News

we are excited to announce the second seminar of the Radical Spotlights series, a collaboration of the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) in the AAA and the Network Anthropology of Economy in the EASA. Twice a year, we’ll highlight critical research in economic anthropology across the globe.

Radical Spotlight: The Economics (and Politics too) of Care

October 30th, 2024, 4-5.30pm Central European Time

https://unisg.zoom.us/j/62561524798?pwd=GJyMwqzzD7AIjfwGdny6agmJXiRhNd.1

Theme

Care raises questions about labour, value, biography, kinship, and responsibility that are at the heart of economic anthropology. Looking at and through care reveals ideologies and practices of what a society is and ought to be, and who should be responsible for its reproduction. This concerns economic ideologies about state, kinship or market relations and the respective inequalities in accessing care and providing it. These inequalities concern human relations to nature and the various classifications of gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of differentiation and rule.

Care is an indicator of radical changes of the contemporary. Some of these are the financialization and marketization of healthcare on a global scale; value frontiers that render some care labour paid and some unpaid; demographic changes such as ageing and urbanization; familial ideologies, and the availability of ever more expensive medical treatments that create new hopes for longer lives.

How are changing care practices anchored in economic ideologies that offer scripts about who is deserving of or responsible for care? How do people ‘price’ the value of care and life itself, and struggle over economic and other values when organizing care? How does care feature in forms of violence in and of social reproduction? And more generally, what does economic anthropology have to offer to our understanding of the economics of care?

These are only some of the questions that the three speakers of this seminar will engage with. The aim of this seminar is to stimulate a conversation and our thinking about the directions and questions that are central to the economics of care.

Speakers

Erdmute Alber, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth, Germany

Caring for future life chances in highly diverse kinship networks: Changing inter-generational responsibilities in moments of economic transformation

Catie Coe, Canada Research Chair of Migration and Care, Carleton University, Ottawa

The commodification of care: Does paying for elder care matter?

Elijah Adiv Edelman, Professor of Anthropology, Rhode Island College, United States

Necrocapitalism and the value of life: Radical care and queer and trans vitalities in a time of disposable life

Organization

Andreas Streinzer, University of St. Gallen and Institute for Social Research Frankfurt and Erik Bähre, Leiden University