COMMENT: In her recent book (Struggles in (Elderly) Care: A Feminist View, Palgrave Macmillan 2017; see entry for 21 January 2018) Hanne Marlene Dahl makes the point that “struggles over elderly care have intensified” (p. 160). She highlights the increasing emphasis, in Denmark and elsewhere, on making the elderly more independent and “self-responsible” (p. 169). Dahl identifies this “active aging” (p. 167) concept as related to a neo-liberalizing form of regulation (in tune with her post-structuralist perspective she notes that neo-liberalizing is never the only form of regulation; p. 169). One of her concerns is that not all those who are ageing may feel comfortable with this emphasis on independence and indeed may want to resist it.

Elsewhere in Struggles Dahl notes the tendency to stigmatize ageing (p. 140). I am reminded here of Betty Friedan’s 1993 book, The Fountain of Age (Jonathon Cape, London), which sets out to overturn this stigma. Friedan mounts a careful challenge to the view of ageing as “decline” and offers in its place a model of “vital aging” (p. 46). “Vital aging” considers “old age” as another step in human development where we come to display more contextualized understandings of events and people. How far, I want to ask, is “vital aging” from the “active aging” discourse that Dahl convincingly questions?

Set side by side, these accounts pose the challenge of how to critique both the stigma attached to ageing that Friedan emphasizes and the “self-responsibilising” that Dahl identifies. The concept of “social flesh”, which Chris Beasley and I developed, proves useful in challenging this dichotomy (see C. Beasley and C. Bacchi, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future. Beyond trust, care and generosity – Towards an ethic of ‘social flesh’”, Feminist Theory, 8(3): 279-298). As argued in the Research Hub entry on “Theorizing care” (28 January 2018), emphasizing human interdependence and reliance on shared resources and space provides a lever to defend both the need to acknowledge the exigencies of ageing alongside ways to facilitate growth and development.

COMMENT: This entry continues reflections prompted by Hanne Marlene Dahl’s recent book Struggles in (Elderly) Care: A Feminist View (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) (see 21 January, 2018, for previous entry).

One of Dahl’s projects is to consider existing research on care and how to develop a new analytic. She notes that for some years feminists have worked assiduously to ensure that “care” is treated seriously as a political issue. Her Chapter 3 provides a helpful review of many of these interventions.

Drawing on Mol (The logic of care – Health and the problem of patient choice, Routledge, 2008) Dahl endorses the need for a new question to guide research on care. It is time, she suggests, to stop asking “What is care?”, a question that risks essentializing “care” (p. 61). Instead we need to reflect on how we think about care, asking: “How are the changing conditions of care and an attention to power and struggles reframing our theorizing about care?” (p. 62; italics in original). Here the point is that how we talk or theorize about care reflects the changing political landscapes we inhabit. Hence “care” is a “moving feast”; it is unwise theoretically to speak about “it” as a “thing”.

Along similar lines Mol et al. (“Care in Practice: on Normativity, Concepts and Boundaries”, Technoscienza, 21(1), p. 84) refuse to define “care”. The authors explain the limitations imposed by definitions. Put (much too) simply, if we provide a definition of an apple, from that point in time we see, as apples, only those things that fit that description. The same is the case with “care”. How confining!

Changing the target of analysis from “care” as a “thing” to how we talk about or theorize care means examining critically the concepts we use – asking what they allow us to see and what they (may) leave out. This reflexive or self-problematizing approach to research is highlighted in Step 7 of the WPR approach, which states: “Apply this list of questions to your own problem representations”.

One concept that may deserve more scrutiny of this nature is “vulnerability”. A good deal of current feminist analysis deploys this concept or close synonyms (e.g. “precarity”; Puar J 2012. “Precarity talk: a virtual roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejic, Isabel Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanovic”. TDR: The Drama Review 56(4): 163–177).

