Hello all,

You are invited to join this public lecture by Chris Chapman. Please register in advance!

Kate

Public lecture: Wed, Apr 10, 2024

12:20-1:10pm MT, on Zoom

Register in advance:

https://cuboulder.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJApceGrrD4tGdcRkfoEv8PB7W0BIwWMknn-

 

Yusuke's Story: Coming of Age in Care and the Precarity of Social Welfare in Japan

Dr. Christopher Chapman

Visiting Scholar at the University of Hawaii, Postdoctoral Affiliate at the University of Oxford

 

Children's voices are often marginalized in child welfare, yet they offer important insight into the design and delivery of social care. Drawing on yearlong fieldwork in a residential care institution, I explore how one young person, Yusuke, sees himself and his society. I consider how his daily movements in and out of the institution form a wide itinerary of social and affective encounters. I analyze how the journeys of being-in-care index both a lived present and embodied past, sometimes invoking both at once in ambiguous, unplanned ways. Relating this to the broader trajectory of care outcomes, I suggest how the child welfare system injects new forms of social precarity into children's lives by way of these forced journeys into care--how children are remade into children of the state. I find overall that the quest of seeking, listening to, and retelling marginalized stories contextualizes new possibilities for understanding the relationship between politics, space, and memory.

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Kathryn E. Goldfarb
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Colorado at Boulder
1350 Pleasant St.
Boulder, CO 80309
Hale Science 350 | Campus Box 233 UCB
Office: Hale Science 466
Office phone: 303.492.1589
kathryn.goldfarb@colorado.edu