Paper short abstract:

In Japan, older ex-offenders have the highest recidivism rates of any age cohort.This paper describes the forms of confinement and care experienced by ex-offenders who engage with both welfare bodies and their own aging bodies beyond the walls of prison.

Paper long abstract:

Japanese ex-offenders often refer to the world beyond the walls of prison as "shaba", a term originating in Buddhist moral cosmology referring to a life where freedom is precarious, still bound to suffering and karmic consequences. Shaba means a different kind of confinement, where various forms of social exclusion and the embodied habits of prison life foreclose on potentials to find new ways of being-in-the-world beyond the carceral. While crime rates in Japan are at currently at a historic low, recidivism rates are higher than they have ever been, and those over 65 reoffend more often than any other age cohort. This paper draws on fieldwork with older ex-offenders unable to 'rehabilitate' through normative temporal and spatial orders (i.e. family, legal work, peer groups). While each ex-offender had unique challenges, age, poverty and social disconnection ran throughout each story, confining older ex-offenders to future-less narratives, of worry and restlessness. This paper describes the lifeworlds of these ex-offenders living in the shadow of the carceral condition, a world that makes it easy, sometimes even desirable to slip back behind bars. As the offender population ages, the blurred borders between care and the carceral are manifested in a rhythm of reoffending and release rather than reintegration, with social deficits beyond the walls reflecting the harsh order of the world as shaba even as the prison becomes more familiar and home-like. A focus on older, frail and disabled offenders offers new potential to trouble notions of care, welfare, and confinement.

Paper short abstract:

By using a local example of care practices towards socially marginalized drug users in shelters, drug treatment clinics etc. I illustrate how the phenomenon of social marginalization and care practices might transcend national boundaries and can be analysed as both locally and trans-locally situated

Paper long abstract:

Anthropological studies of state practices have given us insight into the many particular actions and care-practices of state workers such as doctors, social workers, psychologists etc. (Miller and Rose, 2013). Foucauldian inspired studies of governmentality have focused on analysing state practices by studying the actions of the workers of the state (see for instance: Miller and Rose, 2013; Winlow and Hall, 2013). Through analyses based on minutiae observations of human interaction such as the words, pauses between words, body language etc., between caretakers and recipients, the caretakers has been analysed as the representors of the state and its care-practices (Miller and Rose 2013). This has resulted in many near-sighted ethnographies on the particulars of care instead of understanding care comparatively, less geographically bound and trans-locally. In this presentation, I wish to illustrate how local studies of socially marginalized drug users everyday life and strategies of managing drug abuse as well as the care practices from state or non-state actors that follow, might be illuminated through a broader comparative lens, and how an otherwise narrow phenomenologically inspired approach might pave the way for comparative transnational and trans-local analyses of social phenomena and practices such as care. Thus; from a narrow local example of a small but diverse groups of drug users and their everyday life in Copenhagen, as well as the diverse examples of care practices from workers at drug clinics, shelters, streets etc., to illustrate how we might analyse social phenomena and care practices from a comparative and general perspective.

Paper short abstract:

What is the meaning of "care" in palliative care? The paper explores this question starting from the everyday tensions between an ideal of "good care" and the expectations of patients and families. It reflects on an anthropolgy of care that expands to include non-mainstream ideas/ideals of care.

Paper long abstract:

What is the meaning of "care" in the context of palliative care? A widespread social representation overlaps the idea of "care" with that of "cure" (or, even, with "healing"). In this view, healthcare that does not heal is not "true care". However, in the philosophy and daily practices of palliative care units, this popular idea of care does not apply; here, care is related to the ideal of an "ethics of good death" (Castra 2003). From this perspective, caring the patient means to provide her and her loved ones a comfortable environment of life in her last weeks/months, and to create the conditions for a "dignified" death.

This ideal of good care in palliative care is at least in part alternative to the view of other - and more mainstream - branches of biomedicine. It rather looks more close to the "ethics of care" (Held 2006; Mol 2008) and to anthropological representations of care as a fundamental experience for the human being, and as a moral experience (Kleinman 2012; Aulino 2016).

Based on fieldwork in several contexts of palliative care (units, hospices, and home care services) in Piedmont (Italy), this paper proposes directions for an anthropology of care rooted in the observation of the distance between the ideal of good care expressed by doctors and nurses in these contexts, and the everyday tensions that are created in their relationships with patients and their families.

Paper short abstract:

Studies of care often attribute a positive value to care. What gets lost are the negative sides of care as (re)producing power differentials and marginalisation. In my talk, I stress these counterintuitive effects of care, arguing for a broader conceptualisation that allows for critical insights.

Paper long abstract:

Care increasingly has been used as a concept of critique - critique of neoliberalisation, of migration policies, of gendered and global inequalities. These studies often operate with strong dichotomies that ascribe a positive value to care. For example, Mol (2008) starkly contrasts care to the (neo-liberal) logic of choice and in regard to ethics, Tronto (1993) places all human pursuits that aim towards a better world as care. What gets lost in these depictions are the negative sides of care as (re)producing power differentials and marginalisation (Thelen 2015). Precisely because care plays a key role in articulating moralities it is central to classification of difference. Although the underlying categories in these processes are fluid, their iteration tends to stabilize and reproduce inequalities. In my talk I will stress these counterintuitive effects of care at empirical examples from Hungary and Austria, arguing for a broader conceptualisation that allows for critical insights.