KEYNOTE: Images of Care – Ways of Looking, Ways of Caring: Towards a Visual Anthropology of Care

Keynote by Barbara Pietà
Location: Lecture Hall
Part of Workshop I

What does an anthropology of care look like? What types of images – and more specifically, what ways of looking at care relations – has this scholarship generated? And how has (or how can) visual anthropology further transform these ways of seeing? If, as we argue, care is intrinsically related to visuality (Pietà and Favero 2021), then how can anthropologists of care and people they work with, ‘see, are able, allow and made to see and, to how they see this seeing and the unseen therein’ (Foster 1988, ix)?

In this keynote I will address these questions by inviting the audience to cast their experimentally-minded look at images – and more broadly at manifold strategies of looking – generated by ethnographers who have crafted stories of human and more-than-human coping with insecurity and suffering. This will involve discussing the type of visual and sensory discernment I have developed during my fieldwork with older adults (and their carers) living with dementia in Northeast Italy, and putting this type of looking into the company of the looking developed by other ethnographers or visual scholars exploring relations and practices of care.