The biosocial experience of aging during the Covid-19 pandemic. BIO-AGE
Principal Investigator: Aglaia Chatjouli
Webpage: https://bio-age.weebly.com
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to worldwide reconfigurations causing multiple, immediate and long-term effects in everyday and institutional life. The central aim of this project is to contribute to the understanding of the societal consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic by studying and arguing towards the biosocial experience of COVID-19 in the Greek ethnographic context specifically in relation to the elderly (age 65 and over). The project aims at elucidating the (g)local configurations of the ways the dominant biomedical mobilization following the pandemic conjuncture is morphed into a biopolitical project. This will be achieved via methodologically focusing on a) the experiences of the elderly, biomedical staff, care workers and experts, and, b) the anthropological mapping of the formal state and biomedical discourses and practices as they construct life with/after COVID-19.
The key challenge of this project is to unravel the relational attributes of what we see as the emergence of bio-responsibility and bio-care as central pillars of securing societal cohesion in life with/after COVID-19, through the prism of the elderly biosocial experience of the pandemic. This will be elaborated by tracing both biomedical and lay, “biological” and “social” articulations of the COVID-19 disease, in relation to the theoretical problematization of the distinction between the biological and the social in understanding and in monitoring the pandemic as a biosocial phenomenon.
Principal Investigator
Aglaia Chatjouli, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean
Research team
- Venetia Kantsa, Professor, Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean
- Athena McLean, Professor of Anthropology, the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, Central Michigan University
- Aspa Chalkidou, Postdoc Researcher, Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean
- Eirini Papadaki, Postdoc Researcher, Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean
- Giorgos Kostakiotis, Researcher, Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean
- Falia Varelaki, PgD Candidate, Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean
- Panagiotis Tigkas, Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean
- Silas Michalakas, Freelance Visual Anthropologist and Documentary Filmmaker.
Duration
December 2021 – March 2023
Funding
Funded by the Hellenic Foundation of Research and Innovation
(In)fertile citizens: Perceptions, practices, policies and technologies of assisted reproduction in Greece. A multidisciplinary and comparative approach. (In)Fercit.
Principal Investigator: Venetia Kantsa
The research objective is the detailed ethnographic recording of the concepts, practices, policies and technologies of assisted reproduction in Greece, their connection with legal and human rights issues related to (in)fertility and reproduction, and the comparison with similar research initiatives which take place in neighboring (European and non-European) countries – namely Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Turkey, Cyprus and Lebanon.
Key themes: Assisted reproduction, fertility, kinship, family, legal framework, religion, technology.
Principal Investigator
Venetia Kantsa
Research team
- Aglaia Chatjouli
- Ivi Daskalaki
Duration
26/9/2012 – 25/9/2015
Funding
(In)Fercit is a three-year research program developed within the framework of the “Excellence” Program and co-financed by the European Social Fund and the General Secretariat for Research and Technology.
Assisted reproduction and parenthood in Greece. Anthropological approaches of gender, kinship and biopower
Principal Investigator: Venetia Kantsa
The object of the research was the study of the new technologies of reproduction – more specifically the method of assisted reproduction – with reference to the way gender relations are constituted and intertwined, the representations and conceptualizations of parenthood, but also the ways in which the distribution of knowledge related to the reproductive process is controlled. The study was realized through the use of qualitative methods (in-depth open interviews and participant observation), in order to elucidate the ways in which women and men who have used assisted reproduction in Greece perceive and conceptualize their gender and parental relations in social contexts. Furthermore, all the above were studied in relation to the undergoing technological transformations, while particular emphasis was placed on the networks of power that shape reproduction and, by extension, on the issues of compliance and resistance of the subjects to control mechanisms promoted through the NTAs.
Principal Investigator
Venetia Kantsa
Research team
- Deanna Trakas
- Effie Karveli
- Maria Koraki
- Ourania Tsoukala
(*) All members of the research team were affiliated to the Department of Social Anthropology and History of the University of the Aegean.
Duration
1/9/2006 – 31/10/2011
Funding
The research is funded within the framework of the Subsidized Research Programs, Research Committee, University of the Aegean.