Ethnographies of Loss, Longing, and the Afterlives of Care

Dr. Lauren Cubellis is Head of the DFG Emmy Noether Research Group Situated Care: Subjectivity, Knowledge, and Labor, at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Her research focuses on the relationship between psyche and society, the contingency of knowledge production, and work and the self in innovative spaces of mental health care, and has been supported by the DFG, the Volkswagen Stiftung, The German Studies Association, the NSF, the DAAD, and the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Her writing has been featured in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and Qualitative Research Methods, among others. Dr. Rebecca J. Lester is a professor of medical and psychological anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, where her research focuses on embodiment, intersubjectivity, and cultural practices of self-cultivation. She is also a licensed practicing psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, trauma, self-harm, and relationship challenges. Dr. Lester has published two award-winning monographs, Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent and Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America, and two edited volumes. Her work has also appeared in Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, among other journals, as well as in public outlets including Scientific American, The Conversation, and Psyche. She is a former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, and past-president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology.

• Introduction: Remnants of Attachment. I. Attachments 1. Care as an Attempt to do Something Good 2. Out of Bounds: Theorising Care’s Binds Beyond Concept 3. Materializing Care in Exile II. Remnants 4. Caring for the Minor 5. Looking Away III. Contours 6. Caring as Epistemic Practice 7. Tracing Nonlethality and Clinical Witnessing in Kashmir IV. Ephemera 8. “Gaming the System” as Strategic Mothering 9. Compromised Care in Carceral/Therapeutic Institutions 10. The Otherwise Care of Bucharest Underground. Retrospective: Out of Practice