The Weight of Care: Negotiating Responsibility from the Clinic to the State

Abstract (English)

Across diverse domains of health, welfare, and crisis, the concept of responsibility is often deployed as a straightforward call for individual accountability. This panel challenges such simplistic formulations, bringing together ethnographic research from across the globe to explore responsibility not as a fixed duty, but as a deeply political, relational, and contested process.

Drawing on case studies from conditional cash transfer programs in Colombia, oncology wards in France, pediatric transplant care in Australia, community health work in Bangladesh, selective mutism therapy, and pandemic response in Japan, these papers collectively investigate a critical question: Who is truly held responsible for care, and why?

Together, we reveal a persistent tension between responsibility as a top-down tool of discipline and control and as a grassroots ethic of reciprocity and moral labor. The findings demonstrate how the burden of responsibility is consistently offloaded onto individuals—particularly women, patients, and frontline workers—thereby obscuring the failures of medical systems, state policies, and humanitarian regimes. By examining moments of illness, crisis, and intervention, this panel makes visible the often-invisible work of care and exposes the structural weight borne by those positioned at the nexus of institutional demands and human needs. Ultimately, we argue for a shift away from an individualistic focus on adherence and compliance toward a more critical, relational understanding of how care and responsibility are distributed, negotiated, and resisted in practice.This panel seeks contributions that investigate the intersections of care and responsibility in health contexts globally. We invite paper proposals focusing on the intricate and often contested relationship between care and responsibility within (but not limited to) health and healing practices. In an era marked by increasingly complex health systems, structural inequalities, and global crises, the ethics and politics of care have taken on renewed significance. At the same time, notions of responsibility are being redefined, distributed, and resisted across multiple actors, including patients, families, healthcare professionals, communities, and states
We encourage submissions that critically examine the ways in which care is both an ethical practice and a site of power, and how responsibility is ascribed, internalized, or contested in different medical and socio-political landscapes.
We welcome papers engaging with, but not limited to, the following themes:

- Moral economies of care and the distribution of responsibility (Mol 2008; Han 2012);

-Care work and the burdens of responsibility within families and communities (Ticktin 2011; Thelen 2015);

-Intersections between care, responsibility and gendered expectations (Glenn 2012);

-Institutional care practices and systemic failures in assuming responsibility (Garcia 2010; Livingston 2012);

-The impact of neoliberal reforms and policies on shaping responsibilities (Muehlebach 2012);

- Health policies and the delegation of responsibility to patients and caregivers (Biehl 2013);

- Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial perspectives on care and responsibility (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2003; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017);

- The role of the state in care provision and the politics of neglect (Das 2015; Redfield 2013);

- Global health interventions and transnational responsibilities (Nguyen 2010; Adams 2016).