Economies of Care and Politics of Repair: Co-constitution of Displacement, State and Kinship
Saana’s PhD dissertation, “Economies of Care and Politics of Return,” explored how life is sustained under conditions of displacement and chronic crisis in postcolonial Zimbabwe. It focuses on the co-constitution of bureaucratic and intimate care practices across nations and generations, empirically investigating the life-worlds of low-income Zimbabwean migrants who return home from South Africa at different stages of the life cycle, from birth to death. The study is based on long-term ethnographic research conducted after the 37-year rule of Robert Mugabe, during the “New Dispensation” era. Research sites included Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, as well as the border areas and South African urban margins.
Through developing the analytical concept of “economies of care,” the dissertation examines the institutions and ideals underpinning both individual livelihoods and state functions amidst multiple crises. Economies of care encompass not only material conditions but also the social, moral, and religious resources that sustain material and social life. This concept articulates how individuals and families navigate and orchestrate diverse forms and sources of intimate and bureaucratic demands. These include feeding children, repatriating children and dying family members across borders, navigating court processes, and engaging with bureaucratic systems to access alimony from absent fathers and secure citizenship certificates. In a context where an estimated one-quarter of the population lives across borders, the dissertation examines how citizens and state officials invent new—and refashion old—forms, agents, relations, and institutions of care.
Saana’s postdoctoral research shifts focus from the Global South to the Global North, examining reconciliation and the politics of repair in the context of postcolonial child removals from Greenland to Denmark. Based on ethnographic research among Inuit people who were displaced from their birth families and emplaced into Danish families in the name of modernization and the ‘child’s best interest,’ this research investigates the processes of repair and reconciliation. Drawing on ethnographic materials and archival resources, it asks: How can intergenerational damage and trauma be repaired? How do victims of Denmark’s postcolonial modernization politics claim recognition and justice? In legal monetary compensation cases, how are suffering and loss monetized, and which forms of suffering remain economically worthless? Finally, the research explores the symbolic and pragmatic meanings of various forms of repair for both victim-survivors and the state. The research is part of a comparative, ethnographic project “Postcolonial apology and Legacies of Problematic pasts“.
–> Project: Postcolonial apology and Legacies of Problematic pasts
Saana is also part of a multi-sited, collaborative research project that explores the conditions and relations of future-making in impoverished urban communities in Zimbabwe and Trinidad and Tobago. The project examines the relationship between the state and its urban margins, aiming to produce and share new knowledge about the everyday politics of communities that are distanced from political discussions and decision-making at the national level.
–> Project: Imagining Futures in the Margins of the State