Category: Afholdte arrangementer 2014-2016

Narrative, Suffering and Possible Selves:  Moral Experiments in the Good Life

Venue: Center for Sundhed og Samfund (CSS), Øster Farimagsgade 5A, room 5.0.22.

Time: August 18^th 2014 2.00 pm – 3.30 pm

Host: Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies and the Danish Association of Anthropologists

Abstract:

This talk concerns the cultivation of a subjunctive or “experimental” narrative self.  It is based upon long-term research among African American parents raising children with chronic or severe illnesses and disabilities.  These parents often find themselves propelled to imagine and try to transform their lives. The moral engine of their efforts is a crucial “ground project” (Bernard Williams 1981) that I am calling “care of the intimate other.” There is a temporality to such projects of care that strongly suggests an inherent narrativity to ethical practice and its self-constituting nature. However, the notion of a narrative self has been widely unfashionable in many quarters.  Challenges are the product not only of postmodern/poststructuralist “death of the author” declarations but also emanate from concerns that a narrative self suggests too much coherence and a simple linear life story. Drawing upon one of the parents in my study whose four year old daughter faces probable death, I complicate this coherence portrait by examining how she tries to cultivate uncertainty through the simultaneous nurturing of multiple and mutually exclusive life plots.  This is directly related to her moral concern to cultivate new forms of hope in the face of her child’s grim prognosis.

Cheryl Mattingly, Ph.D., is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and the Division of Occupational Science and Therapy, University of Southern California.  Her primary research and theoretical interests include: narrative, moral reasoning and experience, phenomenology, the culture of biomedicine, chronic illness and disability, the ethics of care, and health disparities in the United States.  She has published extensively on these topics and has received several awards from the American Anthropological Association for her publications. Major books include:  Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots:  the Narrative Structure of Experience (Cambridge University Press); The Paradox of Hope: Journeys Through a Clinical Borderland (University of California Press) and Moral Laboratories:  Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life (University of California Press, Forthcoming 2014).

Onsdag d. 4. juni kl. 15.00-17.00 i lokale 35.3.12, Center for Sundhed og Samfund (CSS)

Torsdag d. 15. maj kl. 14:30-16:30 i lok. 4.1.12, Ethnographic Exploratory, CSS.

Endnu en gang inviterer Antropologforeningen til en Monografik Happy Hour. Denne gang med Mads Daugbjergs nye bog “Borders of Belonging. Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site”.

Program:

14:30 – 14:35 Velkomst v. Kasper Tang Vangkilde, adjunkt, Institut for Kultur og Samfund, Aarhus Universitet

14:35 – 15:05 Præsentation af ”Borders of Belonging. Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site” v. Mads Daugbjerg, lektor, Institut for Kultur og Samfund, Aarhus Universitet

15:05 – 15:35 Diskussion af ”Borders of Belonging. Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site” v. Mikkel Bille, lektor, Institut for Miljø, Samfund og Rumlig Forandring, Roskilde Universitet

15:35 – 15:50 Pause

15:50 – 16:30 Åben diskussion

Som altid vil der være snacks, vin, øl og vand. Arrangementet er åbent for alle, og tilmelding er ikke nødvendigt. Vel mødt!

“Counting the Uncountable:
Constructing Human Trafficking through Measurement”

Tuesday 25^th March from 15:00 to 17:00 in room 22.0.19 at CSS

The lecture examines the ongoing effort to count the number of trafficking victims globally, as part of a major human rights campaign, and the wildly diverse estimates that have been suggested. It argues that the fundamental nature of the phenomena being counted is highly diverse and that the process of counting and classifying imposes a homogeneity on this field, though an uneasy one. Thus, what trafficking is and how many victims there are is a product of systems of classification and measurement, with the dominant definition that produced by the dominant system of measurement. Practices of knowledge production are thus central to this social movement, as in social movements more generally.

Arranged by The Danish Anthropological Association and Department of Anthropology