Catherine Trundle

Competing Responsibilities: Moving Beyond Neoliberal Responsibilisation

Ideas of responsibility pervade social life, underpinning forms of governance, subjectivities, and collective relations. Inspired by current analyses of neoliberal projects of ‘responsibilisation’, this paper examines modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or co-exist with neoliberal ideals. Our aim is twofold: first, we wish to broaden current scholarly understandings of how neoliberal ‘responsible’ subjects are nested within multiple frames of dependencies, reciprocities, and obligations. Secondly, we articulate a framework for conceptualising responsibility that places responsibilisation alongside relations of care and social contract ideologies—three modes of inter-relationship that we see as underlying the ‘competing responsibilities’ inherent in contemporary social life.

Biopolitical endpoints: Diagnosing a deserving British nuclear test veteran

This article examines recent claims for healthcare made by British veterans who participated in nuclear bomb testing in the 1950s. Specifically, it focuses on their claims for war disablement pensions, exploring how they seek and challenge medical diagnoses. Detailing three veteran case studies, the article offers an ethnographic analysis of illness narratives. It explores how sufferers attempt to recast and reject the evidential burdens that they face in pension appeals, and identifies three narratives strategies that they deploy aimed at linking somatic realities to political etiologies. I propose the notion of biopolitical endpoints to capture how test veterans narratively connect political and medical domains as they seek to enable state culpability and redress.

Searching for Culpability in the Archives: Commonwealth Nuclear Test Veterans’ Claims for Compensation

In the late 1950s, Commonwealth servicemen participated in a series of British nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific. Today these veterans claim to suffer multiple health problems from radiation exposure, and seek compensation from the British and New Zealand governments. In resisting the States control of evidential archival documents, the veterans devalue State documents and contest the truth of military records, instead elevating personal and collective memories based on notions of witnessing. Yet veterans do accept certain documents as legitimate bearers of historical truth if they emerge from the archives without the influence of powerful State agencies. From these “unfiltered” documents, test veterans create their own private archives which function as sites of memorialization, social legitimation and legal proof. Engaging with the work of Ann Stoler (Stoler, A. L. (2002), “Colonial archives and the arts of governance”, Archival Science, vol. 2, pp. 87–109; Stoler, A. L. (2009), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford), I argue that revealing State power requires understanding how groups outside the archives both subvert and mimic its documentary logic.

Introduction: Competing Responsibilities: Reckoning Personal Responsibility, Care for the Other, and the Social Contract in Contemporary Life

Calls to be responsible pervade contemporary life.1 In many Western countries, the drive for responsibility is often portrayed as being at the heart of public and political institutions. Governments around the world regularly list one of their main priorities as responsibly managing national finances; large multinational corporations increasingly promote their efforts to be socially and environmentally responsible and responsive; and in many workplaces, employees are increasingly being responsibilized through new modes of audit and assessment. Every day we hear myriad different appeals to responsibility, demanding that people must be held accountable for personal failings, social ills, and accomplishments. In the global arena, responsibility and its absence are often cast as the crux of conflict and its resolution. Responsibility is an ideal, it seems, we can never have too much of; calls for responsibility frequently index a lack, an aspiration, an achievement, or an obligation that is hard to refute. The increasing pervasiveness of responsibility in contemporary discourse, and often the lack of reflexivity about its inherent social worth, are precisely what necessitates a closer examination of this concept. The task of unpack-

Elusive Genes: Nuclear Test Veterans’ Experiences of Genetic Citizenship and Biomedical Refusal

Anthropological studies of genetic citizenship have focused on illnesses with medically explained etiologies. Such studies tend to trace patients’ agency and resistance as they encounter genetic knowledge. By contrast, we explore how genetic knowledge is configured by those suffering from contested illnesses. Through interviews, we examine the claims for health care made by British and New Zealand veterans who in the 1950s took part in nuclear testing in the Pacific. We illustrate how genetic citizenship can be crafted largely without mainstream medical support or state legitimation, showing that participants understood genetics through personal, relational, and affective experiences. These experiences were utilized to build illness narratives in part because they were the best resources available. Veterans also trusted these discourses because they captured experiential knowledge and revealed personal and familial suffering in ways that biomedicine could not.

Vulnerable articulations: the opportunities and challenges of illness and recovery

ABSTRACT Medical anthropology overwhelmingly reveals vulnerability as a problem of powerlessness. Vulnerable groups and individuals are those exposed to the pernicious effects of inequalities, injustices, and oppressive political realities. This largely pejorative stance, we argue, simplifies the place of vulnerability within human experience and in relation to the body, health and illness. By showcasing a range of interlocking vulnerabilities, this paper reveal the spectrum of positive and negative vulnerabilities that affect health and recovery. Through the concept of vulnerable articulations, this paper argues that health and illness experiences simultaneously create and require a range of different interconnected vulnerabilities, some of them harmful, and some of them life affirming. Ethnographically, this paper explore the concept of vulnerable articulations through two contrasting case studies: a group of British and New Zealand nuclear test veterans seeking compensation from the state, and clients of equine therapy in New Zealand. These case studies reveal that understanding human vulnerability requires a close attention to how people navigate between the diverse vulnerabilities that they face, and that attaining well-being often involves harnessing positive vulnerabilities in order to lessen the effects of damaging vulnerabilities.

Indigenizing military citizenship: remaking state responsibility and care towards Māori veterans’ health through the Treaty of Waitangi

How does militarism reshape indigenous peoples’ relationships with settler states? In this article, we explore how military service both opens up and forecloses avenues for indigenous groups to claim new modes of responsibility, care and relationality from the state. Through a discussion of New Zealand Māori nuclear test veterans’ recent legal claims through the Waitangi Tribunal, we detail the range of ways that Māori veterans utilize and rework ethnic identity categories to encompass wider notions of citizenship, care and responsibility, and challenge neoliberal models of reparations. Claimants argue that their ongoing wellbeing sits at the centre of their partnership with the state, revealing how uneasily the Māori military body fits within mainstream logics of Treaty claim-making. Seeking healthcare and wellbeing here does not demand greater autonomy or independence, but requires ongoing interdependence, practices of care and attention to ongoing intergenerational obligations that, like radiation harm, have no clear endpoints.