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This thesis explores the relationship between international informal volunteers, aid workers, and government actors engaging with border crossers in Greece. It sheds light on the failings of large organizations and government bodies, whose bureaucratic structures are slow to respond to border crosser’s needs and which largely follow an exclusionary asylum regime that implements a hierarchy of deservingness. The ethnographic research and analysis exposes tensions within the humanitarian landscape of Greece; it also shows that there is space for informal volunteers to enact solidarity and new forms of humanitarianism that subvert state-sanctioned aid and challenge the status quo of the border regime. This research also contributes to new ways of engaging with cross-sector collaborations; importantly, it highlights that actors in the informal sector in Greece are major players in providing aid, advocating for rights, and bearing witness to human rights abuses and unlawful treatment of border crossers.

This anthropological study focuses on the transformations of gender dynamics in the context of migration and the implications these have for masculinity scholarship in South Africa. Using a case study of migrant men, who found themselves pushed to the margins of the economy and society or the ‘corner of life’, as they called it, I examine how various forms of marginalisation intersect with normative ideas of masculinities. This cornered space was characterised by violence and precarity that undermined their roles and identities as men. Contrary to studies that argue that men with limited options turn to violence to assert themselves, so as to align with hegemonic masculinities, the men in this study did not view hegemonic masculinity as fixed. Failure to live up to hegemonic standards led them to redefine masculinities to match their lived experiences. Drawing from dominant tropes of masculinities, they negotiated and reformulated their own standards and scripts, which recognised their own varied forms of capital. Observing the varied ways that my study participants navigated and negotiated their precarious lived realities, a process they termed ‘kukiya kiya’ – meaning trying various keys to open doors and seize opportunities – I have come to understand masculinities as fluid and plural by definition, consisting of a set of ideas, behaviours and practices resulting in unstable subject positions in the process of being and becoming. I therefore, propose looking at masculinities not as a structure, as implied by the term ‘hegemony’, but as an open-ended space (corner) that is under constant construction.

In public discourses, midwifery care figures as a marginalized profession standing in opposition to technocratic obstetrics. Midwives are thought to handle pregnancy and birth as ‘natural’ events, not as those in need of a medical and technical approach. However, discourses that naturalize pregnancy and birth restrict what ‘good’ pregnant-, fetal-, and birthing bodies and ways of lives may look like. Midwifery care practices are more complex, more ambiguous, and more creative than these discourses suggest. Inspired by feminist science and technology studies of care practices and the material-semiotic approach they utilize, Annekatrin Skeide develops a practice-based approach to midwifery in Germany as an alternative strategy for strengthening midwifery care. Drawing on praxiographic fieldwork in hospitals and homes, in midwife-led birthing places and ob-gyn practices, she avoids opposing midwifery to obstetrics. In her research, Skeide instead shows how ‘medical’ and ‘social’ repertoires are intertwined in midwifery care practices. Rather than praising midwifery’s inherent and universal ‘goodness,’ Skeide explores how pregnant-, fetal-, and birthing bodies and lives become part of different midwifery care arrangements, bringing together various, changing, and contradictory sets of knowledges, techniques, activities, and values. What good midwifery practices and good pregnant-, fetal-, and birthing bodies and lives are, cannot be set once and for all. But Skeide’s thesis provides tools for analyzing how bodies and lives are enacted in ways that fit their situations, better or worse, and which values or ‘goods’ hence emerge.

This dissertation explores the entanglements of time and value at the end of life with dementia in the Netherlands. Interested in what people with dementia, their family members, and professional caregivers found important at the end of life, I explored how they sought to achieve a good death. I demonstrate that the moral value ascribed to death with dementia—the extent to which it may be welcomed or considered good—is rooted in the value ascribed to life with dementia. Further, I show that achieving a good death is subject to a range of temporal experiences and orientations. The different ways of making sense of and influencing the duration, speed, and significance of temporal aspects of dying can change how life and death are valued, not only in terms of a moral “good” but also in terms of its timing—whether death came at the “right” time. Managing the end of life then became a matter of producing and acting upon possible, alternative, or sometimes unwanted futures. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in nursing homes in the Netherlands and additional in-depth interviews in the home setting, I offer an in-depth understanding of how people may become oriented toward death, and the importance of time and future-making in managing the end of life with dementia. I argue that that the pursuit of a good death with dementia is both a temporal and a moral project.

The most common story about dementia is that of sufferers sailing into darkness, disappearing over a horizon beyond communication and expression. Despite predictions of a staggering increase in the prevalence of dementia in the not too distant future, little has been written about how ways of living well with the condition can be brought about and supported. This thesis contributes to the urgent project of creating new imaginaries, in order to inspire practices that allow for life with dementia to be a good life. In her ethnography of everyday life and care in three care and nursing homes for people with dementia in the Netherlands, Annelieke Driessen draws on participant observation in various activities on the ward, including food provison, bathing residents, and a biweekly dancing event. She shows how care professionals and others who provide care, in taking seriously what residents want, becoming aware of interactions with the built environment, attending to difference, and crafting conditions for enjoyment, enact 'interesting subject positions' for people with dementia. If residents accept these invitations, they can become desiring, appreciating subjects. Driessen's study advances 'radical relationality' as methodological approach, an analytical strategy and a key finding, therein formulating novel and useful insights for researchers who seek to make their methods more inclusive to people who cannot voice their perspective in an interview; and furthers the dementia research in pushing for the understanding of subjectivity as dependent on the sociomaterial.

What can pleasure in the nursing home teach us about dementia and subjectivity? In this article I seek to challenge the assumption that the ‘fourth age’ involves the loss of subjectivity. In presenting dementia as a single pathway towards loss and decline, alternative pathways that provide more hopeful imaginaries become obscured. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in residential dementia care, I show how care professionals craft conditions that invite residents to take pleasure in, for example, dancing and bathing, and thus to become what I call ‘appreciating subjects’. Although residents do not craft these conditions themselves, they are active in accepting the invitations offered and enacting their appreciations. I argue that pleasure is a relational achievement, one that is contagious for those who let themselves be affected.