Reconfigurations of Care under Austerity

'Reconfigurations of Care under Austerity' is an original and timely project that stems from long-term ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between July 2015 and January 2017 in a self-organised social clinic of solidarity in Athens, Greece. In the critical period of the economic crisis, the public healthcare sector underwent a severe retrenchment programme during which time, starting in 2010, more and more Greek citizens found their medical needs unmet.

The social clinics of solidarity represent a local, spontaneous response to the economic crisis: they try to compensate for what the state has been unable to provide during the first years of economic austerity. In such grassroots provision of care, the social clinics of solidarity mobilise local and culturally inflected ideas about care and biomedicine.

While social scientific research has mainly focused on the positive dimension of volunteering and solidarity, the adverse social and medical effects of free provision of pharmaceuticals have been so far overlooked. The project sheds light onto the micropolitics of care hidden behind the circulation and consumption of different classes of medication and explores how access to free medicine has increasingly shaped people's reliance on, compliance with, and dependence on pharmaceuticals.

Building on my previous experience with academic publications and benefitting from my skills as an illustrator and graphic artist, I will combine standard academic outputs (e.g. monograph, articles) with innovative ethnographic media (graphic ethnography) to popularise key findings and maximise the impact of my research for the benefit of local audiences in Greece (professionals and volunteers in the social clinics and individuals involved in grassroots solidarity movements). I will further pursue opportunities to share the benefits of using artwork to generate impact within the academic community.

I am to use the network established by the SeNSS DTP in the Southeast to bring together early-career researchers interested in multimodal ethnography. I am committed both to providing practical and methodological training on alternative media for impactful dissemination and sharing my knowledge and experience with a wider community of researchers and scholars.