Monday, June 3rd, 6 – 8 PM
Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Universitätsstraße 3b, 10117 Berlin ( S- und U-Bahnhof Friedrichstraße), Room 205
Title: Changing patterns of care and neighbouring in crisis-ridden Athens
Prof. Dina Vaiou
Since 2009, analyses and explanations about the crisis in Greece, with very few exceptions, have focused mainly on macroeconomic aspects, such as the size and viability of the public debt and a range of possible (neoliberal) measures towards its management. The emerging dominant discourse has made key aspects of the crisis “unmentionable”; such aspects include on the one hand the role of neoliberal pacts, the operation of the eurozone and existing uneven development patterns. On the other hand it has also made “unmentionable” the social effects of the measures taken, which are unevenly felt and endured among Greek people. My presentation, based on research in Athens, takes changing patterns of care and the geographies of care deficits as a starting step from which to discuss how severe deficits in care have developed in the pre-crisis decades, thereby setting the scene for later arrangements; to examine how such deficits have been met by recourse to the low paid labour of migrant women, thereby displacing care deficits to the places where these women have come from; to argue about the ways in which these arrangements of care go beyond personal(ised) service and include a whole range of everyday practices and neighbourly relations which extend along a series of geographical scales. Finally, the presentation proposes to reflect upon (re)definitions of neighbourhood and neighbouring and upon the prospects of such arrangements and negotiations of gender power in the context of the crisis.
