Verónica Maria Pascoal Sousa is an Azorean Portuguese-American PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. She has studied medical anthropology and literature at UC Berkeley, anthropology and gender and women’s studies at The New School for Social Research, and anthropology and history of medicine at Princeton University prior to her doctoral program in Lisbon, Portugal. Her current doctoral research project, funded by the Science and Technology Foundation (FCT), concerns the negotiations between care and harm with a focus on the politics of touch in elder care during the COVID-19 pandemic in Lisbon. She is interested in the ways that social inequalities, particularly those related to gender, race, and class, and technologies of care, are entangled within the practice and experience of elder care in the Portuguese context. She is also currently training in documentary filmmaking.
Sanitizing Care: Negotiation of Touch and Safety in Elder Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Portugal
Abstract:
My doctoral research project seeks to show how COVID-19 has affected elderly populations and their care teams in Lisbon, Portugal. The central question of this research project is in understanding the ambiguity and ambivalence within the relationship between care and harm in elder care, with the issue of touch being the primary point of departure. My secondary concern is how intersectional identities like gender and aging are entangled within biomedical and societal notions of the body, and how the focus on touch may illuminate these entanglements in clinical, institutional, and home settings. Thirdly, I seek to explore the significance of technologies of care in what they reveal about intimacy, care, and harm in regard to touch in elder care, and how technologies mediate conceptions of elderly bodies and relationships between actors.
(FCT ID: 2020.08374.BD)
