulting long term effects can be seen as an extension of State induced compliance of the female body.
Paper long abstract:
The experience of being subjected to violence from a loved one is a paradox. The person trusted most, also poses the most danger and causes the most damage. The connection between love, terror and how this effects women's decision-making in situations of domestic violence (DV), has been somewhat investigated. Yet when combined with an exploration of immediate services available to women, illustrate how legal, social, and governmental avenues of assistance only mirror common abuse strategies used by perpetrators to control women. Results show a tangle of double binds women are left with, which leave no good options to improve their situation. Despite any physical, psychological or financial abuse that partners exert on women's bodies, lives or minds, it is women who are held solely responsible for the success or failure of the relationship, and the continued parenting of children. I argue that experiencing terror from partners who women are socialised to trust utterly, with the lack of viable options to escape, is so obscure to people without first-hand knowledge, as to resist adequate language to express it. Abuse strategies perpetrators employ to undermine women's interpretation of violence and control through epistemic privileging are common. Institutional processes can be seen to do the same, encouraging a dissonance between a woman's embodied experience of harm, and others' interpretations of it. This paper provides insight into current service provision and to develop an evaluation criteria for implementations and new interventions that better target the unique paradox of family violence.
Paper short abstract:
This essay converges ethnical studies in relation to cosmological identity of blind people and their difficult convergence as a political (and cultural) collective. Does a paternalistic-oriented State refrain the political and culture potencies of sightless people?
Paper long abstract:
Converging ethnicity, State and identity studies, this essay analyzes sightless people and their difficult constitution as a political collective, pointed out by current studies and fieldwork observations. Unlike the Deaf community that constituted itself as a political group advocating for the depathologization of their corporality and social acceptance of Deafness as a culture and not a disability, research on sightlessness shows internal divergences that makes this project somewhat impossible. Congregating cosmological notions of ethnicity, especially through the works of Eriksen and Barth, I work on the cosmology of blind people and their identity construction as production of relational subjectivity and the conflict with a paternalistic State and its homogenic-ableist project. Does such asymmetrical relations of power hinder sightless potencies and their constitution as an autonomous politically-based identity?
Paper short abstract:
Youth with mental illnesses must be compliant within the system of health. Regardless of their subjectivities, the requirement to exist in the paradigm of self-directed care is apparent. When they 'age-out' of the paediatric model, they are transitioned to adult care.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses (a case study of) Ahlia, an 18year old girl who took her own life, while in a mental health facility. She admitted herself for fear of ending her own life, yet she got lost in the liminal space between paediatric and adult health. If children and adolescents with a mental illness, seek or require healthcare they are bound by bureaucratic formations to exist within the biomedical model of care delivery in the paediatric setting. As they move toward adulthood, they are required to be transitioned to healthcare specifically designed for adults. The liminal space between child and adult is widely researched and reduced to strict inclusion and exclusion criteria. The policies developed by health bureaucracies have consistently made recommendations toward a slow transition from 14 years of age, yet when steady transition is not practiced using high levels of interdisciplinary communication and regard for individual subjective realities, lives are damaged, forgotten and in some cases lost altogether, as was the case with Ahlia.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will look at forms of care related to sexual and reproductive health in rural Costa Rica. First I will identify the biomedical forms of care offered by a State run Health Care Facility. Then I will distinguish non-medicalised forms of care that women experience in an indigenous community that accesses health care in this rural facility.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will look at forms of care related to sexual and reproductive health in rural Costa Rica. First I will identify the biomedical forms of care offered by a State run Health Care Facility. Then I will distinguish non-medicalised forms of care that women experience in an indigenous community that accesses health care in this rural facility. I would concentrate on identifying the ways in which these care practices interact by enabling or distorting each other. I will highlight of forms of care that are part of everyday life in this indigenous community and that are unrecognised or misunderstood by the Health Care Facility, vis-à-vis the forms of care that rely on biomedical knowledge about disease, pregnancy and hospitalised birth that is emphasised through the health care system. In order to bring forth this analysis, I will look at the implementation of a teenage pregnancy prevention program called Salud Mesoamérica (Health Mesoamerica), which is embedded in the Millennium Development Goals initiative. This program is partially financed by bilateral and multilateral organisations, among them the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The historical influence of these organisations on Costa Rica’s state run health care system and the interactions of this system with diverse populations illustrates a reality in which global, national and local dynamics meet and determine each other.
Paper short abstract:
This paper asks after marginalisation in the social services. Set in the sector that addresses mental illness in culturally 'diverse' groups, it begins with a public complaint made by a woman from such a group, and tracks this complaint's affects to broader organising (but paradoxical) processes.
Paper long abstract:
In the social services sector - the 'shadow state' (Wolch 1990) - certain roles, particularly those assigned to people from more marginal groups, tend to reproduce marginality. What compels compliance with such roles? In this paper, I approach this question by considering what kind of engagements and affects non-compliance stirs up. My work is set in the sector that addresses mental unwellness amongst Sydney's more marginalized service-users (described, by some, as 'culturally and linguistically diverse'). It is a field characterised by sincere striving for health equity but beleaguered by deeply rooted inequalities. Complaints, particularly from those that this sector aims to serve, are acts of non-compliance. To complain is to refuse to partake in the narratives assigned to you. This refusal seems to result in a kind of abandonment (Povinelli 2011). Yet, this abandonment occurs in the same space the humanitarian project's tiers of efforts to 'reach out'; it is abandonment at the site of ardent engagement. This paper will consider how, despite best intentions, such a paradox occurs. It will track the affective aftermath of a public complaint to the confluence of historical and bureaucratic processes that help produce the conditions for this abandonment and these gaps. Ethnographic attention can help make sense of the situation, but, I also ask, can it help it?
Paper short abstract:
The displacement of refugees has been described as a crisis: but crisis implies eventfulness, a distinct problem to be solved. The framing of displacement as an exceptional experience exclusive to refugees overlooks how sovereignty is produced through control over time and constraint over futures.
Paper long abstract:
The recent mass displacement of refugees has been described internationally as a "crisis." But crisis implies eventfulness: a distinct problem that can be solved. The urgency of solving this problem of displacement has seen the use of expansive techniques of sovereignty across Europe, the epicenter of the crisis. Focusing exclusively on the formation of sovereignty through the analytical locus of crisis continues, however, to reproduce the trope of the "refugee" as a category of exception. This paper considers the experiences of people who were resettled as refugees in Australia and whose displacement has ostensibly been resolved. Drawing attention to their continuing experiences of violence, it considers how the temporal framing of displacement is itself a way to conceal formations of sovereignty embedded in the very processes designed to resolve displacement. Doing so opens up new ways to think about control over time and the production of compliant states as a technique of sovereignty.