Datum
29. Oktober – 29. November 2024
Hybrid event/Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health ad hoc seminar
Francesca Vaghi: “Anything that we can do to help, it’s got to be good”: the everyday pragmatism of NHS charities
Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health ad hoc seminar
Tuesday 29th October 2025, 3–4:30pm (online and in-person in the Centre’s boardroom in Queen’s Building, Streatham Campus, University of Exeter).
Crisis no longer seems to represent a momentary state of emergency, but rather an ongoing situation that is continually defining our present. After over a decade of austerity measures in the UK, which have led to cuts in the public sector and rising poverty rates, NHS and other charities have expanded. Examining the work of these organisations offers an interesting example of how the ‘mixed economy of welfare’ works in practice, and how a historically blurry line within the NHS – between what should be state-funded, or simply an ‘add-on’ that can be provided via charitable or voluntary means – is thought of and navigated by different people, at a time of extended crisis. Drawing from an ethnographic case-study in an English city and with an NHS charity, this talk explores the role of the charity in supplementing healthcare while also fulfilling the role of a welfare service. I introduce the idea of everyday pragmatism to explain people’s motivations to work, volunteer, and fundraise for the NHS, informed by Cooper’s work on ‘everyday utopias’ (2014), and ‘prefiguration’ (2016; 2020), and Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011). In doing so, I aim to call attention to people actively doing what they can to improve the present moment through day-to-day practices, while imagining, demanding, and waiting for a better future. As opposed to viewing participants as passively accepting, or defeated by, the current situation, everyday pragmatism rather seeks to illuminate how people negotiate ambivalence in an active and participatory manner.
BIO:
Francesca Vaghi is Research Associate at the School of Social & Political Science, University of Glasgow. Working with Professor Ellen Stewart, she conducts research on the work of contemporary NHS charities as part of the Border Crossings project: https://more.bham.ac.uk/border-crossings/border-crossings/projects/ . Francesca completed her PhD in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, in 2019. This investigated how children create self and peer identities through food and eating practices, how children’s food policy fits into family intervention policies in the context of Britain’s mixed economy of welfare, and how notions of ‘good food’ and ‘good parenting’ (particularly mothering) are interlinked. Her thesis is the basis for her recent (2023) monograph, Food Policy and Practice in Early Childhood Education and Care: Children, Practitioners, and Parents in an English Nursery.
Link to book into the event here: “Anything that we can do to help, it’s got to be good”
Tickets, Tue, Oct 29, 2024 at 3:00 PM | Eventbrite