Paper short abstract:

This paper intends to introduce into the topic of workshop and present the theoretical framework used by convenors to analyse recent reconfigurations of welfare, social security and care.

Paper long abstract:

The collapse of socialist states reinforced global neoliberal trends that surfaced in the early 1980s. State frameworks for welfare have been interpreted as being too paternalistic and consequently increasingly subject to processes of privatization, decentralization, and neoliberal reform in many parts of the world. This development has often been described as a state withdrawal. Yet while socio-economic transformations have undoubtedly produced severe forms of hardship, which may well have been experienced as a loss of the state, the notion of state withdrawal is analytically problematic. There are two (inter-related) reasons for this. Firstly, it implies a rather one-dimensional view of 'the state' which makes it difficult to grasp the complex and contradictory nature of reforms, particularly the ways in which a range of state bodies, actors and institutions, far from being in retreat, continue to shape social life, albeit in altered form. Secondly, the state withdrawal model provides little analytical purchase on the dynamic reconfigurations of public and private spaces, institutions, moralities and subjectivities. In this introductionary paper I propose to analyze these developments using anthropological understandings of social security in combination with feminist perspectives on care. Applying this theoretical perspective promises to overcome the conceptual inadequacies of the "state withdrawal" model. More important, it helps illuminating the nuanced ways in which what is public and private (as spaces, subjectivities, institutions, moralities, and practices) re-emerge and change, continually shaping the trajectories and outcomes of reforms to care and mutual support networks.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focusses on the social world of middle class elders in urban Holland and urban (Buddhist) Sri Lanka (Colombo) and the challenges to name similarity and difference. The paper tries to develop the comparision along the matter of fact way of "shaping the social , in line with Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus'/learned ignorance.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focusses on the social world of middle class elders in urban Holland and urban (Buddhist) Sri Lanka (Colombo) and the challenge to name similarity and difference. The paper tries to develop a comparision along the lines of the matter of fact way of 'shaping the social', in line with Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus/learned ignorance'. It takes into account the idea of family; intergenerational relations and care; fixed and fluid boundaries of the home; the self/person/lifespan; friends and acquaintances; ways of keeping company: proximity and distance; the idea of 'everyday sociality'/'relatedness'.

My aim is two-fold: Reflect on implications of similaries and difference in the ageing-experience; reflect on our concepts to understand and name socio-cultural difference/nuance in meaning.

Paper short abstract:

Here the distinction between 'formal' and 'informal' care of older people in the home is questioned. It explores the validity of this distinction for an analysis of how human and non-human actors negotiate domestic care practices. The discussion is based on recent fieldwork in the US and Sweden.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on ethnographic stories and observations of care for older people in the US and Sweden. It stems from the need to find socially appropriate ways to care for an aging global population. This often includes respect for personal autonomy and the avoidance of institutionalized care when possible. There is consensus - stemming partly from economic and political pressures - that in-home care makes the most sense. For some of the people concerned, home spaces may nevertheless become places of isolation, loneliness or even danger. In such cases viable alternatives must be found. One vivid example from Sweden is the installation of a state-funded bathroom module built directly onto the side of a private house. The rationale is that this eases the task of personal hygiene performed by state healthcare workers. Rather than a fixed entity, here the home emerges as a permeable boundary where private and public dimensions are increasingly blurred. Such fluidness brings into question the validity of a formal/informal care distinction for the analysis of how human and non-human actors negotiate their care. Consequently, this paper argues that contemporary care practices situated by home render such distinctions obsolete. With reference to recent work in the study of material culture and medical anthropology, it offers a nuanced approach to care. Multiple settings are contrasted to highlight the most relevant findings and suggest avenues for further research.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the intergenerational legacies of past Aboriginal child removals in Australia. These legacies will be examined in relation to contemporary Aboriginal child and family welfare practices. Comparisons with Canadian First Nations' and American Indians' experiences will be explored.

