In Morocco, where abortion and extramarital sex are illegal, single motherhood and abortion resonate with public concerns surrounding the integrity of the Moroccan family and changing social landscapes. Single-mother advocates’ work is an ambivalent process that blends the practical labor of care with the ideological work of advocacy and representation. The push and pull between admiration for single mothers who struggle on society’s margins, on one hand, and condemnation of abusers and child abandoners, on the other, contribute to the “towardness” and “awayness” (Ahmed 2015) bound up with caring about vulnerable subjects. NGO workers, struggling to provide services to single mothers, politicize the responsibility to provide care (“take care of”) by arguing that it is not enough to publicly express pity or solidarity (“care about”). By refusing performative solidarity, front-line workers seek to weave the question of responsibility into discussions of care. Moreover, caregivers’ daily reckoning with the patent failures of recent legal reforms to help vulnerable girls and women cast doubts on the substantiality of caring, itself. This paper considers caregiver rage as an oppositional stance, one that calls into question the possibility of providing care in neoliberal times. Drawing on fieldwork in NGOs and hospitals, this paper points to the limits of care in institutional spaces where writing, listening, and speaking are often the only services on offer.

In scholarly and popular accounts alike, Islamic ethics of animal care – from practices of halal slaughter to beliefs about animals’ cosmological place in the world – are often framed through established traditions of Islamic law, history, and theology. Yet, as environmental crises arise, animal populations dwindle and grow, and sociocultural norms of animal care change over time, interacting with animals demands a continuous redrawing of these ethical reference points. In other words, living with animals requires a flexible and experimental engagement with Islam to navigate a variety of uncertain encounters with non-human others. Drawing on ethnographic work on human-animal relations in Jordan, I examine Islamic animal ethics through three stories of human-animal encounter. First, I examine debates about human-dog relations by following a series of fatwas that emerged in 2018-19 in response to changes in stray dog management in Amman. I trace the ways in which governmental officials, political figures, and Ammani residents use competing sources of religious authority to argue for or against the sterilization and culling of stray dogs. Second, I follow the discourses and practices of hunters tasked with eliminating invasive wild boar populations in the Jordan Valley. I show that ethics concerning methods and modes of killing boar, and religious protocols of bodily comportment around boar corpses, must be improvised and renegotiated on a minute-to-minute level. And third, I show how the Jordanian staff of British animal welfare organizations weave Islamic ethics into the liberal-secular programming of the NGOs they work for. Drawing on Qur’anic verse, hadith, and Islamic juridical debates, they impart the message that compassion for animals not only helps animals, but also helps Muslims become better Muslims. Taken together, these examples challenge everyday forms of animal engagement: they involve problematic animals like dogs and pigs, and question the normative standards of animal care in Jordan. But I suggest that because they are challenging in this way, these examples also provide an inroad for understanding the ways in which Islamic animal ethics of care are shaped by experimentality and uncertainty. How is uncertain care for animals practiced? And what might this reveal about everyday Islamic ethics in Jordan? Building on scholarship on Islam and care (e.g., Hamdy 2012, Mittermaier 2019), this paper argues that Islamic animal ethics are just as much forged in the spontaneous, improvised, and often uncertain responses to human-animal relationships as they are an established set of protocols and beliefs.

As part of its global Open Homes initiative, in 2017 Airbnb partnered with a Greek NGO called “Safe Today” (ST) to establish a process for Airbnb hosts in Greece to offer free shelter to asylum seekers and other migrants in need of temporary emergency housing, a large number of whom have traveled to Greece from the Middle East. It soon became clear that few local Airbnb hosts were willing to host migrants for free. Committed to upholding the Open Homes vision despite its failure to gain popular support among hosts, Airbnb opted to subsidize this offer of emergency housing itself by granting ST travel vouchers covering the expense of ST staff booking Airbnbs on behalf of those needing the housing, for up to three weeks at a time. ST became authorized to select Airbnb listings as well as which migrants receive Open Homes emergency housing. Over the course of two years of operation, ST has developed certain patterns in executing the Open Homes system. This paper considers two of them: One, ST staff tend to choose women fleeing sexual assault, often within their own displaced communities within Greece. And two, ST staff tend to choose geographically distant, usually more upscale neighborhoods and apartments that are, in the words of one interlocutor, “modern but low tech,” “nice, but not so luxurious that it will make leaving the apartment difficult at the end of the three weeks.” Based in fieldwork on Airbnb in Greece since 2017, this paper asks: what do these dynamics and decisions tell us about how care is being defined at the intersection of austerity governance, humanitarian assistance and the so-called sharing economy in the Mediterranean? How is the fact that hospitality for refugees is triply mediated—through the Airbnb platform, through an NGO, and through property owners and/or amateur or professional Airbnb hosts who may not own the properties—shaping the nature and temporalities of refugee housing? And how does the fact that guests in this hospitality context are survivors of sexual assault figure in the formulation of this version of care?

This paper explores contradictions of care that emerge as mothers raising children with Down syndrome in Amman encounter therapeutic paradigms of early intervention (al-tadakhul al-mubakkir). Early intervention encompasses a constellation of physical, speech, and occupational therapy programs designed to address the needs of children who experience or are at-risk for developmental delays. Most children with Down syndrome have low muscle tone, which can affect developmental milestones like crawling, grasping, walking, and speaking. As such, they are prime candidates for early intervention services. By cultivating an objectifying and progress-oriented gaze, early intervention invests young children with seemingly limitless potentiality. But what complications arise, and for whom, when bodies are framed as capable of endless progress? Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), one particular model of early intervention, the Portage program, has proven especially popular since it was first introduced in the mid-1980s (Faour et al. 2006). Although its efficacy remains disputed (Oakland 1997), the program offers low-tech and low-cost solutions by training mothers to work with their children at home, using everyday household items and activities as therapeutic tools. During fieldwork conducted in Amman between 2013 and 2015, I watched mothers largely embrace early intervention training (tadrib) as empowering and not radically different from other pedagogical sensibilities that shape local approaches to child development. Yet mothers also struggled to navigate their own positionality within this new therapeutic nexus. In thinking through the ways that therapeutic regimes intervene in forms of embodied knowledge, I draw from Marcel Mauss’s concept of “techniques of the body” (1968). Mauss stressed that all techniques of the body are acquired through informal modes of teaching and learning. But what happens if we instead foreground techniques of the body as uncertain outcomes of care? Anthropologist Lisa Stevenson describes care as “the way someone comes to matter and the corresponding ethics of attending to the other who matters” (2014, 3). In the presence of childhood disability, mothers learned to reassess their children’s “natural” skills as well as their own methods of mothering. Transmitting techniques of the body became sociotechnical projects with heightened moral stakes, and they took shape through exercises, drills, checklists, and evaluations. Yet children’s bodies did not always conform, and moments of “failure” raised questions about bodily difference, acceptance, and the limits of care.