The Anthropology Association of Ireland Annual Conference

Wednesday, March 16, 2016 - 15:15

The Anthropological Association of Ireland annual conference will take place on 15 & 16 March 2016 in John Hume Building, North Campus, Maynooth University. This year's conference is themed “Caring Cultures/Cultures of Care”

Keynote Speaker: Professor Arthur Kleinman, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University and Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Caring Cultures/Cultures of Care

Care is infrastructural for human beings. Humans experience extreme dependency early in life, usually require at least some assistance at its end, and are likely to require periods of care in their middle years.  Nonetheless, while studies of technologies of care have a long intellectual history (especially in Nursing), care as such has not been central to classic analyses of social life.

Feminist Philosophy and Moral Reasoning, however, engaged care in a serious intellectual way in the 1980s, while the topic has also emerged as a significant policy and economic anxiety in demographically graying societies during the last fifteen years or so.  Since this point, “care” has developed into both a cross-roads and a meeting place for very different critiques of the idea of the bounded, calculating and self-interested subject presumably at the heart of capitalist social formations. Care now positively structures everything from new politics, different economics, new forms of social analysis, genres of art and performance practice, and, indeed, a potentially lucrative area for capital investment. Concepts of care are located in environment/sustainability studies, conflict and human rights, mobility studies, equality studies, and multiple other sites. Still, there are few direct measures of formal care, and the number of studies of informal care-giving (while growing) remains significantly under-developed in comparison to its ubiquity in social life.

This conference wishes to unpack the idea of care in both formal and informal settings through original theoretical and empirical studies.

For more information see:
 http://www.anthropologyireland.org/
http://www.anthropologyireland.org/index.php/membership
http://www.anthropologyireland.org/index.php/conference/upcoming