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Event Description

The Labor of Access: Redistributing Responsibility in Systems of Care

Drawing on her ongoing ethnographic research with homelessness, behavioral health, and social-service organizations in New York State, Milic-Kolarevic examines the extra work it takes to make fragmented systems of care actually accessible and functional. She's particularly interested in how the work of navigating institutions such as finding the right services, establishing eligibility, coordinating across organizations, completing paperwork, and maintaining continuity of care gets distributed between the people seeking or receiving services, frontline workers, and nonprofit organizations.

She traces how some of this labor gets shifted away from people seeking services and absorbed instead by providers and organizations, through administrative, relational, emotional, and interpretive work. She asks: what happens when this redistribution becomes essential to making the system function at all? What new possibilities does it create for people who might otherwise struggle to access care and what new vulnerabilities emerge when access ends up depending on whether organizations and individual workers have the time, resources, knowledge, and flexibility to take on work that often falls outside their job description?

Milic-Kolarevic's broader research interests include pharmaceuticals, global health, and the anthropology of policy. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Lunch will be provided. All are welcome.