Work I have undertaken with Chris Beasley suggests that such languages (e.g. “vulnerability”, “precarity”) carry within them an unstated hierarchy between those presumed to be “weak” and those who are considered to be “strong”. Even if the argument is made that we are all “vulnerable” at different stages in our lives, it is important to challenge the weak/strong dichotomy (see Dahl on the importance of trying to avoid reproducing dichotomies; p. 14). To this end Chris Beasley and I have developed the concept of “social flesh”, which draws attention to shared human reliance on social space, infrastructure and resources. In our view this shift from “vulnerability” and “dependence” to embodied interconnection provides grounds for a radical democracy and challenges taken-for-granted privilege (C. Bacchi and C. Beasley, “The Limits of Trust and Respect: Rethinking Dependency”, Social Alternatives, 24(4), 2005: 55-59; see also C. Beasley and C. Bacchi, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future. Beyond trust, care and generosity – Towards an ethic of ‘social flesh’”, Feminist Theory, 8(3): 279-298).

COMMENT: This entry aims to introduce the recent book by Hanne Marlene Dahl entitled Struggles in (Elderly) Care: A Feminist View (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). This rich theoretical text provides the basis for several forthcoming entries on “theorizing care”, “theorizing ageing”, and on “gendering and de-gendering”.

Here I wish to emphasize how Struggles in (Elderly) Care [hereafter referred to as Struggles] illustrates what it means to deploy a poststructural research perspective. Throughout the book Dahl’s focus is on complexity and contingency, and on the processural nature of change. She develops a repertoire of concepts to facilitate analysis of this kind, including some that will be familiar to those working with poststructural frameworks, e.g. “assemblage”, “discourses”, “logics”, “governmentality”, among others.

The key term in the book’s title – Struggles – signals Dahl’s poststructural theoretical positioning. She challenges a view that she sees as dominant in research in the area of elderly care, where the focus is on inevitable and fixed contradictory positions (e.g. “dilemmas”; pp. 76-77). By contrast she points to tensions, conflicts and points of change that produce struggles.

Reflecting her poststructural positioning Dahl notes that her analysis targets a specific context – paid elderly care in Denmark from the 1950s to 2015. Her material is drawn from several research projects conducted over the past two decades. Dahl also specifies that her analysis reflects a critical and feminist viewpoint.

Dahl deploys a range of strategies to ensure that she focuses on a level she describes as “micro”, and that she eschews grand narratives (p. 7, 47). For example, in several places she explains the theoretical benefits of using verbs rather than nouns, e.g. neo-liberalizing rather than neo-liberalism, and gendering (p. 29). At the same time she argues for and illustrates the possibility of drawing broader insights about the nature of the place of “care” in the context of a range of social and political processes – “commodifying, professionalizing, late modernizing, de-gendering, globalizing, bureaucratizing and the advent of neo-liberalism” (p. 19).

These broader insights are linked to the notion of “logics”, drawn from Annemarie Mol’s work (A. Mol, The logic of care – Health and the problem of patient choice, Routledge, 2008; see entry on “ontological politics”, 10 December 2017). Logics are described as “different ways of viewing and providing care” (p. 7), and are treated as synonymous with “governmental rationalities” (p. 129). This key term in Foucauldian-informed analysis is discussed in the Research Hub entry, 7 January 2018. In that entry I emphasize the usefulness of problematizations (brought to attention through the WPR questions; Bacchi WPR CHART) as a way to identify rationalities/logics, clearly a key task in this form of analysis.

Dahl highlights the importance of ensuring that we do not miss important struggles, those that may well be less visible or invisible due to a range of “silencing practices” within “discursive regulation”. To bring these struggles into view, Dahl elaborates three analytic techniques: deconstruction, some comparative discourse analysis and memory work (Chapter 4).

Comment: This entry is prompted by a question from a PhD student, received in late December 2017. The question had to do with a comment I made in the keynote address I delivered at the Fourth Contemporary Drug Problems Conference (“Making Alcohol and Other Drug Realities”) in Helsinki in August 2017. The keynote address can be viewed at https://ndri.curtin.edu.au/events/cdp2017/

In that address I suggest that the WPR approach can be used to critically analyze buildings and other artefacts because, in effect, such artefacts can be seen as proposals that contain problem representations. The student wants to know in what sense buildings can be seen as proposals and why WPR is a useful form of analysis to apply to these kinds of material.

First, I need to mention that part of the purpose of the Helsinki address was to indicate the variety of materials that could usefully be examined critically using WPR. Please watch the video (link above) should you want the full list of kinds of material that I offer for WPR analysis (or see Bacchi, C. (2017). Drug Problematizations and Politics: Deploying a poststructural analytic strategy, Contemporary Drug Problems, 1-12. DOI: 10.1177/009/450917748760). In each case the argument runs thus: what we propose to do about something indicates what we think needs to change and hence what is deemed to be problematic – what the “problem” is represented to be. To apply WPR beyond the policy field, therefore, we need (only) to identify forms of material that can be perceived as “proposals”.

