Like everyone else, I have life-long experience of caring and not caring for things; being sometimes careful and other times careless. Communication has been my central interest as a historical sociologist, and I’ve been considering its relationship to care (attachment, affection, worry, and burden) and security. I have always liked the word care, employing it often in the sense of warm attachment, but I have been looking at how care can at times enact control, violence, or abandonment.
I wrote
The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain
Life Beside Itself is a startling book not only because of what it reveals about the history of settler-colonial government care imposed upon Arctic communities during the tuberculosis crisis (1940-60s) and the suicide crisis (1980s onwards) but for the raw emotional proximity that it provides to the individuals whose lives were changed by policies that, ironically, were derived from care itself.
It is a well-researched book that unnerved me with the haunting emotional intimacies its ethnographic and imagistic approach brought through the pages. The intractable longing of a young man waiting each year at the harbour for the ship, the C.D. Howe, that took his grandmother away to a southern hospital is just one of the things in this book that wounds its readers by recounting different forms of care.
In Life Beside Itself, Lisa Stevenson takes us on a haunting ethnographic journey through two historical moments when life for the Canadian Inuit has hung in the balance: the tuberculosis epidemic (1940s to the early 1960s) and the subsequent suicide epidemic (1980s to the present). Along the way, Stevenson troubles our commonsense understanding of what life is and what it means to care for the life of another. Through close attention to the images in which we think and dream and through which we understand the world, Stevenson describes a world in which life is beside itself: the name-soul of…
I loved that Hamilton’s unpacking of the etymology of security led right to the notion of care.
This book had a shaping impact on how I think about care and its ties to security – a relation that continues to animate my interests. I learned that my cares (affections, attachments, worries) may mobilize me to enhance my security, which also may be done inadvertently at the expense of someone else’s. To put it another way, when we seek security, we are seeking to let go of our cares or to care less.
Security attends to the “inflated focus” on security as an instrument of control in contemporary cultural life and does so richly, drawing upon cultural forms such as fables, literature, and art in a beautiful and provocative text.
From national security and social security to homeland and cyber-security, "security" has become one of the most overused words in culture and politics today. Yet it also remains one of the most undefined. What exactly are we talking about when we talk about security? In this original and timely book, John Hamilton examines the discursive versatility and semantic vagueness of security both in current and historical usage. Adopting a philological approach, he explores the fundamental ambiguity of this word, which denotes the removal of "concern" or "care" and therefore implies a condition that is either carefree or careless. Spanning texts…
This book challenged my thinking about the implications of compassion taking a decisive role in policy.
Not undermining the import of compassion or empathy, it reveals how these moral sentiments are taking precedence over formal rights in decisions about asylum for refugees, aid, access to health or mental health care, and even justifying a military action.
Under the emergent logic of humanitarian reason, structural inequities and violence are easily rendered invisible as the most poignantly shaped public narratives of suffering gain sway over historical conditions of structural injustice and dominance. Fassin draws upon fieldwork in South Africa, Venezuela, Palestine, and Iraq, as well as policy in France, showing how the logic of humanitarian reason can abandon those who are positioned in the most precarious conditions.
In the face of the world's disorders, moral concerns have provided a powerful ground for developing international as well as local policies. Didier Fassin draws on case materials from France, South Africa, Venezuela, and Palestine to explore the meaning of humanitarianism in the contexts of immigration and asylum, disease and poverty, disaster and war. He traces and analyzes recent shifts in moral and political discourse and practices - what he terms "humanitarian reason" - and shows in vivid examples how humanitarianism is confronted by inequality and violence. Deftly illuminating the tensions and contradictions in humanitarian government, he reveals the ambiguities…
Starting with the public claim that Canadian society exhibits social indifference to the racialized and gendered violence connected to murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, Granzow interrogates the presumed absence suggested the word indifference, showing that it hides something present and active: a social investment and authorization of this violence as part of the maintenance of the settler-colonial state.
Looking at the city of Edmonton historically, ways that this investment – or commitment – has materialized are elaborated, including a policing initiative (Project Kare) that collects demographic information on individuals expected to be subject to (colonial) violence and the former Charles Camsell Hospital that incarcerated Indigenous peoples from where many disappeared. This impacted my thinking on the contradictions inherent to the notion of care and the place I call home.
In 2004, Amnesty International characterized Canadian society as "indifferent" to high rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls. When the Canadian government took another twelve years to launch a national inquiry, that indictment seemed true. Invested Indifference makes a startling counter-argument: that what we see as societal unresponsiveness doesn't come from an absence of feeling but from an affective investment in framing specific lives as disposable. Kara Granzow demonstrates that mechanisms such as the law, medicine, and control of land and space have been used to entrench violence against Indigenous people in the social construction of Canadian nationhood.
With As We Have Always Done, I’m taking a bit of a different direction on my recommendation theme in that a negative and harmful form of care – the ongoing forms of dispossession exercised by the colonial Canadian state that has a profound attachment to an ever-encroaching extractive economy – is a historically specific backdrop to a positive form of care.
Simpson, a Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg author, writes about Indigenous resistance and refusal intertwined with reciprocal and consensual forms of caregiving between peoples, non-human animals, rivers, forests, soil, air, and so forth. I have learned from this not only what gets left out of mainstream public discourse but, more so, the significance of shared values being grounded in profound interdependencies between many forms of life.
Winner: Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's Best Subsequent Book 2017 Honorable Mention: Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award 2017
Across North America, Indigenous acts of resistance have in recent years opposed the removal of federal protections for forests and waterways in Indigenous lands, halted the expansion of tar sands extraction and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, and demanded justice for murdered and missing Indigenous women. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking.
Taking civil defence measures on the British home front during the Second World War as a point of departure, I consider the different ways in which the care of human and non-human animals and homes is enacted, surveilled, negotiated, and contested through rumour and in routine daily activities, such as cooking and the care of companion animals and children. This book considers what it means when civil defence indirectly makes the home and civilian neighbourhoods discretionary sites in which care, provision, and safety for vulnerable social subjects is deliberated, An underlying concern in the book is how care can be unwittingly wielded as a weapon against perceived threats to the nation and population.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
