What is the history of care the history of? (original) (raw)
Related papers
Feminist perspectives on the history of humanitarian relief (1870-1945)
Medicine, Conflict and Survival , 2020
Taking a Feminist perspective as a starting point, this introductory piece seeks not only to integrate women as the main agents within the history of humanitarian relief, but also to understand their assistance to victims, from the Franco-Prussian War to WWII, as a type of situated knowledge which was broadly associated with the notion of care through the implementation of practices such as dressing wounds, vaccinating, feeding and clothing vulnerable populations. This political and epistemological position allows us to analyse the agency of women humanitarians as a caring power involving strong gender, class, religious and colonial power relations within the history of Western Empires. Furthermore, our Feminist approach enables us to deconstruct the essentialist vision through which women humanitarians have frequently been depicted as compassionate mothers or loving angels, as well as to contextualize their contrasting experiences of complicity with Western Empires and resistance to male delegates and political and medical representatives. Far from heroic representations, women humanitarians had to navigate through complex global hierarchies although this did not necessarily come into conflict with their dreams about female emancipation.
The Problems with Care: A Feminist Care Scholar Retrospective
Societies
Seeking to support qualitative researchers in the artful development of feminist care scholarship, our goal here is to ‘look back’ on how we have conceptualized the problems of care and developed research that illuminates the social organization of care in distinct ways. As part of a ‘feminist care scholar retrospective’, we present five condensed ‘reverse research proposals’, which are retrospective accounts of past research or scholarly activity. From there, we discuss how each project begins with a particular problematic for investigation and a particular conception of care (e.g., as practices, as work, as a concept) to illuminate facets of the social organization of care shaping paid and unpaid care work and its interpretations. These approaches reveal multiple and overlapping ways that care is embodied, understood and organized, as well as ways care can be transformed.
2021
Since 2015, the so-called refugee crisis has transformed ‘humanitarianism’ into a word devoid of meaning or value for European politics. By now, we all know there are numerous migrant populations in Europe living under inhuman conditions and denied their inalienable human rights; still, it seems futile to argue that equal value should be attached to all lives. Introducing care ethics into relief work calls to reflect upon humanitarianism differently, as a relationship between local communities, Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) workers and refugees that is embedded in space and time and might be allowed to have a future.
Ancient Art Revisited: Global Perspectives from Archaeology and Art History, 2022
A pyxis, or small, portable, lidded container, is an object often associated with women’s private life and personal care. Artists working in the fifth century BCE in Athens crafted a number of these containers from clay and painted them with scenes of women in community with each other. These containers offer a meso-scale at which to analyze the materialization of women’s communities of care in the ancient Greek past. Building from the philosophical framework of a feminist ethic of care to analyze this group of objects illuminates some of the networks of care undergirding ancient communities. An archaeology of care centers these networks of care and the role of careworkers and carework in forging and maintaining communities.