Therapeutic Politics of Care: New Ethnographies of Asia

Please join us for a panel discussion with:

Felicity Aulino, UMass Amherst
Nicholas Bartlett, Barnard College, Columbia University
Lyle Fearnley, Singapore University of Technology and Design
Ting Hui Lau, Cornell University
Emily Ng, University of Amsterdam
Saiba Varma, UC San Diego

Care has become a crucial concern of anthropological inquiry, and current global conditions have renewed its poignancy. To paraphrase Lisa Stevenson, care involves an ethics of attending, corresponding to particular ways that someone (or something) comes to matter. The drive to care, as she and others have noted, is far from innocent, and may be filled with ambivalence whether in intimate or institutional forms. Connecting fieldwork from three provinces in China, Thailand, and contested Kashmir territory, this series brings together the authors of five new books and a dissertation to explore the therapeutic politics of care across multiple logics and scales.

Featuring five scholars who books are coming out in 2020 and one who recently finished a dissertation, our event reflects on care in both its presence and absence. We aim to interrogate not only the different therapeutic forms and relationships (human and nonhuman) through which care can be performed, but also examine the historical, cultural, and social possibilities that structure its forms and possibilities.

The event will proceed through a circular reading of one another’s work. We will take up a critical focus on scale and temporality by tracing the protracted geopolitical encounters that infuse clinical settings, ritual engagements, and the very possibility of healing. Each book author will provide a reading of one of the other authors’ text, then revisit and describe their own work in light of the resonances and dissonances that arise. The result, as we envision it, would be a novel discussion mixing book review and experimental auto-introduction, reading oneself through the other, featuring both comments and on-the-spot conversation with time for audience questions.
Online. This event will be streamed live on WEAI’s YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/WeatherheadEastAsianInstitute/live

This event is organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.