Slow Violence, Crises of Care, and Possible Futures

This session expects to foster dialogue between ongoing research that focuses on the ways in which families, especially women and children, deal with and experience their lives in the context of slow violence, which includes contamination, impoverishment, forced migration and displacement. Slow violence disrupts previous modes of producing the conditions of life, however inadequately supported these were, creating a crisis of care for marginalised families We seek to contribute to an analysis of contemporary inequality, through the consideration of the interaction between different temporalities and spacialities of slow violence that produce an unequal distribution of care and possible futures. Ecological, material, cultural and governance transformations are expressed as new and old risks, inequalities, injustices, and social suffering.

This panel brings together three perspectives that are usually not linked: (1) studies on life in violent environments, particularly through approaches relating to slow violence and toxicities; (2) the reimagination of childhood including preoccupation for the social reproduction of life (Rosen et al, 2021), and (3) ethnographies of everyday life in precarious and violent contexts.

We aim for better comprehension of the relations between violences, toxicity and care in the contemporary context of capitalism. It is of academic and political interest to advance understandings of these interrelated phenomena and their expression in everyday life, as well as to articulate activism and academia in the production of an agenda to transform the current crises of care and life itself.