`WHO CARES ANY WAY’
Who Cares Anyway? - An Intersectional Analysis of ‘Care Work’
‘To care’ To actively empathise with ‘self’ ‘others’ and ‘environment’; ‘I am one of two objects, consciousness and responsiveness’.
Same, Same Same.
Disclosure and Dynamics
I want to begin by noticing my positionality within this research. As a cis white female, from a ‘working class’ background, my personal trauma led me towards work in social care and the arts. Both of which can act as a method of therapy and a way of forming connections. It was my painting practice that led me to the subject of anthropology. I am using portraiture as a methodology, process and subject, so within the research, my method, process and subject, feed and inform one another. This narrative, in some ways, is auto-ethnographic, but navel gazing is where all Anthropology starts in my opinion. In others, it is centered around, and inspired by. my friends, colleagues; painting subjects, those, who I believe, are able to care far more efficiently than me. This is written through an intersectional lens, and because of their relational, inclusive frameworks, is laid on the foundation of work created by Indigenious scholars, and Black Feminist discourse.
“Ideas flow from one to the next in a cyclical fashion. A change in one affects the other, which in turn affects a new change in the original. All parts of the circle are equal; no part can claim superiority over, or even exist without, the rest of the circle”. (Shawn Wilson Wilson, 2008, p60)
Introduction
The original aim of this project was to explore ways to increase the social and economic value of Care Work and ‘Caregivers’. By combining creative and scientific research methods and practice, I am drawing on concepts of visibility, affirmation and transformation. For the purpose of this paper I am using the term ’Social Care Work’, defining it ’as ‘any paid role that involves working with vulnerable people, as a means to stabilize, rehabilitate and improve life experience within, and for the purpose of society’. As a Practice-led research, this body of work wound up as an interconnected analysis of care, empathy, trauma; through the lens of intersectionality. This interrogation resulted in a revision of the term ‘Emotional Labour’, towards a more digestible concept of ‘Emotional Work’; I aim to create a recognised skill within the workplace. With the hope that it can be used to create ‘quantifiable' and defined value in SCW; individually, personally, externally and economically. This paper narrates and reflects on my process and methodology in relation to my findings. Correlating and connecting notions of Care within practices of emotional work, SCW, creative practice and anthropology. Using this framework I will ask and respond to the question Who Care’s? and Why? These questions are at the root of understanding why care continues to be devalued.
Emotional Work is invisible, personal and nuanced; and so using aesthetics and portraiture within the ethnography provides a useful medium to create bonds, visibility and affirmation of individual stories throughout the research. I believe empathy creates a foundation of all of ‘our’ Visual narratives and relationships. Both in ‘’Care Work’ and ‘Art Work’. It also produces the residual conceptions of Self and ‘other’. The first half of the paper will explore conceptions of empathy as an introduction to the theoretical framework. Notions of empathy thread together my process,methodology and subject matter.
My fieldwork began whilst I was volunteering and working in the Homelessness Sector in North London I was working and volunteering at ‘Highway House of Holiness' and, ‘All People All Places’ a Charity funded party by Haringey Council and the Catholic Church. I started filming, writing and making painting’s of the people who inspired me. First Abigale Amoateng, Project Manager At HWH and Alison Charles, Head of Homelessness for Haringey Council and St Munogos. Both taught me practical and relational skills whilst supporting me emotionally. Working with homeless men in north London was mentally and physically challenging; and demanded an abundance of patience, good humour, purpose and dynamic thinking. Through this process I started to wonder why some people have a larger capacity to withstand ‘emotional work’, why and how? Here I began to see a relationship between ‘Emotional Work’, Empathy, and experience of trauma, and so this became a point of investigation. When the Covid-19 Crisis hit, my work focusing on EW in the homelessness sector was interrupted, and the wider landscape of care work changed dramatically, providing me with new perspectives of Emotional Work. With lockdown restrictions, I had to refocus, and began a new ‘portrait’ and dialogue with A GP named Hannah Mendes, with whom I was matched through the social media movement ‘Portraits for NHS Heroes’(Portraits for NHS Heroes | Thomas Croft, 2021). Over the lockdown period we talked over zoom calls discussing EL, and how covid was impacting Hannah and the health care system in general. Simultaneously, I was working on a personal project with Ken Breinburg, making a portrait of the late Petronella Breinburg; poet, author and academic. I began to think about what brought this collection of women together into my studio. This alignment of my subjects, my fieldwork and research sparked this theory; connecting care, creativity within an analysis of oppression and trauma. These connections were made through my relationships with my subjects; making the portraits encouraged me to consider the impact of conceptions of ‘self’ and ‘others’. Framing my methodology (portraiture) as an act of ‘creative’ care, it also became a tool to visibly represent invisible ‘emotional work’. This research manifests as an anthropology of Art, Empathy and Care.
