2010 Introducing ‘Health and Health Care’. Medische Antropologie 22 (1): 1-6. (original) (raw)
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Care and the City, 2022
The coronavirus global pandemic has challenged the perceptions and experiences of urban space and care. The city, which had been celebrated as the future of humanity in the twentyfirst century, became a prison for a while, as state authorities locked people inside their homes, emptying public spaces of almost all human activity. In contrast, the importance of care, particularly health and social care, became paramount. Care workers emerged as the heroes of the hour, and the significance of their work, which hitherto may have been hidden from the view and taken for granted, was now better appreciated. In this context, longstanding questions and tensions of social and ecological care are more pertinent than ever before: What does it mean to care, why is it a cause for concern, whose responsibility is it, and which claims to care can be believed? To investigate the precarious state of care, this chapter provides some critical reflections on the contexts, concepts, and practices of care. It is structured into three parts. The first part examines the context of the rising attention to care. It locates the concern for care in the larger context of an 'age of carelessness,' with its misplaced sense of confidence, and its intended and unintended consequences, as reflected in and exacerbated by the crises of economic globalization and climate change. The second part investigates the concepts of care, as a relation between need and ability and a response to vulnerability and precarity. It raises questions of who provides and who receives care, the relations of power that are involved, and the threats and gaps that emerge in the commodification of care. The concept of care is examined in relation to social and ecological challenges through the notions of solidarity and reciprocity. The third part provides a critique of some practices of care and how they may be subject to misuse and false claims, as shown in some examples of the different forms of social and ecological care, asking whether some claims to care can stand up to critical scrutiny. Context of Care: The Age of Carelessness The broad historical context for the emergence of a concern for care is the extent to which the urbanized industrial society has transformed the world since the early nineteenth century, triggering what has been named the Anthropocene. Through a combination of ignorance and 2
Challenging Care: Professionally Not Knowing What Good Care Is
Anthropology & Humanism, 2020
A dominant trope in the anthropology of care—of revealing a practice to be, despite our moral intuitions to the contrary, really a form of care—limits our understanding of the dynamic processes whereby care’s morality is established in prac- tice. In the British care sector the ideal of care is clear: avoiding coercion and neglect. There are manifold rules designed to hold carers accountable to realizing it. But the rules do not reliably lead to the ideal. Rather, they leave undetermined an enormous amount for carers to fill in. In this setting, whether or not a worker’s action becomes “caring” depends on far more than good intentions or following rules. The action’s moral status rests, instead, on the contingencies of the relationship with the care recipient. We should refrain from entering into the evaluative work of rearranging the borders of good care in order to investigate how our informants themselves do this in the midst of care’s relational vicissitudes. Doing so enables us to attend to how debates about what constitutes good care are part of broader patterns by which moral responsibility is assigned and distributed within caring relationships
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.
Care: actors, relationships, contexts
Care' (or 'caring') is one of the contested concepts in the study of gender and social politics. As a concept and activity, care covers a number of different relations, actors, and institutional settings, and crosses conventional boundaries. It can pertain to family analysis, but also to labour market and welfare state analysis, to concepts and practices of work and citizenship, to issues of social inclusion and exclusion, and so forth.
Care as Virtue, Care as Critical Frame: A Discussion of Four Recent Ethnographies
Medical Anthropology, 2018
If, in the past decade, you have not dusted off your philosophy readers or revisited Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice, then you might have missed medical anthropology's decade on "care." This surging area of study showcases the relationships, roles, and meanings of care, and is the ethnographic version of an ethics of care initiated by feminist scholars like Gilligan and others in the 1970s. For ethicists, the major concern is interdependence of persons and the vulnerability of the sick to the moral actions of others. Anthropologists take up these ethical questions with less universalist perspectives, emphasizing local practices and the "tinkering" that can only be described as relationship-specific (Mol et al. 2015; see also Huang 2015). For an introduction to this perspective, one might read any of a few published reviews (Alber and Drotbohm 2015; Martin, 2013) or several early works including an essay by Janelle Taylor (2008 and response by Lawrence Cohen) and the books of Annemarie Mol (2008; Mol et al. 2010) or Miriam Ticktin (2011). But if the roots of care in ethical theory are to be remembered, and I
The Conundrum of Caring in Nursing
2016
Caring as a universal human attribute has withstood the test of time. Caring was proven integral and weaved through the profession of nursing as the very foundation upon which the fundamentals and principles of nursing practice are grounded. The environment, political climate, complexities of patient care, escalating nursing workloads and advanced technologies has changed significantly since Florence Nightingale’s day and has challenged the practice and genuineness of caring in many regards. It is possible to surmise that the lack of clarity and visible disagreement between nursing theorists has weakened the importance and necessity of caring in the nursing profession. However, the construct of caring remains critical to the nursing profession perhaps even more so now than in the past and it is up to us as respectful, compassionate and professional nurses to help ensure that caring in nursing surpasses these turbulent times and remains at the forefront of nursing practice.