400003 FK Care: Kinship and Beyond (2018S)

Care: kinship and beyond
Care has garnered much public interest during the past decades. In these debates care is often conceptualized as a given element of kinship or more generally the private sphere, and less often explored as a feature of political organisation. As a result, the importance of care for representations of community and claims for belonging based on long-term reciprocal relationships are easily overlooked.
Care among relatives is evaluated as good but also as in decline, while Care in public institutions is then often be treated as a modern phenomenon, a mere substitute for traditional care. These representations generate difference and Othering of internal and external populations.
This seminar takes a wider focus on care as vital element of social organisation that can help to collapses domains usually kept separated, like kinship and the state, and private and public, in ways that are productive for social analysis as a whole. On an aggregated level care practices feed into the (re)making of social order as well as the shaping of social change.
At the centre of our discussions will be the ethnographic research of participants.