Rosie Read (Bournemouth University)
Gendered Compassion: Women and Volunteering in the Czech Republic
January 16, 2013, 17:00
Department of Methods in the Social Sciences, Landesgerichtsstraße 20, Room H10
Seminar co-organised with the Department for Methods in the Social Sciences

The reconfiguration of welfare arrangements across Europe is taking place in tandem with an increased policy focus on volunteering. Volunteering is often depicted as promoting all kinds of social ‘goods’, from expanding civil society, promoting social cohesion and a sense of community belonging, to providing new routes to employment and reviving public services (or at least, making them cheaper). In this paper, I explore the emergence of new discourses about volunteering in the Czech Republic in the 1990s. Non-governmental organisations and religious groups promoted volunteering as part of a broader critique of professional, institutionalised welfare provision. Volunteering was seen as a way of ‘humanising’ health care, for instance. These ideas about volunteering became embedded both at national and local levels. I argue that one important effect of these transformations is that they change and reproduce women’s unpaid caring roles in society, and articulate older class inequalities in new ways.

Rosie Read is currently Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at Bournemouth University, UK. She has conducted a number of research projects in the Czech Republic and the UK exploring issues of gender and care work, volunteering, welfare transformation and the state.

Eyal Ben-Ari (European Centre for Japanese Studies)
Anthropology, Research and Armed State Violence: Some Observations from an Israeli Anthropologist
January 23, 2013, 18:00, HS-C

Against the background of the controversy over the relations between anthropologists and the military, I use my observations as a scholar of war and the armed forces to do the following things: First, I situate the ongoing debate as a peculiarly American rendering of global academic processes marking our discipline. Second, I contend that while heavily coloured by American biases, this debate nevertheless carries implications for scholars around the world because of the structural centrality of American academia. Third, I maintain that we anthropologists have a political and moral duty to continue studying the military and processes of militarization and militarism including studies enabled by the armed forces because of what they may reveal about the bases for using state-mandated armed force around the world. Fourth, I explain how fieldwork such as I have been carrying out among Israeli troops implicates a number of rather particular issues and necessitates a careful process of dialogue with the subjects of our study.

Eyal Ben-Ari is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Honorary Research Fellow of the European Centre for Japanese Studies. He has carried out research in Israel, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. In Japan he has carried out research on white-collar communities, early childhood education, and the Japanese community in Singapore. He is currently doing research on the place of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces in Japanese society. In Israel he has studied various aspects of the Israel Defence Forces and placed them in comparative perspective with the militaries of the industrial democracies.