S13) Belonging and Becoming in Professionalised Care Encounters

difficulties of relationships between care workers and clients

• reconciling different social expectations: german - professional, emotional distance, rules, strict working hours; viet - familiar, personal, close

• kinship not only through blood and descend but also through care → how to care deeply for someone but not become family

• social workers have to mediate between cultures

• difficult to keep distance, difficult physically and emotionally

• social workers live in this space between professionality and close bonds, even when you set boundaries

• emotional overload, burnout, emotional pressure

• colliding expectations → emotionally demanding for both sides

how do social workers define ideas of kinship and belonging (anew)?

• actively redefine kinship by setting boundaries: saying they are not family, correcting them that they are not their son/daughter, use new words to talk to them politely

• new form of partial belonging: trust & connection BUT NOT kinship → kinship not fully adopted but not fully rejected

• affective care work → build relationships of trust and try to reach an understanding by clients that care work is not seen as defined and caused by kinship

what are emotion repertoires and what is their role in this context?

• emotion repertoire: it is culturally shaped how we interpret emotions, we express emotions differently depending on our culture

• social workers move between two realms: german neutrality n emotional distance vs vietnamese warmth n closeness

• emotion repertoires guide how we show compassion and how we should act

• reformation of emotions in context of social work, emotion repertoires are questioned, changed and expanded

in what relation are the concepts “belonging “ and “becoming”?

• becoming: worker become a better/particular/professional worker through work with their clients, they become translators and cultural mediators

• belonging: general understanding is belonging to a place (static), here: process, produced through many interactions, social workers create emotional ties through contacts, always in transformation, emerges from relationships, produced through interactions, FLUID AND CHANGING, INSTABLE

• belonging is always connected to becoming, belonging emerges through/from becoming

end of big theories

• caused by: crisis of representation, writing culture, feminist and postcolonial critique, new methods and accountability through positionality

what that means:

• no more all-including, all-representing theories like evolutionism, fuctionalism, structuralism that try to explain a society as a whole

• idea that researchers also construct culture and processes, subjectivity, positionality, reflecting - my perspective shapes how i research and how others see me influences what i’m told, what i find out

• local particularities and postmodern influences, there can be contrasting and fluid identites, act on situations

• transcending place and cultural borders as analytical norm!! not an exception

“Beyond Culture” (Gupta & Ferguson) CRITICISM

• criticism of term “culture”

• world is not made out of disconnected places and groups (nation, ethnicity, cultural group, city, town)

• culture beyond territorial borders, no cohesion between space, place and culture

• culture can not be objectified or classified as one things, cannot be put in one container → multi-cultural societies!

“Beyond Culture” (Gupta & Ferguson) MAIN POINTS

• places, social units and individual location/positioning were and are continually formed anew

• cultural references and meanings are invoked in specific situations (individ and collective)

• take a look at connections (mobility, virtuality, references to bigger contexts, other places, social groups, etc)

• local positioning: imagination, belonging, place-making

• “Bindestrich-Zugehörigkeit”, representations, power dynamics, …

“Multiple Modernities” (Shmuel Eisenstadt)

• modernisation theories (1950s/60s): institutions and cultural basic assumptions of “secular west” as model for societal development (reflective individuals, chosen identities, break with traditioms, rational thinking)

EISENSTADT:

• diverging ideologies, traditional institutions with modern aspects (urban witchcraft)

• religious fundamentalism, politicisation and modernity of traditions, questioning of western modernity

• there is no “one modernity” that is the endgoal

• no linear development

• diverse and interconnected development of modernity, acquisition/appropriation, re-interpretation of modern elements

• critcism: eurocentristic reference frame, too relativistic - no plurality of perspectives

“Scapes” (Arjun Appadurai)

• critiques idea of westernisation

• instead: actively reproduced global diversity

• wants to BREAK LOOSE from dichotomies and mostly economic models like world system theory and push-pull theories

• FOCUS on appropriation, resistance, creativity, agency

• power of the local which influences global dimension → globalisation AND SIMULTANEOUSLY highlighting of local specialities, sometimes even bc of globalisation, local and global deeply interconnected

• fluid scapes. ethno-, ideo-, techno-, finance-, media-scapes

• arising and existing flows

• cultural reproduction is politicised ad not bound to territory, IMAGINATION (desires and fantasies abt other places (you might migrate to), belonging

• “beyond enculturation”: culture as arena for conscious choice, justification and representation (people negotiate own culture → do something and (re)interpret that element)

• CRITICISM: doesn’t takt into account the existing boarders and power dynamics

“Transnational Migration” (Glick-Schiller)

• transnational approach

• break loose from territorially bound concept of culture and push-pull approach → very different motivations, biographies and experiences which are all part of migration

• culture as “social relations, social structure, and transgenerational transmitted patterns of action, belief, and language”

• social relations and belonging INSTEAD OF acculturation and multiculturalism

• transnational social fields

• focus on state: hyper-presence AND hyper-absence (AMBIVALENCE), e.g. not in country of origin anymore, but still confronted with country of origin through visa-process, food, traditions

• long-distance nationalism = strong support from far away of own state

• CRITICISM: over-emphasis of agency and choice → privileged definition of transnational belonging, aren’t migratory processes (almost) always transnational

perspectives - research in a globalised world

• globalisation not a one-way street, questioning of modernisation theories, culture term, connection and disconnection

• condensing of the global in the local (“glocalisation”), social relations, agency AND global structures

• methods: different sources of representation, reflexivity and power dynamics, collaborative and decolonial approaches