Care Anthropology / Anthropology of Caring

13. Conclusion: Anthropology & Care Welcome to Module 13 of Transforming Lives through Care 🎯 Learning Goals By the end of this week, you should be able to:  Reflect on key themes and case studies from the subject.  Revisit and connect major anthropological concepts used to understand care.  Identify areas where you'd like to explore further or deepen your understanding. Recognise how this subject has transformed your thinking about everyday life . 🚦  Introduction Welcome to Week 12 of Transforming Lives through Care. This final week is all about reflection and revision. You’ve journeyed through many forms of care—across borders, generations, species, and institutions. This week gives you the space to look back on what you’ve learned, revisit what stood out, and consolidate your understanding of how care transforms lives—and how anthropology helps us make sen...

Welcome to Module 12 of Transforming Lives through Care . This is part of a course in the Anthropology of Care at La Trobe University. This week we explore the idea of self-care —a form of care that emerges not from institutions, but from community, resistance, and refusal. What happens when self-care becomes a political act? What does it mean to survive under conditions of neoliberal neglect? Drawing on applied and public anthropology, we consider care not just as a practice of support, but as a politics of solidarity and survival. 🎯 Learning Goals By the end of this week, you should be able to: Understand radical care as a response to neoliberalism and systemic neglect. Reflect on how care can function as collective survival and political resistance. Explore the “politics of refusal” in the context of self-care, solidarity, and everyday life. Apply anthropological insights to your own life: What might radical care look like for you? 🚦 Introduction Neoliberal s...

Main point Since the 1980s, governments around the world have introduced major reforms to healthcare and other public services. Instead of governments providing all services directly, businesses and other organisations increasingly compete to provide them. Meanwhile, you are increasingly expected to choose what kind of care you want, who provides it, and how to manage it. We have analysed these changes using the theory of neoliberalism . In the interactive tasks, we broke neoliberalism down into five principles: marketisation , individual responsibility , cost–benefit efficiency, outsourcing , and moralised citizenship . We then applied these principles to the NDIS. We saw that some features of the NDIS fit neoliberalism quite well, but others do not. After all, the NDIS involves substantial government funding. So neoliberalism helps us understand the NDIS, but it doesn't explain everything about it.  Significance The significance goes well beyond the NDIS. We can see similar...

Introduction: NDIS as Neoliberal care What is the logic or rationale behind Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)? One way to analyse this is using the concept of neoliberalism. In what follows we'll: study 5 neoliberal principles, get an overview of the NDIS, apply the 5 principles to the analyse NDIS reflect on the usefulness of this neoliberal analysis By doing this, you'll develop your skill at using this theory to analyse care. 5 Neoliberal principles First, pick one of these 5 principles at the heart of neoliberal care: 1. Marketisation  Where do you get your care? Instead of receiving care directly from the government, you enter a marketplace. Different providers compete for your business, and you become a consumer of care.  Neoliberal pioneer Friedrich Hayek stated:   “The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”   The idea is that giving you choices in a market gives you greater contro...

11. Neoliberal Care: From Welfare to Self-reliance Welcome to Module 11 of Transforming Lives through Care .  This week we turn our attention to neoliberal care —how care is reshaped when states withdraw from direct provision and individuals are expected to become self-reliant, responsible citizens. Neoliberal reforms reflect deeper changes in how care, personhood, and citizenship are understood. What happens to care when it is no longer a right, but a personal duty?  🎯 Learning Goals By the end of this week you should be able to Examine how neoliberal reforms reshape understandings of personhood, care, and citizenship. Critically reflect on the role of the state, family, and market in elder and disability care. Compare Dutch reforms to Australian care frameworks, especially in the wake of austerity and marketisation. 🚦 Introduction Neoliberalism : Although this week’s reading focuses primarily on care policy, it is also about changing ideas of...

  Main point Governments care for citizens; but along with that comes control. That's this week's takeaway. Specifically, in the modern era, governments took on the task of safeguarding people, who were now understood as 'population' or 'citizens'. To achieve this care, new kinds and levels of knowledge were created. People became legible to the government through things like statistics. This is the governmentality concept. Significance Using the structure-agency concept we could say that governmentality is a structure. We can use the " governmentality" to analyse government policies. But I think Foucault's point is not that the governments force this on us. It's not some big conspiracy. Instead the point is that we do this to ourselves. We make ourselves legible and keep an eye on ourselves. We turned ourselves into disciplined subjects. And that's where it might become really significant for you. Who you are might be, in part, a dis...