Paper long abstract:

The welfare of Indigenous children in western settler nations has been, and continues to be, a focus of state intervention. In Australia, since 1998, May 26 is acknowledged as National Sorry Day. Sorry day is a day of commemoration for the Stolen Generations. The term 'Stolen Generations' refers to those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children who were removed from their families as a result of Indigenous child removal policies, dating from 1910 through the 1970s. May 26th is the day when in 1997 the Bringing them home Report was tabled in the Australian Federal Parliament. It was from this Report, the subsequent media coverage and political debating that the Stolen Generations and the intergenerational legacies of these removals entered into the forefront of public discourse.

While past Indigenous child removals are acknowledged as having significantly affected Aboriginal families and communities throughout Australia, the intergenerational legacies of removals - how to address them and by what means - either through Aboriginal and or non-Indigenous approaches - is less cogent. This paper will examine these issues by focusing on the relational dynamic that exists between government policy and government department practices and the work of Aboriginal community organisations. Teasing out these dialogical relationships will allow for the unpacking of multiple perceptions and approaches that exist in relation to understanding the Stolen Generations and how traces relating to past Aboriginal child removals and their intergenerational legacies are interspersed through the day-to-day work of Aboriginal child and family welfare practices. This will be ethnographically explored in an Aboriginal community located in Redfern, an inner city suburb of Sydney, Australia.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss contemporary volunteering programs within Czech hospitals. It will consider the gendered notions of citizenship that emerge from this caring activity, and how such forms of public participation contribute to the neoliberal reorganisation of Czech welfare.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will consider the ways in which hospital volunteering programs in the Czech Republic contribute to the neoliberal restructuring of the country's health and welfare frameworks. It is based on the findings of an ethnographic research project carried out in 2008, which focused on hospital volunteering programs in three Czech urban locations. These programs enable (predominantly female) volunteers to provide company, care and support to hospital patients on a range of wards. The paper will explore how volunteers of different ages and backgrounds engage with and experience volunteering, and how these experiences are informed by a range of techniques employed to recruit, train and supervise volunteers. Such expertise tends to highlight the significance of reflexivity and self-knowledge for volunteers, and advises on the appropriate boundaries to establish in their relationships with patients. The paper will then compare contemporary volunteering with older forms of public participation from the former socialist era in Czechoslovakia in order to draw out how notions of gendered citizenship are undergoing transformation, and in particular to highlight the changing contexts in which women are engaged in providing care and welfare. Finally, the paper will explore why volunteering programs need to be considered both as a complicated response to the neoliberal restructuring of Czech health care and welfare frameworks, as well as part of what helps to bring it about.

Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork among the members of a small group of poverty relief volunteers, this paper explores some of the ways in which the sufferings of the poor are deployed toward the naturalization and reinforcement of personal autonomy, delf-sufficiency and rational self management

Paper long abstract:

The paper draws on fieldwork among the members of a small group of volunteers in Thessaloniki Greece. Along with food, they offer poor people "psychological support" the aim of which is to transform them from victims of their own immaturity and irresponsibility into autonomous, rational, self-sufficient individuals. To become more effective in the therapeutic role they assume for themselves, they seek the guidance of social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists. Their efforts to rehabilitate the poor and their apprenticeship to experts reveal to them the causes of the problems their interventions seeks to address. Volunteers come to view poverty as a symptom of individual psychological problems and failures and / or of dysfunctional interpersonal relations. They also feel that their own commitment to helping others access the real causes of their troubles is the outcome of a personal choice that contributes to their own empowerment, namely to their capacity to cultivate in their own lives the attitudes and virtues they try to teach to the poor. Involvement with poverty relief under expert guidance transforms their sense of themselves and of the world within which their self-improvement efforts make sense. Attending the deployment of the sufferings of the poor for the generation of lessons about the advantages of personal independence and rational self management may contribute to the understanding of the processes through which neoliberal values and constructs are gradually naturalized and appropriated by "ordinary" people.

Paper short abstract:

Based on long term ethnography among homeless people and social workers in Florence and in Bologna, my study tries to develop an anthropological critique of the conceptual framework of the social workers in Italy: which are the conceptual categories a social worker uses to provide care?

