WAAT: “Why Do Patient-Workers Go to Court? Law, Event, and Self-Making in Turkey’s Occupational Diseases Cases” by Dr. Gül
Weekday Afternoon Anthropology Talks (WAAT)
March 4, 2024
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
BSB 2105
Calendar
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Our next WAAT is presented by Dr. Zeynel Gül. Dr. Gül will present "Why Do Patient-Workers Go to Court? Law, Event, and Self-Making in Turkey’s Occupational Diseases Cases" on Monday March 4 from 12-1pm in BSB 2105. Light refreshments will be provided.
This talk analyzes the trajectories through which claims on behalf of workers that their ill health is caused by work conditions come to be articulated and adjudicated in the movement between medicine and law in Turkey. Based on eighteen months of multi-sited ethnographic research in occupational diseases hospitals, courts, workplaces and households, it asks, when legal rights have been expanded for workers to claim compensation for occupational diseases, why are so few cases decided in favor of workers? More intriguingly: why do patients persist in taking recourse to institutions such as specialized hospitals and courts that seem highly likely to fail them? Instead of attributing such hopes to the category of “false consciousness,” this paper explores what can be learned from the experiences of workers whose bodies are depleted by work practices and whose worlds are extremely saturated by the rationalities of law and medicine. Only through rejecting the temptation to collapse their experiences into successes and failures in advance, I argue, do we get to see the lives of these workers as persistent projects of self-making and making themselves legible to themselves and others.
Date posted
Feb 29, 2024
Date updated
Feb 29, 2024