Calculating Care: Reinvesting in a Burkina Faso Market through Crisis

The proposed research will build on my doctoral research, where I explored the intellectual and emotional work required to manage poverty and increasing insecurity in a Burkina Faso market. Financial management is a key topic in International Development with neoclassical microeconomics and behavioural economics enjoying narrative authority in mainstream discourses on the economic behaviour of the poor. This body of literature and associated practices understand financial management as making choices between competing knowable priorities that can and should be traded off to maximise an individual or nuclear family's composite level of wellbeing. However, through grounded ethnographic work, critical development scholars from anthropology and economic geography have developed a rich base of evidence for the complexity that people manage through their financial management practices. However, these bodies of literature stop short of treating the everyday calculative practices of the poor as labour.

My PhD illuminated how vendors "got by with what [they] have" (se débrouillent avec ce qu'on a) through a protracted security and economic crisis, deftly responding to dramatic and unpredictable changes in what they could afford to care about, and what they could not afford to neglect. As well as striving to maintain their businesses, this group of traders patched and pre-empted losses relating to their social connections, their objects, their health, their physical spaces and their hopes for the future, pushing back against intensifying threats. The emotional and cognitive efforts of their calculative practices became heightened and more visible, illuminating what they cared about, and reflecting their changing scope of agency in exercising this care. I have called this labour 'calculating care', and I argue that the complexity and amount of this work a person has to do corresponds to the (under)valuation of their labour, and body, through socially constructed inequalities.

The monograph will illustrate what this work does, the expertise it requires, and the toll it takes. It will interrogate this central concept through the existing research of my PhD, but also through additional fieldwork that traces how the threats and opportunities that shaped interlocutors' lives have materialised and shifted over time. I will submit the monograph proposal to publishers and editors with clear expertise and reach in the fields of development and anthropology, such as the International African Library series (Cambridge University Press), Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning series (University of Chicago Press), or it would be an ideal fit for a new book series focused on critical perspectives in development edited by my mentor Paul Gilbert and my PhD supervisor Dinah Rajak.

There has been a recent bloom of widespread interest in how we can and should understand the disproportionate levels of work required to manage vulnerability in relation to systemic inequalities. Alongside the monograph proposal and introductory paragraphs, I will co-produce a public-facing short film with key interlocutors, relating to key themes that have emerged from this research about the everyday practices of care and calculation through which they manage the structural violence that bears down on them. As well as arranging screenings in relevant academic settings, I will submit this film to festivals (e.g. RAI Film Festival; Global Voices Film Festival), to broaden its reach. I will also create a website for the film, with information on arranging screenings, a more easily shareable trailer version and resources to contextualise the film and increase its impact, such as learning resources for teaching, and accessible summaries of the key themes. This film will thus be helpful for teaching as a legacy output. I anticipate the audio of the film to be mixed between Mooré and French, with versions with each Mooré, French and English subtitles for broader reach.