About

Cov-Care examines the intertwining of institutional structures and affective relations of care addressing gender-based violence during Covid-19 in Greece. Dominant representations of Covid-19 call for individual responsibility and social distancing dubbed as “care for the self” – “care for the others.” With emphasis on the ability of the body to produce (herd/personal) immunity or surrender to the disease, care has become a measurable phenomenon connected to people’s individual adherence to social-distancing orders so as to “protect” the self and society, while the healthcare system fails to meet the pandemic’s exigencies. Contrary to those public discourses, this project sheds light on the obscured complexities of care provision, the injustices, and the multiple forms that violence has taken in the name of or as a corollary of Covid-19 safety. Through a bottom-up approach to the experiences of GBV care providers and recipients (natives and migrants/refugees), we investigate how violence and care intersect, or how the rubrics of safety, home, and social distancing – mediated by gender, race, sexuality, religion, class, etc.– shape differential presents and unequal futures. By introducing the notion of affectscapes of care and by combining anthropological and philosophical questions on subjectivity, affect, biopolitics, and performativity with ethnographic dilemmas on structural violence and on the social effects of resilience when populations are guided by governments to adapt to change and uncertainty at times of multiple crises, we ask: On what affective -scapes do GBV care provisions and processes of resilience rely? Heeding the urgency to connect ethnography and theory with public engagement – a persistent debate in social anthropology – this research focuses on a wide and clear dissemination of our findings and conceptual frameworks to academic and lay audiences.