Re-/presentations of Disruption and Care

Abstracts

Resituating collective memory-work: written memories as textual technology of care

Tine Friis, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen

Writing is commonly associated with self-care; as being a therapeutic practice with positive health outcomes. This paper resituates the methodology of “collective memory-work” and its use of written memories in relation to assumptions about writing, health and care. Memory-work is a participatory and group-based methodology that was developed by Haug and colleagues (1999) as part of the German feminist movement in the 1980’s. Memory-work presents a framework for investigating how we as humans develop our selves in relation to preexisting cultural understandings as we reproduce and negotiate them. Awareness about this relationship is an emancipatory aim of memory-work, reflecting its research tradition as part of a movement that generates hope for changing the world. This paper argues that the aim of emancipation must be considered anew when adopting a methodology like memory-work. By considering the “pharmakon” quality of text as technology (Greco & Stenner, 2021), this paper argues that written memories may not only have positive health outcomes but also negative implications. Moreover, this paper argues that memory-work differs from assumptions about writing as a means for health-related benefits by recognizing this pharmakon quality. Doing so, makes it possible to understand memory-work as inviting its participants to tell the story that women have reproduced unnuanced and victimizing understandings about their oppression, thus paradoxically hindering their own emancipation. More broadly, this paper suggests that the pharmakon quality of text is not necessarily problematic but must be considered in research practices working with text. Resituating memory-work exemplifies one way of doing so.

Performance and representation in veteran care practices

Eva Krause, University of Copenhagen; with Mette N. Svendsen and Ulla Christensen

In the aftermath of recent decades’ military involvement in international warfare, caring for wounded veterans has posed significant challenges for Western societies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Danish Invictus Games team – the most comprehensive rehabilitative program for wounded veterans in Denmark – this paper explores the complexities of veteran rehabilitation and demonstrates that caring for wounded veterans is inextricably intertwined with caring for politicians, researchers and media representatives. Our Danish ethnography offers insights into the tensions and entanglements of veteran care. Connecting theories of care with theories of performance and representation, we demonstrate how a seemingly ‘classical’ form of care – veteran rehabilitation practices – takes the form of performance. We illustrate how politics, research and TV documentaries are integrated into care practices, and how, in ‘performing themselves’ for shifting audiences with shifting agendas, wounded veterans become caregivers as well as care receivers. Uncovering the intricacies of Danish veteran care, this paper brings to the fore that wounded veterans, while going through their personal rehabilitation process, are (un)willingly positioned as representatives of others (e.g. wounded veterans, veteran rehabilitation, Danish Armed Forces, and Denmark). Thus, we show that caring for wounded veterans goes hand in hand with caring for fictive, future wounded veterans and for the careers and agendas of others. Taking an interest in care as a mutually constitutive practice, and showing how caring for people can simultaneously imply caring for institutions, this paper offers new ways of thinking of and with care.

Rethinking Texts on and for the practices of care: A prototype

Morten Nissen, Aarhus University; with Emil Rønning Bech

In the ever-growing infrastructures of information, a plethora of texts on practices of care can be found, e.g., in ‘models’, reports, research articles, etc., all of which are somehow performative. Some are intended to be, as ‘manuals’, but even these can be performative in unintended ways, e.g. stigmatize or reduce transparency by feigned simplicity. ‘Evidence-based practice’, the dominant approach to these issues, is epistemologically shallow and narrow, and often itself part of the problem. It seems vital to rethink the ways practices of care are represented and documented in different textual forms.  

We aim to present the prototype of an alternative: a ‘manual’ that is dissensual, with an air of mystique or uncertainty, with open contradictions and divergent voices and genres - and which by such means invites, not to ‘obedient’ or ‘absent-minded’ adaptation, but to reflection, discussion, and critical adoption of the practices and methods represented. This implies a broadened ethics of care, which involves a continuous ‘caretaking’ of the diverse, interrelated representations and the practices and the institutional governance in which these are embedded. How might such a manual emerge and be used in practice, how would it relate inter-textually to other (perhaps standardized) representations, and how would it disrupt and rework our collective ways of engaging with representations of care?  

We explore these issues by following and contributing to the attempts of ‘U-turn’, a Copenhagen facility for young drug users, at ‘manualizing’ their practice in a dynamic and semantically ‘open’ way, using a ‘wiki’-technology. 

The emergence and performance of care with text

Maria Valeur, University of Copenhagen; with Morten Nissen

Some practices are specialized as care, but in recent care theories (e.g. Tronto, Thelen, Groys), care is potentially everywhere – in hospitals, families, kindergartens, schools, yes, but also in friendship groups, workplaces, social movements, etc. This gives us the challenge of reconceptualizing it concretely as a local phenomenon.
What is care in particular situations, how does it come to emerge, and why is it important? How can we understand its processual and ethical character? The problem is pertinent as capitalist or neoliberalist optimization at once monopolizes and marginalizes care (Fraser), and as the consequences for (human and planetary) life become more evident. 

Text has a long history as a technology of re-/presenting, articulating, and
performing care. Care is performed with a variety of textual forms, from love letters to patient records, from tattoos to SoMe updates, from manuals and flowcharts to instruction videos and art installations.  

At the U-turn facility in Copenhagen for young drug-users, the Writing Group meet
once a month to write and present poems. They also experiment with texts e.g. by re-representing their writing as videos. This presentation will explore how care emerges in the Writing Group with the technology of text. How is the practice of care created and performed, and how can this help us articulate and rethink how to work with text? Specifically, we will explore text as a liminal technology (Stenner) in a hybrid practice of care as counselling / art and addressing idiosynchratic disorder as well as common
issues and values.

Care in Cybersecurity and Teleinfrastructure - Telling comparative stories about infrastructural breakdown across Greenland and Denmark

Laura Kocksch, The Technoanthropology Lab (TANTlab); with Mette Simonsen Abildgaard

Care lives in the here-and-now material tinkering. Caring also evokes an moral stance that emerges from such tinkering rather than abstract ideals. Our presentation takes a comparative approach in weaving together, and setting apart, different modes of caring for infrastructural breakdown across two fieldsites. 

In our fieldsite in Denmark, cybersecurity has become an increasing concern that governmental agencies hope to tackle by better educating and informing citizens and small and medium-sized companies (SMEs). Although with best intentions, this has caused uncomfortable knowledge for companies that must rely on outdated machines and informal security practices. Care subverts formal recommendations to keep SMEs afloat. 

Reckoning with an everyday characterised by various telecommunication disruptions, tactics across our fieldsites in Greenland include individual preparation (cash and a battery-powered radio in the closet, etc.), but also dismissal and renegotiation of what counts as breakdown or disruption. Care, understood as a pragmatic and moral stance towards infrastructural breakdown, can become stigmatised across this vast and uneven infrastructure.

The comparative approach to caring practices allows us to draw together the situated relations of the two fieldsites: How does care for infrastructural breakdown set them apart, partially connect, disrupt, or entangle them anew? And, how to further conceptualise care through the lens of comparison?