Calculating Care: Reinvesting in a Burkina Faso Market through Crisis

拟议的研究将建立在我的博士研究的基础上，我在那里探索了在布基纳法索市场管理贫困和日益不安全所需的智力和情感工作。财务管理是国际发展的一个关键话题，新古典微观经济学和行为经济学在关于穷人经济行为的主流话语中享有叙事权威。这些文献和相关实践将财务管理理解为在相互竞争的、可知的优先事项之间做出选择，这些优先事项可以而且应该相互权衡，以最大限度地提高个人或核心家庭的综合幸福水平。然而，通过扎实的民族志工作，来自人类学和经济地理学的批判性发展学者已经为人们通过财务管理实践进行管理的复杂性提供了丰富的证据基础。然而，这些文献没有将穷人的日常计算实践视为劳动。我的博士论文阐明了供应商是如何在一场旷日持久的安全和经济危机中“依靠现有资源生存下来”的，并巧妙地应对了他们可以关注和不能忽视的重大和不可预测的变化。除了努力维持自己的生意，这群商人还弥补和预防了与他们的社会关系、他们的物品、他们的健康、他们的物理空间和他们对未来的希望有关的损失，反击日益加剧的威胁。他们的计算实践的情感和认知努力变得更加突出和明显，照亮了他们所关心的，并反映了他们在行使这种关心时不断变化的代理范围。我把这种劳动称为“计算性护理”，我认为，通过社会建构的不平等，一个人必须做的工作的复杂性和数量与他们的劳动和身体的（低）估值相对应。专著将说明这项工作是做什么的，它需要的专业知识，以及它所付出的代价。它将通过我博士学位的现有研究来拷问这个核心概念，同时也将通过额外的实地考察来追溯影响对话者生活的威胁和机会是如何随着时间的推移而具体化和转变的。我将把专著提案提交给在发展和人类学领域具有明确专业知识和影响力的出版商和编辑，例如国际非洲图书馆系列（剑桥大学出版社），芝加哥意义实践研究系列（芝加哥大学出版社），或者它将非常适合由我的导师Paul Gilbert和我的博士导师Dinah Rajak编辑的专注于发展批判性观点的新书系列。最近，人们对我们如何能够而且应该理解管理与系统性不平等相关的脆弱性所需的不成比例的工作水平产生了广泛的兴趣。除了专题论文提案和引言段落外，我将与主要对话者共同制作一部面向公众的短片，涉及从这项研究中出现的关键主题，即日常的谨慎和计算实践，他们通过这些实践来管理压迫他们的结构性暴力。除了在相关的学术机构安排放映外，我也会把影片提交给电影节（例如RAI电影节、全球之声电影节），以扩大它的影响力。我还将为这部电影创建一个网站，提供安排放映的信息，一个更容易分享的预告片版本，以及将电影置于背景中并增加其影响的资源，例如用于教学的学习资源，以及关键主题的可访问摘要。因此，这部影片将有助于教学作为一个遗产输出。我预计这部电影的音频将在摩尔语和法语之间混合，每个版本都有摩尔语，法语和英语字幕，以扩大覆盖面。

The proposed research will build on my doctoral research, where I explored the intellectual and emotional work required to manage poverty and increasing insecurity in a Burkina Faso market. Financial management is a key topic in International Development with neoclassical microeconomics and behavioural economics enjoying narrative authority in mainstream discourses on the economic behaviour of the poor. This body of literature and associated practices understand financial management as making choices between competing knowable priorities that can and should be traded off to maximise an individual or nuclear family's composite level of wellbeing. However, through grounded ethnographic work, critical development scholars from anthropology and economic geography have developed a rich base of evidence for the complexity that people manage through their financial management practices. However, these bodies of literature stop short of treating the everyday calculative practices of the poor as labour. My PhD illuminated how vendors "got by with what [they] have" (se débrouillent avec ce qu'on a) through a protracted security and economic crisis, deftly responding to dramatic and unpredictable changes in what they could afford to care about, and what they could not afford to neglect. As well as striving to maintain their businesses, this group of traders patched and pre-empted losses relating to their social connections, their objects, their health, their physical spaces and their hopes for the future, pushing back against intensifying threats. The emotional and cognitive efforts of their calculative practices became heightened and more visible, illuminating what they cared about, and reflecting their changing scope of agency in exercising this care. I have called this labour 'calculating care', and I argue that the complexity and amount of this work a person has to do corresponds to the (under)valuation of their labour, and body, through socially constructed inequalities. The monograph will illustrate what this work does, the expertise it requires, and the toll it takes. It will interrogate this central concept through the existing research of my PhD, but also through additional fieldwork that traces how the threats and opportunities that shaped interlocutors' lives have materialised and shifted over time. I will submit the monograph proposal to publishers and editors with clear expertise and reach in the fields of development and anthropology, such as the International African Library series (Cambridge University Press), Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning series (University of Chicago Press), or it would be an ideal fit for a new book series focused on critical perspectives in development edited by my mentor Paul Gilbert and my PhD supervisor Dinah Rajak.There has been a recent bloom of widespread interest in how we can and should understand the disproportionate levels of work required to manage vulnerability in relation to systemic inequalities. Alongside the monograph proposal and introductory paragraphs, I will co-produce a public-facing short film with key interlocutors, relating to key themes that have emerged from this research about the everyday practices of care and calculation through which they manage the structural violence that bears down on them. As well as arranging screenings in relevant academic settings, I will submit this film to festivals (e.g. RAI Film Festival; Global Voices Film Festival), to broaden its reach. I will also create a website for the film, with information on arranging screenings, a more easily shareable trailer version and resources to contextualise the film and increase its impact, such as learning resources for teaching, and accessible summaries of the key themes. This film will thus be helpful for teaching as a legacy output. I anticipate the audio of the film to be mixed between Mooré and French, with versions with each Mooré, French and English subtitles for broader reach.