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- Convenors:
-
Patrícia Alves de Matos
(CRIA-ISCTE - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa)
Antonio Maria Pusceddu (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA-ISCTE))
Gerhild Perl (University of Trier)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Politics and Power
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel brings together historical and ethnographic perspectives on the politics of human vulnerability focusing on how different ideologies of care and 'nature' prevent or enhance forms of embodied agency within, beyond and against state regulations.
Long Abstract:
The Covid-19 crisis brought to the forefront the importance of addressing the politics of human vulnerability after the cumulative impact of decades of neoliberal policies, exclusionary migration laws, environmental degradation and aggressive capitalism. The pandemic exposed the centrality of interdependent networks of care giving and receiving in shaping people's capabilities to confront, cope with and recover from health, material, natural and emotional shocks. Nation-states have assumed a dominant role in the management of emergent pandemic-driven vulnerabilities through moral narratives and policies with ambivalent and far-reaching economic, political and social consequences. Taking the pandemic as a point of departure, this panel brings together historical and ethnographic informed perspectives on the politics of human vulnerability focusing on how different ideologies of care and 'nature' prevent or enhance forms of embodied agency within, beyond and against state regulations.
We invite papers addressing: how (and which) popular views of care and 'nature' underlay people's understandings of socio-ecological crisis, vulnerability and healing practices, and how they shape capabilities to cope with and recover from bodily and livelihood disruptions and hazards; and, how regulatory policies and hegemonic classifications contribute to reinforcing the unequal value of bodily vulnerability along the lines of race, class, gender, age and nationality.
This panel will expand current theorisations of the politics of human vulnerability focusing on the intersections of care, nature and the state. In addition, it explores how embodied knowledges, practices and moralities are instrumental for anticipating, coping, resisting and recovering from livelihood disruptions, socio-environmental crisis and health insecurities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Feminist theories on vulnerability emphasize its ambivalent character as dispossession and dissent. Embracing this nuanced understanding of vulnerability, we engage the practices and knowledges put forward by two activist projects collaborating in Spain.
Paper long abstract:
There is a common condition shared among all and each of us which consist of being continuously exposed to be hurt, to be vulnerabilized (using the verb form of the noun vulnerability to stress its processual character). Nonetheless, there are also social, economic and political articulations able to increase or to reduce that possibility of exposure to injury. This provoked vulnerability contributes to generate a differential hierarchy of vulnerability.
Challenging essentialist notions that label certain collectives as vulnerable (both as victims and passive), and building upon feminist theories on vulnerability which emphasize its radical ambivalence, understood as a lack yet also as an opportunity (Butler, 2006; 2009; Lorey 2015), we propose to analyze and draw lessons from two initiatives interconnected in time and place.
Building upon these authors, the sites where different faces of vulnerability are experienced become the very source of subversive, disobedient and re-appropriating practices. Therefore, we focus on two initiatives working to redefine precarity and disability beyond its overly pejorative undertones. This paper compiles and engages some of the embodied and discursive knowledges developed by these two activist initiatives based in Madrid: Precarias a la Deriva, and Foro de Vida Independiente y Divertad.
Both projects, independently and collaborating among them, showcase graphic examples and provide insightful lessons for “dissidence from dispossession” (Butler and Athanasiou 2013) and “resistance within vulnerability” ( Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay 2016; Maguire 2016). This radical engagement with vulnerability shows its productive openings, this time offered by two unique projects for thought in action.
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces practices of care in the US-Mexico borderlands through an examination of hydro-social engagements–including poetry that enacts water relations. Juxtaposing two desert watersheds within a contested ‘carceral landscape,’ the paper examines multi-species ideologies of care.
Paper long abstract:
A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in a bed.
It can make you good. It has a head. It remembers everything
– Natalie Diaz (Postcolonial Love Poem, 2020: 50).
In her poem, “The First Water Is the Body,” Mohave poet Natalie Diaz positions her people’s river–today known as the Colorado–as an enactment, an entry point, for reckoning with vulnerability and on-going white settler violence in the face of environmental degradation. Recent scholarship on race and carceral technoscience examines how technologies originally developed for policing, border regimes, and prisons have expanded along a “carceral continuum” (Shedd, 2011) to extend beyond spaces of exclusion and detainment. While anti-immigrant zealots within the current US Administration have attacked and undermined federal laws aimed to uphold the international right to asylum, the US Mexico border has played the avatar for xenophobic and racist diversions to “Build the Wall!” As Sonoran borderlands peoples and ecosystems are experiencing a decades-long drought, increased food insecurity, and some of the highest rates of Covid-19 infection per capita in the world, the construction of this carceral landscape is endangering one of the largest and most environmentally unique ecosystems in North America. In this paper, I build from the poetry of Natalie Diaz, superimpose the idea of the carceral continuum, and draw from ethnographic research to examine long-standing hydro-social interventions of extraction, as well as practices of care–watershed restoration, maintenance, and harvesting–in the Sonoran borderlands.
Paper short abstract:
Galician dairy family farms understanding of care, in a context of national and supranational policies that foster a competitive and intensive agriculture, acquires a new an important dimension in the framework of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
In a seminar in Barcelona in 2016, Arturo Escobar argued: “Capital doesn’t allow temporary nature of care”. He meant that capital leaves no time for care, for social reproduction. This idea has been central to understanding the issue of care in the context of family dairy farms in Galicia (north-west of Spain), where I have been working in the last years. For these farmers, care is an important issue related with nature, since they see themselves as caretakers of the environment. They also understand sustainability (in an emic way) from the perspective of sustainable livelihoods, which are strongly imbricated with care regarding their family (the domestic group), community and the environment (landscape and animals). However, this perspective of care is problematic in a context of national and supranational (EU) policies that foster a competitive and intensive agriculture, where the main demand of these family farms is a just price for the milk they produce. Feminist perspectives raise the sustainability of life and the relocation of life to the centre of the economy to rethink the classic dichotomy between production and reproduction. The centrality of life as a fabric that includes reproduction and farming as inseparable, resonates with farmers’ demands when struggling for a just price that guarantees their livelihoods and dignity. All these issues come to the fore and take on a new dimension when the Covid-19 pandemic breaks out.
Paper short abstract:
Examining the state's provision of support to destitute refused asylum seekers, this paper argues that in discharging its duty of care to those it decides are vulnerable, the Home Office subjects them to coercive control. Those most dependent on the state's care are most vulnerable to its abuse.
Paper long abstract:
When people claim asylum in a foreign country, they lay bare their vulnerability and make a claim for care from the state. In the UK, as in many other western countries, the current politics of migration shapes a culture of suspicion and disbelief, leading many cases to be wrongly rejected. Yet, even when protection is refused, that is seldom the end of the story, and many will submit fresh claims for asylum. In the meantime, however, refused asylum seekers, forbidden to work or access benefits, become destitute: refused asylum, they are refused care. To become entitled again for the Home Office’s ‘asylum support’, in most cases they must either submit a fresh asylum claim, or evidence health problems so severe that they could not be expected to leave the UK. This paper is based on 18 months' ethnography in various support organisations, as well as in-depth life stories with people seeking asylum. I first analyse the complex process of applying for asylum support, showing how human vulnerabilities – destitution, and physical or mental ill-health – get packaged up as evidence according to the categories imposed by the legislative framework. I then turn to the support itself, provided in poor-quality housing often in isolated districts, with an allowance of c. £35 per week on a pre-payment card. I argue that, precisely in discharging its duty of care, the Home Office subjects people to a form of coercive control. Those most dependent on the state’s care are most vulnerable to its abuse.