Between the state and the home: Interpretations of violence within everyday life in Cairo, Egypt

This talk will explore the relationship between state violence and domestic violence amongst low-income residents of Cairo, Egypt. Building on work in feminist geopolitics, which has emphasized the importance of the corporeal within discussions of national and global politics, I interrogate narratives and interpretations of violence within everyday life. In doing so, keen attention is paid to the language used to define and explain violence by interlocutors. In these accounts, ‘violence’, is often understood as being devoid of care and is juxtaposed against ‘discipline’—understood as an act of care meant to correct inappropriate behavior. I ask: can interpretations about violence in the home contribute insights into patterns of violence practiced by the state against its citizens and what, if any, broader implications does this present for Egypt, a country still grappling with political transformation four years after the ‘Arab Spring.’

(Re)Producing Citizenship through (Health)Care: Latina Immigrants’ Experiences of Reproductive Healthcare in Atlanta, GA

State and local immigration laws create an environment of insecurity for undocumented immigrants, with intensified policing at the level of social reproduction especially after 9/11. Focusing on Latina immigrants and their access to and experiences of reproductive healthcare, this talk examines how an environment of insecurity intermingles with deleterious notions about Latina sexuality and reproduction in order to create a gamut of obstacles that Latina immigrants must face in order to obtain reproductive healthcare. I explore how Latina immigrants navigate – and sometimes resist or subvert – these obstacles and “demand” good healthcare through tactics such as the use of assertiveness and informal medical information networks. I suggest that in exploring the ethics of care inherent in their actions, as well as the ethics of care lacking in the actions of health service providers, we can see how Latina immigrants are attaining the rights (health and healthcare) and enacting the duties (raising healthy families) of citizens, even as the treatment they receive often construes them as unworthy of such rights and turns their acts of duty into deviance. By interrogating the informal carework they must undertake to obtain formal (health)care, this talk highlights ways that undocumented Latinas “fight back” in ways that are often rendered invisible by virtue of their inextricable entanglement with the mundanity of everyday life. Such instances of resistance are often ignored in studies of citizenship and geopolitics, which tend to focus more on visible acts of both policing and resistance, like arrests and public protests. I contend that although immigrant policing has intensified at the level of social reproduction, strategies and tactics deployed by immigrants push back at the same level and allow Latinas to exist in a setting that wants them to do anything but. Further, Latina immigrants deploy carework to procure good healthcare even as they are characterized and treated as unworthy, thereby reworking citizenship at the intimate level of the body and subverting harmful stereotypes and treatment along the way.

"Living Care-fully: Understanding Interdependence in Livelihoods through Inter-generational Relationships in northern Ghana"

This talk will explore the potential contribution of a feminist ethics of care to livelihoods approaches. I argue that autonomy and independence frame our current approaches to understanding how people support themselves, obscuring the interdependent nature of connections that found our lives. Drawing on fieldwork in rural northern Ghana, I will explore interdependencies by focusing on the experiences of women engaged in intergenerational relationships as they encounter emerging dependencies associated with ageing and illness. I will briefly discuss the unfolding negotiations of strategies between an elderly woman and her daughter-in-law, examining the challenges of producing a morning meal. I will then move to explore how married women face constraints from strong patriarchal values that require her to focus labour and resources on her husband and his family. However, illness in an elderly parent may compel a daughter to provide end of life care. Women then work to legitimize a reorganization of their strategies to ensure that they can meet the needs of an ailing parent. These stories demonstrate how women's lives are deeply connected to others and their strategies address the needs of others. They highlight the need for consideration of an ethics of care in livelihood approaches, where interdependencies, dependencies and vulnerabilities can be acknowledged for their foundational roles in shaping strategies.

Title: Massacres and Protesting Hateful Capitalism: Lessons to be learned from Mexico's activists



Abstract: Protests sparked by news of the September 26 massacre of rural students in Iguala, Mexico have spread across the country as people demand their return. Even with news of their deaths, the demand for their return, ALIVE, does not change. This demand echoes four decades of protest for the return of the desparecidos, those who were forced to disappear by corrupt governments. Such a declaration indicates the fight of the eternal revolutionary, that is of the one who will stop fighting once the dead can be brought back to life. The revolutionaty potential in this message explains, in part, the government's violent repression of this demand and of the refusal of the US government to acknowledge it. In Mexico, such protests have woven together with those against feminicidio (the killing of women with impunity) and against the juvencidio(the killing of youth with impunity) as part of the Mexican drug war funded by the United States. In this paper, I triangulate the struggles sparked by the Iguala massacre, feminicidio and juvenicidio to show how they seek to generate an international and activist public engaged in related struggles across the Americas, including in northern North America, where socially vulnerable populations battle the forces to disappear them from history and geography. Such struggles require a theoretical and activist openness to the lessons to be learned from Mexico and other struggles across the Americas where a vernacular of protest reveals insightful theorizations of these neoliberal times.