University of Victoria
Caring at The Edge: What Counts as Care? Defining the Terrain
What is care and how do we investigate it? This panel starts with the assumption that care is more than the performance of tasks, more than an expression of concern, more than duty, an ethic or a labour of love. Care involves distinct ways of being and relating to others. It involves its own specific styles of knowing and judging. It requires particular forms of institutional and social organization. Yet care also marks off contested terrain. Care is shaped by – and in turn shapes – inequities in power, divisions of labour, affective relations and discursive constructions. Care is deeply implicated in the social relations of gender, race, class, sexuality, age and ability. Caring @ the Edge calls us to delve into the tensions and limits of care. It raises challenging questions around policy priorities and the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and human resources. Can a sociology of care contribute to a way forward? We invite papers that advance our understanding of care as a social process and as a politics, that probe tensions, and/or strive to produce knowledge in support of a more caring society.
This session is cross listed with the Society for Socialist Studies.
Chair: Susan Braedley
Beyond Violence and Nonviolence
Laurel Collins, University of Victoria , laurelcollins@gmail.com
Nonviolence, on the one hand, exists as one half of a division between two opposing concepts. Tolstoy referred to this dualism as the law of love and the law of violence, Ghandi juxtaposed ahimsa and hinsa, and King distinguished between actions based on hate and actions based on love. On the other hand, nonviolence as an unconditioned concept calls for the collapse of all hierarchies and dualisms. In this paper, I explore the evolution of theories and practice of nonviolence, with a focus on Tolstoy, Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and Sharp, alongside the development of contemporary theories of violence, including Sorel, Benjamin, Arendt, Derrida, Schürmann and Agamben. I argue that nonviolent social movements that rely on moralizing the choice of compassion or care over violence unconsciously undermine their efforts. They reenact the traditional division between good and bad, recreating the dualism that leads to violence. I argue that there is a unconditional concept of care that is beyond the dichotomous language of violence and nonviolence or of good and bad.
Thursday June 6, 2013 08:45 AM - 10:15 AM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-062
Distinguishing the world of care from the world of science: Implications for Sociologists?
Albert Banerjee, York University, albert.banerjee1@gmail.com
This paper draws on and extends the work of Kari Waerness on the “rationality of care” and Anne Marie Mol on the “logic of care” to think through care as a “social imaginary” or a “world” with specific ways of knowing, being, and also relating to human vulnerabilities, dependency and weakness. This paper contrasts this “world of care” to the world of reductionist science, a world that was imagined in and around the scientific revolution, yet still holds power today for how we think about and go about resolving problems. This paper concludes by drawing on the work of Canadian feminists – e.g., Lorraine Code and Dorothy Smith – to ask how might living in a world of care reconfigure the work of sociologists? What happens to sociology when we start from care?
Thursday June 6, 2013 08:45 AM - 10:15 AM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-062
Uncertain Patients/Customers: A Networked Approach to Exploring Canadian Vision Care Practices
Christian Pasiak, Carleton University, cpasiak1@gmail.com
This discussion of care practices draws from the case of a specific medical network outlined in my doctoral research. It comes out of interviews with eye doctors, people with keratoconus (a progressive corneal-thinning condition and form of macular degeneration not widely known to a Canadian public), and advocates for keratoconus awareness. Patients and advocates appeal to public awareness (e.g. in Facebook groups, online petitions), concerned with access to medical interventions that halt the progression of keratoconus but are not (yet) considered ‘standards of care’. Importantly for many, these interventions are not government-insured, provoking participants to compare types of care for other medical conditions covered by government health insurance. These debates drew my attention to a broader politics of care practices. Using cases from my research, I engage strengths and limitations of Mol’s ‘logic of choice/logic of care’ model where care practices delineate a different mode of organizing collectives (versus economic models of organizing collectives around public health via individual responsibility). I address questions about how concepts of ‘good care’ relate to different collectives and how these frame not only justifications for medical interventions but how participants described keratoconus in interviews, where keratoconus’ very status as a thing changed with proximity to different techniques and ways of knowing. I also discuss how inequalities emerge in networks with uneven distributions of caregivers across dynamic, heterogeneous spaces of decision-making, caregivers broadly defined to include kinds of ‘sociotechnical mediators’.
Thursday June 6, 2013 08:45 AM - 10:15 AM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-062
Intimacy as Lifestyle? Examining the Measurement Accuracy of Singlehood
Julie Broderick, University of British Columbia, juliebroderick@yahoo.ca
The way individuals practice intimacy and care has shifted since the Second Demographic Transition. However, the legal definitions of civil status have largely remained static, and arguably no longer capture contemporary relationships. Of important note is how those who are legally accounted for as ‘single’ may be misrepresented in social research, as this category may not match what is occurring socially. Consequently, social scientists are running the risk of misinterpreting and misrepresenting contemporary practices of intimacy and care. By teasing out largely undocumented contemporary practices of care, this paper calls for social researchers to open their scope in studying intimacy to provide voice to the ranges of care that is being practiced in everyday life. A move towards understanding intimacy as a lifestyle, and not as a static category, is an important way to validate, account for, and consider these new forms of intimacy when policies are being negotiated. This paper highlights that by not understanding intimacy as a trajectory, or a lifestyle, researchers risk not documenting important changes in family and support organizations. With this in mind, this paper discusses a possible way forward.
Thursday June 6, 2013 08:45 AM - 10:15 AM Building: Elliott Building, Room: E-062
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