Paper long abstract:

The topic of this paper is what in France is called terrains sensibles: spaces (ghettos, streets, camps, etc.) and social conditions (homeless, squatters, etc.) which the Institutions (Services, Law-Courts etc.) define as deviant, illegal, etc. I talk about how institutions care (or govern?) these people. In particular, I analyse the conceptual framework of social workers in Italy.

First, my focus is on the notions of social exclusion and marginality always present in the narrative of social workers about people with whom they work: social workers use these words almost interchangeably and in doing so they risk masking the wide-spread situation (e.g. working poor, new-poverties, social and economic vulnerability etc.) in our society. So, social exclusion and marginality have become empty notions, characterising a wide range of different life-situations containers.

Second, I analyse how social workers abuse and exploit the word "culture": they use it to describe a case that the Service doesn't understand and doesn't know how to manage. In this way, the responsibility is all in the hands of the person (the 'user') and the Service avoids self reflection.

Third, I consider the dominant medicalizing discourse. Medical-psychiatric categories are often used to interpret social situations: this is not only accepted but also a priori considered as legitimate. Finally, the dominant languages and practices at both levels of polices and social work produce an hegemonic process which reinforce a pathological interpretation (individualized disorder) and fail to connect the individual condition to the systemic inequities and structural violence.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will present plans for an ethnographic study of complex systems for the production of social security in a rural Russian context. It will explore processes of in/exclusion in interactions between formal provision, informal networks and the (re)production of communities of care.

Paper long abstract:

The project draws on anthropological understandings of social security as encompassing both material and emotional forms of provision and involving both state/public frameworks, regulations and institutions, and more interpersonal/private networks, practices and relationships. On this basis, the project explores social security as something which villagers actively produce, drawing on a combination of state/non state, formal/informal resources, structures and networks. In trying to understand these processes and practices, attention is drawn to the influence of informal networks and the role of charismatic leadership in maintaining state structures and developing new programmes for socially vulnerable groups. Yet such informal networks (re)produce categories of exclusion as well as inclusion. Thus, understandings of 'deserving need' and hierarchies of power and authority play an important role in defining both access to support and obligations to provide care which are differentiated along lines of gender, class and ethnicity. The relationship between state and non-state systems of support and provision and the differing ways in which these relate to the provision of material and/or emotional support is also a key focus of study. Here the emphasis which villagers place on integration into 'caring communities' as a key feature of security is of interest, particularly as this exists alongside support for neoliberal understandings of the 'self sufficient individual' and a renunciation of 'dependent' attitudes and 'excessive' expectations of state support.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on the initial findings of a research project on inter-generational relations under stress with fieldwork in Burkina Faso. The focus is on two stressful situations: 1. jobless adult children, supported by their old parents, 2. adult children taking care of their old sick parents.

Paper long abstract:

Poverty is increasing in Burkina Faso despite economic growth: 2002, nearly half of the population were living under the poverty line defined as 125 € per year (Soulama 2005). Under these economic conditions, the interpersonal mutuality will also in future continue to be the base of social security and care. Though young urban people long for independence from their parents. However, this is impossible under current conditions, and interdependencies with old and new circles of support and care continue to determine their intergenerational relations. The anthropological research on the micro level is working with a multitude of interviews and life stories. As statistical data on the effects of inter-generational exchange is lacking, only qualitative data makes it possible to trace old patterns of reciprocity and to discover new practices and perspectives of young and old women and men in relation with the established structures of reciprocity. Within our interdisciplinary research project "Intergenerational relations under stress: a comparison between Europe and Africa" (2007-2010, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation) we analysed a multitude of interviews and life stories in Bobo-Dioulasso, the second largest town of Burkina Faso, West Africa (and my research partner in Switzerland). The research is focussing on two situations considered stressful: 1. jobless adult children, living with and supported by their old parents, 2. adult children taking care of their old diseased parents. In the workshop, I will put the recent results of my study in Bobo-Dioulasso up for discussion.