Anna Ayeh- Parenting in/with Institutions: Bureaucracy, Morality, and Unequal Politics of Care in German Academia
Lecture abstract
This talk examines how institutions – both a German university as ethnographic field and the broader institutional frameworks that govern care – shape practices and possibilities of parenting and career-making. Within the university, “family friendliness” is prominently performed yet routinely undermined. At the centre of this contradiction lies institutional childcare: its ‘absent presence’ shapes how parenting is enabled, constrained, or rendered invisible. By tracing how (child)care infrastructures intersect with bureaucratic routines, temporal regimes, and moral claims on parenting, the paper explores how the university becomes both the site and the agent of producing inequalities.
About the lecturer
Ich arbeite zu differenzierten und ungleichen Formen des Wissens, Arbeitens, und Fürsorgens in Europa und Westafrika und möchte verstehen, wie die intersektionale Positionierung von Menschen die Art und Weise beeinflusst, wie sie Fürsorge leisten und erhalten. Dabei interessiere ich mich besonders für die Wechselwirkungen zwischen (hegemonialem) Wissen, Sozialpolitiken und gelebten Care-Praktiken.