Anthropology Speaker Series at WVU - Solidarity, Contradiction, and Care in Austerity Greece

Please join us on Monday, April 4 for a talk and discussion with Dr. Heath Cabot of the University of Pittsburgh. This is the first event in the Anthropology Speaker Series being hosted by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University.

This talk draws on Dr. Cabot's ethnographic research (since 2015) with grassroots healthcare initiatives in Greece in the heart of austerity. These "social solidarity" clinics and pharmacies provided care and medicines via horizontally organized modes of labor and redistribution. Pensioners, unemployed people, and even refugees and migrants assisted equally diverse groups of beneficiaries - some of whom were themselves participants in solidarity work. This talk centers on dominant repertoires through which volunteers theorized the meaning and practice of solidarity. These repertoires often came into conflict, signaling misrecognitions and ambivalences in the field of collective action, sometimes engendering new forms of inequality; yet they also accommodated diverse interactional contexts and needs, enabling participants to manage dilemmas of hierarchy and access to care. 

For more information, please contact Diana Hoyos Gomez, diana.hoyosgomez@mail.wvu.edu.