Oral Presentation by Lux Yoani Lenz¹
¹ Universität Innsbruck, Austria
TIME: Tuesday, 14 July, 14:30 – 16:00
Location: Room 2
Session: 6
Abstract
Condensed presentation of a study on the devaluation of care work, drawing on Beatrice Müller’s theory of value-abjection to analyze how structural conditions shape the everyday experiences and subjectivation processes of nurses in outpatient care. Based on Clarke’s Situational Analysis, the research adopts a power-sensitive approach that interweaves the discursive, historical, social, and material dimensions of the care field. Drawing on six semi-structured interviews, it reconstructs how nurses navigate tensions between institutionalized efficiency logics, economic constraints, ambivalent experiences of recognition, and their professional and ethical self-understandings. The findings clearly indicate that the widely diagnosed care crisis can only be understood as the result of the logics of prevailing systems of power and domination. By tracing the complex dynamics shaping outpatient care, the study develops a nuanced understanding of the structural-discursive obstacles to people-centered care which is informed by theories of capitalism. Accordingly, the results open up perspectives on resistance, agency, and utopian alternatives to the contemporary organization of care work.