In the second part of this paper I will revise theories and representations of emotional labour in care work. I will then untangle the relationship between the devaluation of Carework to the subordination of certain (intersectional) identities, and their perceived shared traits such as empathy. Creating a framework for the concept of ‘Emotional Work’ as a more accessible and quantifiable tool to recognise and measure invisible work in care, addressing how this could impact value schemas within both SCW and wider society. I will examine social value ranking formation in human social groups and how this is shifting. I will draw on findings from my fieldwork alongside a combination of social-cultural, psychological and neurological discourse, exploring hierarchy formation theory and status perception in human primates. My observations highlight a structural dependency on the oppression and exploitation of intersectional identities, and within that the experience of trauma. This connection exposes how the western Care system is still entangled with the colonial conception of ‘other’ as deficient and less than. ‘Caregivers’ create a social and economic foundation, which supports capitalist society in the west through, in unrecognised ‘free’ labour and the entangled subordination of certain intersecting identity traits and experiences.
The concept of ‘Intersectionality’, arose from the experience, scholarship and activism of African American Women, who created fundamental social change and paradigm shifts throughout their experience of trauma oppression (Salem, 2019, p1). Ida Wells Barnett, Kimberlie Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins paved the way for this relational shift in how we think about oppression and identity. Hill writes ‘by embracing a paradigm of race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression, and adding variables such as age, sexual orientation, and religion, Black feminist thought acknowledges these distinctive systems of oppression as being part of one overarching structure/matrix of domination (Hill Collins, 1990, p,221). Using the conception of ‘other’, created in the west through colonialism, ‘Caregivers’ create a social and economic foundation by doing unseen ‘unpaid’ work or ‘emotional labour’, which in turn uphold capitalislism. Who exactly chooses to care as a career, I believe, is reliant on numerous factors such as; economic opportunity and status, gender norms, moral obligation, cultural ideologies and norms, religious orientation. Lived experience within the intersections could create a capacity and skill-set to withstand and manage trauma. This co-dependency compounds the positionality of ‘othered’ intersectional identities, for example in current cultural representations, narratives of ‘femininity’ and ‘emotional work’ are attached, naturalised and subordinated through ‘care work’(Carsten, 1998).
I will end this paper reflecting on how using creative methodologies can effectively create value and offer other solutions to how the cycle of trauma, invisibility, othering and subordination could be broken, and using practices of awareness, boundaries and care.
Research Methodologies and Metaphysics - Art, Empathy and Aesthetics and Value
Development through Transformation
> Empathy > Transformation > Aesthetics > Enchantment > Disruption > Action >
My theory and methodology was inspired by Rosi Bradotti’s conception of the ‘Politics of Affirmation’ outlined in Nomadic Theory. drawing on aesthetics, as a tool of affirmation, empathy and transformation. Bradotti talks about the ‘materialism of thinking, framed by perceptions, conceptions and imaginings. Her theory blurs boundaries of what we perceive to be consciousness. It invests in ‘all that lives’, including non organic matter, technology and so called nature (Braidotti, 2011, p2 ). Braidotti frames ‘all thoughts’, things as ways of being. This idea connects the different aspects of my process; Creative Practice, Care and Emotional Labour all beget one other. My methodology enacts a type of interconnected philosophy, a way of thinking and being within the discourse of Visual Anthropology; combining the subconscious process of art practice with cross-disciplinary analysis, my experience and the experience of my subjects, my narrative is limited by these points of contact.
