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    On Listening as a Form of Care
    On Listening as a Form of Care
    On Listening as a Form of Care
    Ebook63 pages56 minutes

    On Listening as a Form of Care

    By João Biehl, Kristen Ghodsee and Lisa Stevenson

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    About this ebook

    Combining first-person narration, philosophical reflections, and advocacy, this volume features conversations with anthropologists and ethnographers Lisa Stevenson, João Biehl, and Kristen Ghodsee and offers a toolkit of strategies for listening as a form of care. The contributors teach us to foreground the lives of ordinary people within a rapidly changing political and institutional landscape, and afford us opportunities to explore and reimagine health in relation to frameworks such as political economy, medicalization, human rights, and justice.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateOct 1, 2020
    ISBN9781936994083
    On Listening as a Form of Care

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      Book preview

      On Listening as a Form of Care - João Biehl

      cover.jpgcover.jpg

      All right reserved including the right to reproduce this book, or parts thereof, in any form without written permission from either the author(s), editors, Slought Foundation, or the Health Ecologies Lab. No part may be stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Biehl, João Guilherme, interviewee. | Ghodsee, Kristen Rogheh, 1970- interviewee. | Stevenson, Lisa, interviewee. | Levy, Aaron, 1977- interviewer, editor.

      Title: On listening as a form of care / with João Biehl, Kristen Ghodsee, and Lisa Stevenson; edited by Aaron Levy.

      Description: Philadelphia : Slought Foundation and Health Ecologies Lab, 2020.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2019050555 (print) | LCCN 2019050556 (ebook) | ISBN 9781936994076 (paperback) | ISBN 9781936994083 (ebook)

      Classification: LCC BF323.L5 O54 2020 (print) | LCC BF323.L5 (ebook) |

      DDC 302.2/242—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050555

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050556

      Contents

      Introduction

      Aaron Levy

      Chapter 1:

      Anonymous Care

      Lisa Stevenson

      Chapter 2:

      Folded into Lives

      João Biehl and

      Kristen Ghodsee

      Contributors

      The collapse of social compacts and values has produced an equally radical awareness of mutual interconnectedness with environments, nature, and people. Care is the name for this exposure.

      — Michael Stone Richards, Philosopher

      The rhetorics of health and illness become effective ways of policing the boundaries of civil society, and of keeping people always outside.

      — Jonathan M. Metzl, Psychiatrist

      Introduction

      Traditional understandings of health and well-being often isolate individual histories from their social life, such as their relationship to families, communities, and geographies. Recent public health and environmental crises involving lack of access to healthy food, clean water, and economic and educational opportunity demonstrate how health is also impacted by disparities and diverse social and environmental factors. The scale and complexity of healthcare in the 21st century further exacerbates these inequalities, motivating us to rethink health and well-being through acts of listening and care.

      These urgencies inform our work at the Health Ecologies Lab, which is comprised of a group of scholars united around research, projects, and curricula. Together, we seek to develop a shared vocabulary about health and to encourage space within the university for critical thought and reflection with students and scholars from the humanities, social policy, and medicine. What can medicine and its understanding of health learn from social policy and the humanities? How are acts of care understood and enacted across disciplines and institutions? We think critically about health as it is understood across disciplines, institutions, and social systems in order to envision new ecologies of health.

      The lab values listening as a way of understanding the larger social systems that affect health and well-being. We seek to redefine listening as a responsive activity that values the knowledge embedded in communities. We focus on listening as a deliberative practice, one that structures our identities and activities. We are also committed to learning from the knowledge embedded in the lived experiences of communities in Philadelphia and beyond. Together, we seek to bring scholars from various disciplines together and welcome multiple voices, from patients and caregivers, to providers and policymakers. Our collaborative projects aim to leverage this collective knowledge to empower individuals to live healthy lives, and to compel institutions and structures to respond and engage.

      With these considerations in mind, we invited ethnographers and anthropologists Lisa Stevenson, João Biehl, and Kristen Ghodsee to participate in a series of reading groups and public dialogues at Slought Foundation in April 2018. Their respect for the open-endedness of people’s lived experiences has been foundational for our thinking at the lab. Their ethnographic works has also prompted us to reflect on responsible methods for recording histories of violence and dispossession, unimaginable loss, and the longing for transformation.

      *

      Lisa Stevenson’s book Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (2014) and her film project Into Unknown Parts (2017) demonstrate the power of language and film to capture the lived experience of violence. They are haunting ethnographic journeys through the tuberculosis epidemic from the 1940s to the early 1960s, as well as other historical moments when life for the Canadian Inuit community has hung in the balance. She examines the Inuit experience of being forced to leave their home communities and live for an undetermined period of time in a southern tuberculosis sanatorium. Rather than a straightforward expository narrative, her writing and film work hopes to capture one of the most striking aspects of the dislocation this produced: the way the

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