Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Heike Drotbohm (Anthropology)

In this talk, Heike Drotbohm reflects on the notion of care in the context of transnational migration. Care is highlighted as both a transnational capacity and a duty which changes its meaning according to changing conditions and circumstances. She will concentrate on the links between care and the notion of crisis, understood as a certain moment of accelerated change when care is needed in particular ways. In her reading, crisis not only refers to individual or biographical shifts (such as disease or death), but also to perceptions of radical societal change. She shows that contemporary living conditions under the current financial crisis, with rising rates of unemployment, low incomes, and the state’s withdrawal from many programs of social security, can increase the pressures on relatives living in different areas of the world. In moments of state failure, earlier forms of social security become relegated (back) into the private realm, where expectations toward care change and where multiple actors, such as communities, neighborhoods, and individual family members, have to (re)turn to informal ways of coping with individual challenges. Drotbohm’s reflections will be based on a case study on transnational Cape Verdean families.