I will be discussing the idea of care in creative practice, specifically portraiture, as both a political form of communication, and a relational tool. I see the process of making paintings as a metaphor for the anthropological process, and the way we shape our identities, spotlighting the action of building, layering, dissolving and mutating, embodying micro and macro perspectives. The paintings provide tangible trace’s of research, but are also gifts, or artefacts, ‘representing’ a shared and unique experience. Without monetary exchange, they become significant markers of value, honouring each participant and creating a ‘feeling-bond’ (Hyde and Atwood,1879,p59) between two people, as discussed by Robert Hyde in ‘The Gift, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World.’ (p,59, Hyde and Atwood, 1879). Both Visual Anthropology and Art encourage us to consider the sensory multimodal nature of humanity. As an undercurrent, to highlight the value of emotions, and relations within the ‘production of knowledge’. I am framing the “medium” and ‘technology’ of the visual, as an ‘organic’ extension of ‘ourselves’, supporting the classic theory by Marshall Mcluhan's; where he suggests that media, and aesthetics are an extension of our nervous system CITE. The paintings provide us with a thick description and an emotional response to the research. Highlighting that creativity and Anthropology, performs and embodies, simultaneously, both narcissistic and empathetic elements of the human condition, this deflects from binary thinking and notions of good or bad. I am contextualising the ‘work of art’ in this case, the portrait, as an act of apperception and affirmation, which will resonate differently depending on the way you contextualise the ‘self’. Historically, ‘the way’ that we ‘portrait’ represents our political, social and national identities, this can be seen in institutions like The National Portrait Gallery (Hinkson, 2016, p3). The Western ‘version’ of the ‘individual’ portraiture has functioned as a tool to reinforce Colonial Western Value systems and norms, such as individualism, racism and classism. But portraiture can also be seen as a site of change/activism, for example, the use of the painted portrait on covers of Vogue and Time magazines to Honour groups such as NHS staff and as statements during the peak of the 2020 BLM movement (Nast, 2021)(Valentine, 2021). The Covid Crisis of 2020 created space and opportunity to ‘re)distribute the senses’, through ‘the way’ that we make portraits. I have discussed this framework in more depth in a previous essay, contextualising portraiture as a ‘socio-political act’ which highlights the shared space between Art and Social Science, (Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis, 2002). As an object, and a process, portraiture is inherently anthropological; it’s reflective, reflexive, imaginative and introspective. The painted portrait can be mutually abstract and naturalistic, political and personal. Expressing a sense of ‘ourselves: and, constructing reality, by imprinting our memory and image into the environment. I am also drawing from Deleuze Vitalism and Alfred Gell’s work on the functions of the ‘Enchantment of Art’, returning back to the idea of transformation and considering the ways in which we create, and relate to art objects. In the context of this project, the portrait helps us to think about how art alters our processes of perception, cognition and identity and contributes to wider narratives. And so can be utilised within social silence to create value, and identity.
