Title: Calculating Care: Reinvesting in a Burkina Faso Market through Crisis
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Consolidating my doctoral research by producing the book proposal and first two chapters of a monograph During the fellowship, I will produce and submit a book proposal and develop the first two chapters of a monograph based on my doctoral research. The monograph, "Calculating Care: Reinvesting in a Burkina Faso Market Through Crisis", will document the affective and cognitive work required of market vendors to keep their lives and livelihoods going through a protracted crisis. Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork in Ouagadougou, it develops a core argument that practices of care and practice of calculation at the micro level are co-constitutive, and that viewing them as such offers a perspective through which to capture an under-explored facet of the labour of managing disproportionate exposures to uncertainty. Through rich ethnographic accounts, this monograph will trace how vendors had to exercise increasingly deft expertise to allocate labour and other resources, and safeguard what they couldn't afford to lose. The first two chapters Chapter 1, "Calculating Care: The Work of Reorienting through Uncertainty", and Chapter 2, "Managing the Unmanageable in the Market's Margins", will be developed through the fellowship and will develop the core conceptual contributions of my doctoral research, arguing for the analytical power of the concept of "calculating care" in seeing and documenting the work of managing disproportionate exposure to uncertainty. Additional fieldwork (see below) will also enrich the monograph proposal. Extending my research experience and expertise through follow-up fieldwork I will undertake an additional piece of fieldwork at the same site as my PhD research, developing further insights relating to how participants exercise care for their physical bodies through practices of calculation through the Covid-19 pandemic shifted. This fieldwork will enrich the monograph proposal, and support the production of a short film for wider dissemination. Improving my publication record with two additional academic outputs I will submit an article entitled "Exhausting Edges: Saturations of Calculating Care for Female Market Vendors in Burkina Faso", based on Chapter 4 of the monograph to the highly ranked journal Development and Change. This article will analyse the gendered factors that shape distributions of responsibility for deploying and reconfiguring resources, particularly in managing the interdependencies between life at the market and life at home, intervening in key debates about gender and labour in development studies. A second output is a chapter for a book on "Mending and Repair across Africa" (target publisher: Berghahn). Entitled "Minding Margins: Caring and Repairing through Crisis at a Burkina Faso Market", this chapter will develop ethnographic material from the thesis on the repair of objects as an expression of the changing limits of what forms of aspiration or risk were affordable for vendors. Although this will be mostly prepared by October (see "Post-Doctoral Experience"), the final submission of the chapters is scheduled for November 2021 and so I will be finalising this chapter during the fellowship. Increasing impact and extending my research expertise by co-creating a short film I will make a short film with interlocutors, extending the reach of this research to broader academic and non-academic audiences. Through a new and more broadly accessible medium, this film will show what the work of calculating care looks like for different vendors, depending on their own configurations of resources and responsibilities. As well as being disseminated through screenings and entered into festivals, the film will be hosted on its own website with a range of resources such as learning guides and accessible distillations of key themes, serving as a teaching resource and an entry-point to the research for practitioners and researchers across disciplines.

Lay abstract: The proposed research will build on my doctoral research, where I explored the intellectual and emotional work required to manage poverty and increasing insecurity in a Burkina Faso market. Financial management is a key topic in International Development with neoclassical microeconomics and behavioural economics enjoying narrative authority in mainstream discourses on the economic behaviour of the poor. This body of literature and associated practices understand financial management as making choices between competing knowable priorities that can and should be traded off to maximise an individual or nuclear family's composite level of wellbeing. However, through grounded ethnographic work, critical development scholars from anthropology and economic geography have developed a rich base of evidence for the complexity that people manage through their financial management practices. However, these bodies of literature stop short of treating the everyday calculative practices of the poor as labour. My PhD illuminated how vendors "got by with what [they] have" (se débrouillent avec ce qu'on a) through a protracted security and economic crisis, deftly responding to dramatic and unpredictable changes in what they could afford to care about, and what they could not afford to neglect. As well as striving to maintain their businesses, this group of traders patched and pre-empted losses relating to their social connections, their objects, their health, their physical spaces and their hopes for the future, pushing back against intensifying threats. The emotional and cognitive efforts of their calculative practices became heightened and more visible, illuminating what they cared about, and reflecting their changing scope of agency in exercising this care. I have called this labour 'calculating care', and I argue that the complexity and amount of this work a person has to do corresponds to the (under)valuation of their labour, and body, through socially constructed inequalities. The monograph will illustrate what this work does, the expertise it requires, and the toll it takes. It will interrogate this central concept through the existing research of my PhD, but also through additional fieldwork that traces how the threats and opportunities that shaped interlocutors' lives have materialised and shifted over time. I will submit the monograph proposal to publishers and editors with clear expertise and reach in the fields of development and anthropology, such as the International African Library series (Cambridge University Press), Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning series (University of Chicago Press), or it would be an ideal fit for a new book series focused on critical perspectives in development edited by my mentor Paul Gilbert and my PhD supervisor Dinah Rajak. There has been a recent bloom of widespread interest in how we can and should understand the disproportionate levels of work required to manage vulnerability in relation to systemic inequalities. Alongside the monograph proposal and introductory paragraphs, I will co-produce a public-facing short film with key interlocutors, relating to key themes that have emerged from this research about the everyday practices of care and calculation through which they manage the structural violence that bears down on them. As well as arranging screenings in relevant academic settings, I will submit this film to festivals (e.g. RAI Film Festival; Global Voices Film Festival), to broaden its reach. I will also create a website for the film, with information on arranging screenings, a more easily shareable trailer version and resources to contextualise the film and increase its impact, such as learning resources for teaching, and accessible summaries of the key themes. This film will thus be helpful for teaching as a legacy output. I anticipate the audio of the film to be mixed between Mooré and French, with versions with each Mooré, French and English subtitles for broader reach.

Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE