Anthropological Perspectives on Care

3 units

This course aims to provide an introductory survey of topics and approaches to the anthropology of care. It does so by drawing on a range of ethnographic, theoretical, and cross-disciplinary materials. This will allow us to think through and engage with care in its myriad forms, its presence and absence, its bureaucratization and management, its relation to kinship, relatedness, labor, and government. In the first part of the course, we will explore theories of care as moral practice with a feminist lens. In the second part, we will engage this lens with ethnographic materials about care in diverse settings that also shed light on the political, economic, and lived realities of care. These ethnographic and sociological works include explorations of the circulation of care in moral economies and its monetization as paid labor, the politics and antipolitics of healthcare in institutional settings, and the role of care in kinship, household formations, and life course regimes across cultures.This is a fully online course. Only University College students receive credit for online courses