``Identity needs to be created, as works of art are created” and so signalling the first trace of our conscious individuality. (Hinkson, 2016),
Empathetic Beginnings
This body of work began with an interrogation of Empathy, a self obsession, an obsession with and with the relationships between these concepts. I started with these questions...Does our system of ‘welfare’ depend on a certain individual's capacity of empathy or compassion? What makes one person more empathetic than the other? In regards to the psychological and personal costs of this work, how is this performed with love for both self and other? Our Narrative’s of Empathy provide the foundation of my practice and tie together the different elements of my work. Empathy is broadly understood as a psychological function, and relies on the western conception of the self and other. I situate it in a relational interpersonal space, where it can manifest both positively and negatively. Empathy in its conception is interdisciplinary, it values the emotional, as much as the rational. Etymologically, it can be traced back to the latin root ‘pathos’ meaning the ‘sharing of feeling’. The German term for empathy ‘Einfühlung’ means ‘feeling into’, suggesting fusion between the observer and object. Personally, I relate to this description through the practice of painting, theoretically, it describes a destabilization of identities.. It connects the physical, psychological and emotional ways of being which are more present in indigenious ontologies Aboriginal portraiture (Raffan, 2021). When I’m painting, I draw from the unconscious process of Einfühlung, based on instinct, reaction and intuition; it's not finished until it ‘feels’ right (Koss, 2006). The relationship between Einfuhlung and Pathos helped me to make sense of the connection between care and creativity; psychology and art. ‘Einfuhlung’ has been central to theories of art and aesthetics since the 1800's, and can be traced all the way back to Aristotle, which Juliet Koss discusses in depth in her paper ‘The limits of Empathy’. My connections were made when reading the work of Wilhelm Woringer and Theodore Lipps, specifically ‘Empathy and Abstraction: Essay in the psychology of Style’. This paper highlights the idea that we are nature, and that making art is a method of connecting and creating, not representing. Empathy is both essential for creativity, political and personal relations, and so specifically anthropology. In the context of this subject it plays an important role in our current ‘Welfare System’, ‘Capitalism’ and the landscape of Care.
For me, Empathy serves a greater purpose than maintaining human social relationships, it acts as a ‘force’, or energy, that connects us with our ‘self’, our environment and each other. Our underlying connectivity, sameness and difference, essentially unifying fragments of the same thing. For this reason, I continue to highlight the importance of my method, process and subject in equal parts. Philosopher Robert Fishner used Einfuhlung' to describe the transformative process that takes place between the viewer and the artwork, he wrote “ I entrust my living life with the lifeless for, I am mysteriously transplanted and transformed into the other’. Noting that, transformation takes place through movement and medium to produce connection, and so creating ‘Art’. Koss suggests that Art has the power to ‘destabilize the identity of one and animate the other’, making no distinction, and blurring the boundaries of us, objects and ‘nature’. I take the view that Empathy is an experience of exchange and transformation. It is where it is located within societal relations, structures and experiences, which define the form and direction it takes, not negative or positive, just alternatives.
Exploring empathy led me to think about how this conversation interacts with broader philosophical questions in the context of Care… What is the purpose of suffering within our ecology? How can we reimagine this system, if the ‘carers’ were cared for? Are empathy and suffering intrinsically linked?
Is experience of trauma essential to our social structures?
Ethnography content -(Decolonising Care)- New Paradigm’s
Dominant status perceptions > Colonialism > Intersectional Oppression > Complex Trauma > Empathy > Care-Work > Rigid identity Mobility > Dominant Status Perceptions
During my fieldwork I noticed a lack of; understanding and visibility of the emotional aspect of this work. Specifically within some of the most emotionally testing, trauma charged, low paid roles, such as in Care Homes and the Homelessness sector. Discussions in my field work taught me that the term ‘Emotional Labour’ is not known and/or understood by the people that it affects most. When discussing together, it proved to be a difficult conversation. So, a re-evaluation of the term ‘Emotional Labour’, emerged as the main focus of this project. The term ‘Emotional Labour has been widely theorised within femisist discourse since Arlie Hothchild ‘coined’ the phrase in 1983, in ‘The Managed Heart’. Hotchild describes emotional labour as to “induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the ‘proper state of mind in others''. More recently, the term has been trending in the mainstream and social media. Through this circulation, it took on different meanings to different people (Wilkinson, 2018). The ambiguity and malluabity of the term, I believe, is due partly to it’s unaccessible theoretical roots, which may only make sense on the whole, to those who are academically educated, specifically in feminist discourse and maxist theory. The term ‘labour’ by its-self is also exhausted with meaning, and more specifically, because of its association with ‘low skill job roles’, I decided this terminology is not the right fit for this framework, although, it is a continuation from Hochild’s model.For the purpose of this Essay I am using the term ‘Emotional Work’; an exchange, and transformation, of some kind.
