Anonymous Care Research Articles

Traces of Kinship Care: Preliminary Findings From Nansen Passport Holders’ Documents in the League of Nations and Arolsen Archives

This article offers a new perspective on a body of literature that has been growing since the modern concept of “statelessness” became a pressing concern of diplomats and the displaced alike more than a century ago: it studies the “voices” of the stateless as captured in the archival documents of the organizations designed to deal with refugees through the lens of family and kinship care. This will help us to gain an understanding of how stateless refugees and the officials, administrators and humanitarians who assisted them navigated and negotiated the kinds of care requested, needed, withheld, or provided, and that have been captured in the documents coming out of these processes. By positioning care as relational and embedded within historical documents, this contribution offers glimpses of the physical remnants of the processes that took shape between the various actors. From these explorations, it follows that the distinction between anonymous care, as provided by humanitarian or state organizations, and personal care may not have been so clear-cut: sometimes helpers and those being helped turn out both to be Nansen passport holders. The focus on family and kin moreover allows to move beyond the institutional focus on individuals and to understand statelessness and displacement as an experience of families and communities instead.

Nothing about us without us: Centering lived experience and revolutionary care in efforts to end and prevent homelessness in Canada

Following the efforts of Disability-Justice advocates who have fought for decades for the representation of people with disabilities in matters that impact them, this paper considers the importance of centering people with lived experience of homelessness and housing insecurity in efforts to end and prevent homelessness. This paper has three interrelated goals: situating the work being done by activists with lived experience of homelessness within broader homelessness prevention and housing rights advocacy in Canada; outlining the importance of centering voices of lived experience in research and advocacy contexts, focusing on both ‘naming’ power and privilege in advocacy work, and navigating embodied knowledge and epistemic authority; and highlighting the ethics of ‘care’ (as theorized by disability and feminist scholars) as fundamental to the process of doing radical and justice-oriented work. To accomplish this, this paper examines two oppositional faces of ‘care’–anonymous care, structured by the demands of neoliberal capitalism, and a potential antidote, revolutionary care. The paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2017 in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory to contextualize lived experience self-advocacy. Additional examples are drawn from the new Canadian Lived Experience Leadership Network, as well as the author’s lived experience of homelessness and activist work in the context of homelessness prevention. Ultimately, this paper offers a critique of efforts to include lived experts in the fight to end and prevent homelessness that, despite good intentions, often reproduce power imbalances–suggesting mutual, reciprocal, revolutionary care as one possible path forward. Power operates in subtle ways in advocacy contexts as an unintended driver of exclusion and discrimination: recognizing and disrupting this dynamic is integral to the goals of ending and preventing homelessness and achieving housing justice in Canada.

A Crisis of Care: The Politics and Therapeutics of a Rape Crisis Hotline.

This article explores the politics and contingencies of care provided to survivors of sexual assault on a rape crisis hotline in the U.S.'s mid-Atlantic region. The support provided to survivors on the hotline represents a crisis of care, one fomented by the victim services sector's failure to address the limitations of a crisis-oriented paradigm or survivors' chronic trauma. The tension between the survivor-centered model of the hotline and the mental health needs of clients represents a friction of utility-a misalignment between the care hotline advocates provide and the support survivors seek. The anonymous care and internal contradictions of the hotline also results in high rates of vicarious trauma for advocates. Given the polysemic dimensions of care exhibited on the hotline, the service represents a form of negative care, one that accounts for gaps in survivors' care yet still fails to empower proactive means of recovery.