The Politics of Care

June 4-6, 2025

Prof. Sandra Bärnreuther, UNILU, Jürg Bühler, UNILU, Dr. Molly Fitzpatrick, UZH and Dr. Olivia Killias, UZH

Prof. Lisa Stevenson, McGill University, CA

Prof. Kristina Krause, University of Amsterdam, NL

"Care" has become a widely used concept in anthropology and one that has proven to be good to think with, in particular when theorizing human interdependencies. Its current use far exceeds the original applications of the concept to fields such as feminized household work or health care. An important strand of theorizing care goes back to analyses of emotional labour in capitalism (Hochschild, 1979) as well as the international (political) economy of care work (R. Parreñas 2000; Hochschild 2000, 2003). In medical anthropology, there were attempts to define care as a specific, and highly moralized, form of interpersonal engagement (e.g. Kleinman 2009, Biehl 2012, Mol 2008), a perspective that can be traced back to feminist care ethics (see e.g. Tronto 1993). Subsequently, various authors have argued for a less normative approach to care and extended its use to examine the politics of care more closely (e.g., Garcia 2010, Mühlebach 2012, Stevenson 2014, Thelen 2015, Ticktin 2011, Varma 2020). In doing so, they revealed the 'dark side' of care, stressing that care can also be violent and is often intimately linked to control and surveillance (e.g., Aulino 2019, Martin et al. 2015, van Dooren 2014). Within this new literature on care, there has also been a growing interest in theorizing the politics of care in human-animal relations and more-than-human worlds (e.g., Blanchette 2020, Münster et al. 2021, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, J. Parreñas 2018). In this sense, care has become a productive tool to examine the intertwinement of political, economic, cultural, and moral dimensions of everyday relationships of support (McKearney & Amrith 2023).

This (selective) discussion of anthropological approaches to care already demonstrates the flexibility of the concept. In this CUSO workshop, we are particularly interested in discussing the political valence of care. We will explore the different ways in which PhD candidates make use of the concept in their work and discuss the theoretical challenges that this may pose. PhD students working on a range of topics – such as migration, humanitarianism, human-animal relations, disability studies, queer studies, environmentalism, reproduction, gender, kinship, healthcare, and more – will benefit from this module by exploring the ways in which care – and the politics that so often shape it – take form within their ethnographic cases. With expertise across the spheres of migration, gender, affect, belonging, aging, healthcare workers, the welfare state, parenting, citizenship, diversity, and, of course, care, our invited experts will engage with each participant's project to consider the usefulness of the concept of care in their work. Our goal is not to arrive at a general definition of how care should be understood. Rather, we aim to appreciate its indeterminateness and explore the different ways in which it can be used to understand social and political life in novel ways.

Crêt-Bérard, Puidoux

Participation fee: CHF 60 

For students of the CUSO universities (Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel and Fribourg) and from the universities of Bern, Zürich, Luzern, Basel and St. Gallen, accommodation and meals are organised and covered by the CUSO doctoral program in anthropology. 

Travel expenses will be reimbursed via MyCUSO based on half-fare train ticket (2nd class) from the student's university to the place of the activity.

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