Next I thought about EW’s function in Western society, exploring ways, which it could be ‘managed', ‘nurtured’ and refined. The commodification of unrecognised Emotional work within Social Care roles currently serves the structure of the Welfare State, without relevant economic and social exchange. Beatrice Muller explores this in her article ‘The Careless Society—Dependency and Care Work in Capitalist Societies’, she claims intersectional disparities in unpaid work are no coincidence, but instead a basic condition of capitalism, which is founded on devaluation of care. There is a dichotomy at play, where ‘Care Work’ produces both labour, health and a sense of security for society, at the relative ‘cost’, of the wellbeing and standard of life, of those doing the caring; this is not accounted for even by the caregivers. Coming from a background of 'care work' , I believe a sense of individual and collective wellbeing can emerge from performing, and ‘understanding’ EW, but only If ‘cared’ for in a more considered way. And only if the idea of health begins to be seen in a ‘eco-relative’ way, embodying mind, body and environment. In the UK, services such as the NHS and Social Services etc, do ‘work’ and are more effective for overall ‘social health’ than in other countries, but again, the cost of this is invisible and unrecognised. Hothchild talks about a "global heart transplant" where love is transferred from the Third World to the First World. This is where poor women from less developed countries fill the "care deficit" in developed countries where the need for care has expanded, and state support for it has diminished (Hochschild 2002, 39). Patricia Hill Collins identifies this through the lens and experience of African American Women in her book ‘Black Feminist Thought’, she writes ‘the exploitation of Black women’s labor is essential to U.S. capitalism, Black women’s long-standing ghettoization in service occupations, represents the economic dimension of oppression’ (Davis 1981; Marable 1983; Jones 1985; Amott and Matthaei 1991). These are examples of ways that Care crosses cultures, and cuts through the intersections, and examples of the relationship between trauma, empathy and the capacity to Care.
Cultural mechanisms and conceptions of collectivism/individualism, self/other, within different cultures and social groups also affect our relationship to ‘Care Work’. Learning from these different approaches and ways of being, could help to create a better overall health in care work, creating new patterns and values. Intersectionality means connecting the points of our micro-narratives; I noticed a link between western ‘individualism, (a mode of being more prevalent in privileged groups) and the experience of stress and burnout caused by emotional work. I began to question what made Care work more manageable or fulfilling in collectivistic cultural contexts; for example faith communities. Outside of moral obligation, I think that it’s an understanding of ‘interdependence’, which in turn creates feelings of safety, purpose and belonging (Mesquita and Delvaux 2013). Caring for others as you do the ‘self’ is accepted, normalised and appreciated.
Shifting ‘managing> feelings to >‘valuing’ feeling>‘absorbing’ feelings >‘transforming’ feelings………
the act of painting, the act of creating.
A Capability for Care, Who care’s - Specifications
Can this mentality exist outside of the context of faith? I recognised a correlation between the capacity and capability of ‘Emotional Work’, and experience of trauma, inequality, and/or experience of being the ‘other’ or less than. This connection suggested that there is a co-dependence between empathy, trauma and capability to care.Withthe exception of faith driven vocational ‘Care-Givers’, which often subsequently intersect with other intersectional identities. For example, White, British, heteronormal, neurotypical, upper class men are the least likely ‘identity’, to be found, or to situate themselves, in roles that demand high levels of emotional work. Instead normally existing in managerial high paid roles that involve less EW, or that is often picked up by lower paid colleagues (James, 1992). Extending a perpetuating cycle of dominance, through subordination of care work. For example, dominant masculinity hegemonizes; and normative femininities continue to be associated with empathy, low status and low pay. So, concurrently, a revaluation of EW and Care would also destabilize current gendered norms, and the associated social ranking values; such as physical dominance and aggression which do not currently serve the ecosystem as a whole. This is supported by Psychological Neural-Social research ‘Understanding Social hierarchies: The neural and psychological Foundations of Status Perception’ which explores how hierarchies are formed across human and primate social groups. One of their studies found that an individual's' status affects their perception of ‘others’, because “experience of ‘subjection to risk and trauma initiates higher levels of empathy. They found that ‘Dominant men are less sensitive to the facial cues of male dominance, inferring that lower-status individuals have trained themselves to perceive subtle dominance cues, because they will incur greater costs than higher-status members if they perceive these cues incorrectly’ (Watkins et al, 2010).
