Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Medical Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists

Primary Theme: Ethics

Secondary Theme: Health

(3-0095) Entanglements of Care: Ethics, Disability and Imagination about Prognosis and the "Good Life"

Care has become an important notion in anthropology and more recently in the field of the anthropology of ethics, especially drawing from feminist scholarship such as Carol Gilligan’s concept of ethics of care (Gilligan 1977) and Mackenzie and Stoljar’s concept of relational autonomy (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000), as well as Cheryl Mattingly’s work on moral laboratories and the “good life” in the context of care (Mattingly 2014). Ethnographic works in medical and psychological anthropology as well as the anthropology of disability have explored the everyday ethics of care contextualized within technoscientific ideologies, healthcare systems, globalizing neoliberalism, and humanitarian regimes. In this panel, we reflect on how entanglements of care intersect with ethical concerns within different contexts: services for people on the autism spectrum in Canada, United States, France, Italy, and Germany; participatory design of auditory and affective technologies for people with different abilities in Montreal, Canada; communities of women with Turner Syndrome and people with Down Syndrome, both in the United States; and patients waking up from coma in a Swiss hospital. We consider across these diverse contexts: how is care defined and evaluated? What constitutes “good care”? What imaginaries inform notions of care? When and where is care understood as harmful? These questions importantly inform everyday ethical practices, which anthropological methods are well suited to unpack.
Gilligan, C. (1977). In a different voice: Women's conceptions of self and of morality. Harvard educational review, 47(4), 481-517.

Mackenzie, C., and N. Stoljar. (2000). Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Mattingly, C. (2014). Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for the Good Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Chair(s)

• Rossio Motta

  McGill University

Organizer(s)

• AJ Jones

  Graduate Student
  Emory University

Presenter(s)

• AJ Jones

  Graduate Student
  Emory University

Organizer(s)

• Ariel Cascio

  Postdoctoral Researcher
  Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal

Presenter(s)

• Ariel Cascio

  Postdoctoral Researcher
  Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal

• MIchael Cordey

  PhD Candidate
  Université de Lausanne

• Florian Grond

  postdoctoral fellow
  McGill University School of Physical and Occupational Therapy

• Anne Kohler

  University of Connecticut

Discussant(s)

• Ellen Badone

  McMaster University

• Rima Praspaliauskiene

  Visiting Scholar
  University of California, Berkeley

Presentations:

• 8:00 AM - 8:15 AM

  “I have my butterfly sisters”: Community and the Ethics of Care for Women with Turner Syndrome
  AJ Jones – Emory University
• 8:15 AM - 8:30 AM

  Entanglements of Care in Autism Services in Europe and North America
  Ariel Cascio – Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal
• 8:30 AM - 8:45 AM

  The difficulty of care and the difficulty of reality
  MIchael Cordey – Université de Lausanne
• 8:45 AM - 9:00 AM

  Co-designing with People with Different Abilities: Sonic Boundary Objects, Ethical Tensions and Care
  Florian Grond – McGill University School of Physical and Occupational Therapy
• 9:00 AM - 9:15 AM

  Speculative Imaginaries of Mental Health and Intellectual Disability
  Anne Kohler – University of Connecticut
• 9:15 AM - 9:30 AM

  Discussion
  Ellen Badone – McMaster University
• 9:30 AM - 9:45 AM

  Discussion
  Rima Praspaliauskiene – University of California, Berkeley