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，在那里我探索了管理布基纳法索市场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，新古典主义微观经济学和行为经济学在关于穷人经济行为的主流论述中享有权威。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优先事项之间做出选择，这些优先事项可以而且应该被权衡，以最大化个人或核心家庭的综合福祉水平。然而，通过扎根的人种学工作，人类学和经济地理学的关键发展学者为人们通过他们的财务管理实践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力。我的博士学位阐明了供应商是如何通过一场旷日持久的安全和经济危机，巧妙地应对他们能够负担得起的东西和他们不能忽视的东西方面的戏剧性和不可预测的变化。除了努力维持自己的业务，这群交易员还修补和预防了与他们的社会关系、对象、健康、物理空间和对未来的希望有关的损失，以抵御日益加剧的威胁。他们在计算实践中的情感和认知努力变得更加明显，说明了他们关心的是什么，并反映了他们在行使这种照顾时代理范围的变化。我把这种劳动称为“计算护理”，我认为，一个人必须做的这项工作的复杂性和数量，与通过社会构建的不平等而对他们的劳动和身体的(低估)估值相对应。这本专著将说明这项工作的作用、所需的专业知识以及所付出的代价。它将通过我博士的现有研究来询问这一核心概念，还将通过额外的田野工作来追踪塑造对话者生活的威胁和机会是如何随着时间的推移而变成现实和变化的。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，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和我的博士生导师Dinah Rajak编辑的专注于发展中的批判性视角的新书系列。最近，人们对如何而且应该理解管理与系统性不平等有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。除了专论提案和介绍性段落外，我还将与主要对话者共同制作一部面向公众的短片，与这项研究中出现的关键主题有关，这些主题是关于他们管理压在他们身上的结构性暴力的日常护理和计算做法。除了安排相关学术机构的放映外，我还将把这部电影提交给电影节(例如RAI电影节；全球之声电影节)，以扩大其影响范围。我还将为这部电影创建一个网站，提供有关安排放映的信息、更容易分享的预告片版本和资源，以使电影与背景联系起来并增加其影响力，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，这部电影将有助于作为遗产输出的教学。我预计这部电影的音频将混合在Mooré和法语之间，有两个Mooré的版本，法语和英语字幕，以便更广泛地传播。

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.