Research Seminar “Care in Times of Crisis”

What is care? How do individuals and communities mobilize care to sustain each other’s lives and repair their worlds? We will consider practices, ethics and politics of care within and beyond the clinic. Based on excerpts of three key recent ethnographies, we will discuss care as a relational, ethical and political practice that is embedded in social structures, and imbued with inequalities and power.

What does it mean if worry and anxiety become forms of care? What are the ways people sustain lives amid dispossession and abandonment where care becomes entangled with harm? How might we theorize violence and care in relation, rather than opposition? What could an atmospheric care entail that enables breathing amid microbes, air pollution and inequality?

Visiting scholar Prof Harris Solomon will co-teach the course.

Register by 15 May 2026 on Moodle.

Readings:

• Garcia, Angela. 2010. The Pastoral Clinic. Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande. University of California Press (Introduction + Chapter 1, “Graveyard,” + Chapter 3, “Blood Relative”).
• Tran, Allen. 2023. Life of Worry: Politics, Mental Health, and Vietnam’s Age of Anxiety. University of California Press (Chapter 1 “How to Worry” + Chapter 4 “The Medicalization of Worry” + Chapter 5 “The Psychologization of Worry”).
• McDowell, Andrew. 2025. Breathless. Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India. Stanford University Press (Introduction + chapter 4 “Air” + Chapter 7 “Afterlife”).