In the context of Care work, I am suggesting that each person has a different capacity for trauma and ‘disposition’ to do care-work; to actively empathise with ‘others’. This can be dependent on positionality within intersections, personal history, or religious beliefs. The more trauma that a person is exposed to in early or everyday life, the greater desire and capacity they have for dealing with the emotions of others, alongside their own. There is a complex web of identity traits which are generated, in part by social-cultural location, and the impact of intersectional domination and oppression. And so can mean that Emotional ‘work ‘seems’ easier, or is experienced as ‘second nature’ for ‘others’. Which when combined with the necessity of available ‘low skilled’ work, creates ‘A caring capability’. Producing traits such as sensitivity, empathy, patience; alongside, resilience and agreeability, which currently go hand and hand with lower career expectations of those which experience lower economic status, gender inequalities. Lived experience of complex trauma, and/or moral religious obligations create the perfect psychological mindset for the environment of care work. A skill set providing a ‘capability’ and necessity to withstand the effects of secondary trauma, for the purpose of economic survival and/or community. This in turn creates a system where intersectional groups are more likely to apply for care roles, and are more ‘open’ for exploitation within them. There needs to be relative affirmation.
Costs of Care - Quantifiability.
To create change, we first need to identify the cost of ‘caring, providing a framework for measurable levels of EW’. Costs manifest as personal, psychological, relational; and so politically. Ethnographies, such as Care = Organization + Physical + Work, in Hospices; (James, 1992) and Rebecca Selbergs 2012 study “Femininity at Work: Gender, Labour and Changing Relation highlight the multi-dimensional nature of Care roles, expose the personal, social, physical and physiological sacrifices, and the extra relational demands carers take on by being exposed to multiple groups/classes/cultures. Burnout is one of the main reasons that people leave the care sector and take time off. In the 1988 report ‘The impact of interpersonal environment on burnout and organizational commitment’ they describe burnout as ‘family work balance and social depletion’, prevalent in occupations where large amounts of time are spent with the problems of others’ (Leiter & Maslach, 1988). Secondary Trauma Stress is also reported as commonplace in nursing, but is also prevalent in less regulated sectors where we see even less safeguarding and care for staff. STS is defined, according to Figley (1995) as “the natural consequent behaviors and emotions resulting from knowledge about a traumatizing event experienced by a significant other’. Stress induced by coming into contact with a traumatized or suffering person. The solution to this is multifaceted; but I believe would improve the standard of care, as well as the standard of life for the carers, and so, providing long-term economic and health benefits to society on the whole, with the added potential to remold current power dynamics and identity politics. I suggest introducing a combination of higher pay, regular mental health check in’s, therapy, measured and limited exposure to trauma and clients would be a good place to begin. Also there is space to draw from new theories and work around trauma, as a site of positive transformation. ‘Post Traumatic GrowthTheory’ developed by psychologists Richard Tedeschi, PhD, and Lawrence Calhoun examines the positive responses and transformation that happens after trauma, one of which includes ‘helping others’. They frame stress not necessarily as a negative but included a component of transformation and personal growth (Aldwin, 2009).
Caring work should be understood as complex and emotionally challenging, psychologically and physically demanding > I would like to see a shift in the perception of work that is emotionally ‘challenging’ to be perceived as ‘important’ and ‘impressive’, as work that is ‘intellectually challenging’ and ‘economically lucrative’ (embodying status ranking traits, dominance and prestige) (Koski, Xie and Olson, 2021).(Hill Collins, 1990). Finally, looking towards Post-Covid policies, recognising ‘Emotional work’ within ‘Social Care Work’ is important when reconsidering new Health Care Paradigms, as it recognises Capitalism alongside the performance and well-being of the Carers as being mutually effective. (Grundy, 2021).
