Course Care and Violence Among the Marginalized: A Dialogue with Professor Angela Garcia

Course description

This PhD course explores the intersections of care and violence within marginalized communities, drawing on the influential work of Professor Angela Garcia. Through lectures, group discussions, and interactive dialogues, participants will engage with ethnographic approaches to understanding the lived experiences of those at society’s margins. The course encourages critical reflection on the roles of institutions, research ethics, and the researcher’s personal engagement with vulnerable communities.
Professor Angela Garcia, a renowned anthropologist from Stanford University, investigates issues of violence, addiction, care, and ethics, focusing on how these are produced and experienced within marginalized groups in the U.S. and Mexico. Her work offers deep insights into the historical and institutional processes shaping lives at the margins.
Garcia’s latest book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost (2024), is described by Arthur Kleinman as “a searing ethnography of the violence experienced by poor mothers in Mexico City’s war on drugs as they struggle to protect their children by committing them to lay treatment centers that use violence as care. It is also a searching autobiography of Angela Garcia’s own existential struggle with the violence of poverty, drugs, broken family, and abandonment.” This book will serve as a central point of reflection during the course.
Participants will read aloud short excerpts of their own empirical material, inviting Garcia and fellow participants to engage in open discussions related to the themes in Garcia’s work. This ‘PhD masterclass’ will be followed by a lecture by Garcia at the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University.

This course provides a unique opportunity for PhD students to critically engage with Garcia’s scholarship while reflecting on their own research practices and ethical challenges.

Aim

The course aims to

• Introduce participants to research on marginalization and marginalized groups
• Provide insights into the relationship between institutions and marginalized communities
• Encourage students to relate themes of life, death, hope, violence, addiction, and criminalization to their own research
• Foster reflections on the role of the researcher and the ethical challenges of personal engagement with marginalized communities

Target group/Participants

• This course is designed for PhD students in anthropology or other qualitative disciplines, particularly those who are in the process of collecting or analyzing data. It is especially suited for participants willing to share unpolished data excerpts and engage in open, explorative discussions.

Preparations for the course

• Each participant is required to prepare a maximum one-page ‘chunk’ of data or ethnographic description that they find striking or particularly relevant to the themes explored in Garcia’s work. This could be a description of a situation, a person, or a case, or excerpts from interviews or observations.
• The text should be suitable for reading aloud to facilitate collective reflection.

Literature

Mandatory Readings

• Garcia, A. (2024). The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (272 pages)
• Garcia, A. (2014). The Promise: On the Morality of the Marginal and the Illicit. ETHOS, 42(1), 51-64. (13 pages)

Additional Readings

• Garcia, A. (2010). The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along the Rio Grande. University of California Press.
  Convener

Language 

• English

ECTS-credits

• 2

Lecturers

• Marie Louise Tørring, Research Programme Director, Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University.
  Lecturers
• Angela Garcia, Professor, Department Chair, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.
• Line Dalsgård, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University.

Venue - TBA

Course dates:

• 07 May 2025 09:00 - 12:00
• 08 May 2025 10:00 - 16:00