School of Social and Political Science

Description

Speaker: Dr Ros Greiner (UCL)

Chair: Dr Lucy Lowe

In this seminar Dr Ros Greiner will discuss a number of theoretical advances towards conceptualising the intersection of patriarchy and ableism at the level of the family. She will draw on her doctoral fieldwork, which she conducted with families raising children with Congenital Zika Syndrome in Barranquilla, Colombia.

First, Ros will examine gendered care work in the context of structural violence and the coloniality of disability (Ferrari, 2020). Drawing on the concepts of ‘unmothering’ (Runswick-Cole and Ryan, 2019) and political motherhood (Mateo Medina, 2013; Quintela and Biroli, 2022), she will show how mothers reconceptualise their role as political, and in doing so, publicly assert their child’s personhood.

Next, Ros will turn to the social construction of disability, demonstrating that through the experience of disability discrimination by association, mothers come to occupy the social position of a person with a disability.

Finally, Ros will show that the absence of adequate state support for disabled children is debilitating to both them and their primary caregivers. Drawing together critical Latin American perspectives on care and embodiment (Rodríguez, 2020), interembodiment (Bunkley, 2022) and debility (Puar, 2017), she develops the theory of interembodied debility.

This talk  will set the stage for an interesting discussion of the relationships between gender, reproduction, disability, disablement and care. Ros is particularly interested in exploring the links between her existing work and movements for environmental justice, exploring the acceleration and stratification of debility and disablement in the Anthropocene.

Dr Ros Greiner is a feminist researcher, using qualitative, ethnographic methods to investigate health inequities. She currently works as a Lecturer in Global Health at Institute for Global Health at University College London. Her work analyses the intersecting themes of gender, disability, and care under neoliberalism, drawing on critical disability studies and decolonial feminism, with a focus on Latin American perspectives.

This is an in-person event which is co-hosted by the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropoloy (EdCMA) and the Anthropology, Environment and Health research cluster.

Please note that this event may be recorded. The recording will be used for internal University of Edinburgh teaching purposes only.