Reflections/Conclusion -
Framing Creativity and Anthropological as a Practice of Reverence and Care
‘Every meaningful appearance of beings involves an event in which a human being takes a being as—as, say, a ship in which one can sail or as a god that one should respect—what unites all the different modes of Being is that they realize some form of presence (present-ness).
The Covid Crisis and BLM movement shifted all of our perspectives, and naturally tested out many of my theories and questions. Care workers, nurses and service jobs were in the forefront of our social and visual media. Did this visibility add value? The covid-19 crisis only unveiled years of undervalue lack of support within the NHS. For me, the lack of ‘PPL’ acted as a metaphor for this neglect within ‘social care work’. Laura Dresser's report revaluing care in 2015 claimed that visibility and numbers would be able to create a significant change to policy (Dresser, 2015). Visibility, time and empathy of care workers was expressed on a large scale all over art platforms, physical publications and social media. However even in 2021 this haThe relationship and dependency between Capitalism, free Emotional Work, empathy and experiences of oppression, struggle and trauma, were magnified, producing collective empathy and social movement. The effect of this STS is yet to be felt. However, recognising the practice of emotional work in different contexts and environments can help us to aid the way we process and manage this in the future. When speaking to people who do emotional work about emotional work, there is a sense of self soothing from the acknowledgement. I think the relationship between, There is a relationship between trauma, suffering and care;
Using creative practice as part of an ethnography provides a new way to talk about invisible sensory notions such as ‘Emotional Work’. The conception of empathy, representation, creativity are tied together by the action ‘emotional work’. Anxiety, uncertainty, trauma all drive empathetic reactions, which hold the possibility of transforming into ‘beauty’ eg, music, pleasure, representation, and relationships. This act of reproducing positive and negative empathy: moving from an ‘urge’ to connect and feel, the same way or a different way. This Framework highlights relations between process, transformation and connection which are intrinsic, to notions of cooperation, social change and relationships between self and other, including our environment. The way we portrait, represents how we imagine and conceive ourselves, and so do the traits that we value.
Combining Anthropology and Art left me feeling like I had been neglecting my creative practice, and specifically neglecting ‘aesthetics’/‘beauty’ within the inquiry of care. There was a clash between my artistic ego, and the need to draw a conclusion. Aligning the visual and aesthetic quality of the ‘Art with the theory was important to me. In Bell Hooks Essay ‘Love as the Practice of Freedom’ she writes about how joy needs to be documented more. There is a Joy in ‘Care Work’ in Emotional Work, but it is worth a lot more than ‘we’ comprehended, and so worth representing, same, same. Trauma is relevant to joy, focusing on one or the other, within a process of transformation creates a fragmented picture (bad/aesthetics). Hook emphasizes the importance of service. Within the current value system of the West any task or job that is related to "service" has been devalued. This can also be seen in neurological studies on primates, where physical dominance is favoured. Service strengthens our capacity to know compassion and deepens our insight to new perspectives to the ‘self’. Creative research practice’s allow us to represent with care, because it reflects ‘us’,‘I’ other, our ego. Susan Jewell explores this in her paper ‘Surface Materials and Aspects of Care’, why she makes, she responded ‘Because I care’. This is subjective and personal, but an act to create something from an idea, for whatever reason is care-full, egotistical and an attempt to connect to others. I want to frame contemporary anthropology as subjective, as much as it is relational, but also as an inclusive act of giving and receiving. Our material (art, eachother, nature) is a collaborator, (Jewell P49) in creating future knowledge, perceptions and ontologies. A so-called post colonial landscape. Valuing Care, Careworkers will create a different social dynamic, and could act as a signifier of change, but won't necessarily end hierarchical systems. I am more interested in adapting our values, based on the needs of our ecosystem/ourselves as far as we can see it. I am equally obsessed with my-self, others and the strength of the medium that connects us. I represent the discipline of anthropology as creative, empathetic, narcissistic, progressive and transformative. We can't separate ourselves from our history, but we can be accountable, change our methods and the direction and speed of our attention, and will do so naturally.