Category: 2022

Care and Crisis: Imaginations of the Unincorporated in Puerto Rico

This project explores imaginaries of care and identity in Puerto Rico through a simultaneous attention to movements for Puerto Rican independence and social work spaces. It explores how care takes on new meanings as politicians, individuals, and organizers deploy it to different ends in their imaginings of the Puerto Rico to come and the kind of belonging the island will occupy. Therefore, this project will explore the dynamic relationship between belonging and breakdown – how interventions of care are used as acts of self-fashioning, particularly as indications of the “good” state in the formation of a new national body (whether more deeply embedded in, or independent from, the US).

Further, in engaging the discipline of social work, this study will examine how the hopes and failures of community are imagined and enacted within the clinical space. Whether through psychological intervention, public advocacy, or support services, the role of the social worker is often positioned to lessen the burden of breakdown by shoring up community connectedness – to create a social strong enough to accommodate institutional failure. Through ethnographic work which places these stories in conversation, I am interested in how community is built and seen to fail, and thus how relation is imagined in the wake of historic and continued inequity on the island.

Ambiguous Politics of Care: Syrians’ Uncertain Life in Turkey

Begüm is broadly interested in understanding the kaleidoscopic interactions between the state, humanitarian aid organizations, and households by investigating the politics of care and alternative care practices in everyday life of Syrians in Turkey. Rather than simply document and reiterate the victimized narratives, Begüm proposes pondering on the psychic life of Syrians as intersubjective processes that are entangled with the state’s inconsistent and ambiguous politics of care and humanitarian aid organizations’ assumptions about traumas as completable and predictable trajectories. Also, her research aims to explore Syrian families’ phenomenologies and somatic experiences of displacement and investigate the self-narratives of subjects and abjects of care systems to trouble a linear and coherent understanding of victimhood and suffering. Putting psychological, political, and medical anthropology into dialogue, Begüm seeks to probe political violence and its material and immaterial reverberations as an ongoing set of processes contingent upon uncertain and temporary engagements of the past, present, and imagined future.

Charm Offensive: Counterinsurgencey, Youth and Everyday Life in Kashmir

Anthropological studies of counterinsurgency and militarism show how liberal states often disguise war-making through apolitical projects of humanitarianism, aid, and development to win the hearts and minds of civilian populations. In Indian administered Kashmir, a range of new militarized projects characterized as “perception management” and “de-radicalization” strategies specifically target youth populations affectively, socially, and behaviorally. Through a multi-sited ethnography across three districts of Kashmir, my project examines how Kashmiri youth experience and engage in these programs of militarized recreation, which includes sports training, and skills development programs. This project examines militarized recreation as a subject-making apparatus, shows how spaces of leisure are newly militarized through covert forms of state violence and traces how youth themselves navigate these spaces to cultivate bodily practices and desires.

A Home Away from Home: Familial & Institutional Care for Autistic Adults in India

This project promises to ethnographically attend to the ways in which families of autistic individuals grapple with the ageing and continued dependency of autistic adults in the absence of state-mandated social support in Delhi, India. Ever since Autism became acknowledged as a separate diagnostic category in the late 1980s in India, the trajectory of early diagnosis, early rehabilitation, and early outcome became a popular curative strategy which was prescribed to distressed families. Yet a majority of autistic individuals and their families fell out of this curative and rehabilitative timeline due to a lack of access to appropriate care services. As the earliest diagnosed autistic individuals began entering their adulthood in 2010s, their families began experimenting with the regimen, temporality, and location of care work that now had to perform for autistic individuals as adults. By ethnographically mapping the sites of these experiments with care, that is, residential care facilities for autistic individuals, this project promises to theorize autism as a shared condition, care as an experiment in ethics, and family as a contested and capacious mode of being. And through experiments with ethnography itself, the project seeks to chronicle the ways in which autistic individuals’ own aspirations, relations, and commitments unsettle these familial experiments with care.