Buildings and other artefacts can be seen as proposals in the sense that they commit to particular ways of organizing the world. It follows that it is possible to ask: “If this building [or some part of a building, e.g. a purpose-built room or facility] is a statement about how things ought to be, what is seen as needing to change and hence as ‘the problem’?” Bottrell and Goodwin (2011, p. 4) use the example of modern schools with their “uni-purpose facilities located on enclosed land, fenced and gated” and how they reflect a “hidden curriculum” that problematizes the moral and cognitive training of young people (“Contextualising schools and communities”. In D. Bottrell & S. Goodwin (Eds.), Schools, communities and social inclusion. South Yarra, Australia: Palgrave Macmillan).

Other authors have drawn attention to the cultural and hence meaning-filled dimensions of buildings (see Woolgar and Jezaun 2013. “The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology studies?” Social Studies of Science, 43, 321–340). The question becomes: how are we to engage critically with artefacts of this kind? WPR, through its seven forms of questioning and analysis (see Bacchi WPR CHART), makes available a critical analytic strategy to interrogate buildings and other artefacts as to their presuppositions and limits, producing useful political analysis of a wide range of materials.

Comment: This entry is prompted by a question from a PhD student received mid-December 2017. The question concerns how to link identified problem representations to particular political rationalities. Using a WPR analysis, problem representations are identified through examining how specific policies produce or enact “the problem” (see Bacchi, Analysing Policy, Pearson Education, 2009). But how, I am asked, can you take the next step and draw links between these representations and particular political rationalities, such as neoliberalism? The short answer is that specific ways of representing “the problem” – e.g. who is held responsible, what is deemed to be the proper domain of government, how relations between governments and business activities are conceptualized, etc. – link to ways of thinking (“political rationalities”) that have a certain coherence (such as social liberalism, neoliberalism, etc.).

A longer reply requires two steps: first, elaborating what is meant by political rationalities; second, showing how these rationalities are linked to problematizations and hence to problem representations.

Rationalities, as used in governmentality studies, have nothing to do with being rational in the conventional sense of the term. Rather, rationalities are rationales, the logics or ways of thinking that make particular modes of government intelligible and hence acceptable. They are not ideologies; nor do they translate into policy in a direct fashion (see Larner, W. [2000]. “Neo-liberalism: Policy, ideology, governmentality”, Studies in Political Economy, 63, 5-25). Instead, based upon forms of knowledge that characterize our intellectual heritage, they underpin contingent routine and mundane governing practices (see Bacchi and Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 43).

The best way to characterize a political rationality is to note that it is a style of problematization (Dean, Mitchell and Hindess, Barry (1998) Governing Australia: Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 9). As suggested in the short answer above, we can best identify a political rationality by considering how aspects of social relations are problematized. For example, a neoliberal mode of rule is commonly associated with governmental practices that presume self-regulation and an entrepreneurial spirit as desirable human traits. In this rationality/rationale, individuals themselves are held to be responsible should their economic or health status fail to meet expected standards. If one observes a pattern within targeted policies that problematizes political subjects in this way, holding them responsible for “failings” – a stance often described as “responsibilization” – one can say that a neoliberal rationality is in evidence. So too, one can examine how social relations more broadly are problematized. For example, considering social relations purely in economic terms can also be linked to a neoliberal rationality (see Calişkan, K. and Callon, M. (2009) Economization, Part 1: Shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization, Economy and Society, 38:3, 369-398; and Birch, K. and Siemiatycki, M. (2016) ‘Neoliberalism and the geographies of marketization: The entangling of state and markets’, Progress in Human Geography, 40(2): 177-198).

The analytic task involves offering ways to interrogate and critique political rationalities that have possible deleterious effects. Here, WPR provokes reflection on the limits in particular ways of conceptualizing governmental and social relations by asking what is not problematized in specific practices and their underlying knowledges (Question 4 on Bacchi WPR CHART). It also directs attention to the forms of subject presumed and hence elicited through practices that produce individuals as responsible for their own health and welfare (Question 5 on Chart).