Wellbeing in Minorities network (WeBeMi) launches series of seminars focused on wellbeing in minorities understood widely (more information about the network is below).
Upcoming seminars 2024
20 March at 14:00 (Helsinki time) ”Care Work and Housing: Patchworking Social Reproduction in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina”. Speaker: Dr. Nejra Nuna Čengić, University of Graz, Austria.
The seminar will be held on Zoom:
Abstract
Housing and social reproduction are usually studied separately. In writing that links them, housing often appears primarily implicitly, for example as a container for care work which reproduces labour power; as a submerged, not specifically thematised element in routine activities for the reproduction of life; and/or as a major object of household debt that enables capital accumulation within financial capitalism. Somewhat more attention is paid to homelessness. Still, between homelessness and having a secure roof over one’s head, there is a large terrain of practical and affective struggle for housing. My MSCA-supported ethnographic study of domestic paid care work with older people and children in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), revolves around precarious informal female care workers in a post-socialist, post-war and internationally supervised country. Instead of perceiving housing as an assumed infrastructure for reproductive labour, I reverse the order, considering scenarios in which the securing of housing is a goal of paid care work. Examining country-specific and socially differentiated access to credit, diversified strategies of social reproduction, and the importance of the labouring body, I challenge some dominant views about social reproduction within global financial capitalism, and contribute to the scholarship about financialization in the (semi)periphery.
Nejra Nuna Čengić is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Graz, Centre for Southeast European Studies. She holds a PhD in the Anthropology of Everyday Life from AMEU-ISH Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her doctoral thesis dealt with the relationship between war violence and speech, exploring narrative strategies that citizens of Sarajevo employ in their war accounts. Her second major research project dealt with transformation of labour and international intervention in BiH (focusing on project-funded labour), while her current research focuses on another form of precarious labour: female domestic paid care work. She is the author and co-author of books, book chapters, academic articles, book reviews, and a member of numerous professional and activist networks.
17.04.2024 Dr. Merle Wessel, Germany, TBC
Past seminars
21.02.2024 ”Aging, Queerness, and Digital Remediation: Senior Prom and The Motel Sisters in Care as Affective Infrastructures” by Dr. Stefan Schweigler, University of Vienna/University of Graz
31.05.2023 ”Against damage-centered research – Analyzing Arctic Communities Perspectives on Covid-19 and Mental heath” by Dr. Daria Morgounova Schwalbe, University of Copenhagen
22.02.2023 “Vaccination hesitancy among professional middle-class Russian parents” by Dr. Ekaterina Borozdina, University of Tampere
08.03.2023 ”Queering Elder Abuse: LGBTQI+ older adults and challenges of wellbeing” by Prof. Marianna Muravyeva, University of Helsinki
19.04.2023 ”Digital welfare services as affective infrastructures: Embodied sensations by older migrants in the Helsinki metropolitan area” by Meri Kulmala, Senior Researcher, University of Helsinki and Camilla Granholm, University Lecturer, University of Turku
About the WeBeMi Network:
Subject: minorities & health
Keywords: health, care, minorities, gender, ethnicity, class, groups
The aim of the network is to bring together scholars working at or interested in the intersection of minority research and wellbeing. It is intended to provide researchers working in the fields of minority research, health and care studies, social sciences, law, as well as some subfields of bioscience a platform for discussion of how marginalised, liminal or subordinated position(ing) within the social hierarchies and realities, structural and practical inequalities and wellbeing are intertwined.
The network builds on a broad understanding of minorities and the processes of minoritization, and seeks to advance studies of wellbeing in minorities as a distinct line of theorising, and a research practice. We intend to expand the discussion by exploring new forms of minoritization, as well as novel responses to them that emerge on global and local levels. The network approaches wellbeing on physical, mental and social welfare levels, which implies multiple actors being involved in the creation, maintenance or disruption of this condition. We seek to grasp the role of variegated actors – policy makers, professionals, activists, but also non-human subjects and technologies – in reconfiguration inequalities, co-articulating agency, and shaping the practices of resistance.
The set of the discussed approaches facilitates bridging diverse, often seen as discrete/divided fields of academic knowledge on minorities and health. It enables interdisciplinary dialogue and thus novel perspectives. It also promotes cooperation between scholars and actors outside academia – members of minority communities, as well as those involved in health and care provision for the subordinated groups. By doing so, it puts forward the exploration and discussion on specificity, promotion, and challenges to minorities’ well-being from multiple angles.
Contacts:
Dr. Anna Avdeeva, Åbo Akademi
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wellbemin
To join our network and mailing list – please, fill in form here: https://survey.abo.fi/lomakkeet/15266/lomake.html or contact Anna