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Humanitarian organizations and research groups are increasingly considering the potential of integrating palliative care into humanitarian health responses. While studies on the topic frequently examine the obstacles of integrating palliative care into humanitarian action, the field is marked by notable research gaps, particularly concerning assessments of practice, the impact of guidelines, as well as critical inquiries into the moral and conceptual implications of a “humanitarian palliative care”. This thesis contributes to the latter of these research gaps by unpacking the discourses of palliative care and humanitarianism as imperatives, with attention to the ways in which the two may support or challenge each other.  The main research question, “How does humanitarian action take up palliative care as a humanitarian concern?”, is addressed through an anthropological lens. To shed light on the intangible, yet powerful, moral aspects of combining these discourses, this research method consists of a literature review approaching guidelines and studies as empirical data. While without its main ethnographic method, the use of classic anthropological theories and analysis offers apt insight into the framework of a humanitarian palliative care. The thesis paper progresses as follows: first, a literature review outlines the background of palliative care and its introduction in the humanitarian sector along with the direction of existing studies and guidelines on the topic. This outline then facilitates a comparative analysis of the moral language and principles of palliative care and humanitarianism. During this analysis, Fassin’s critique of “humanitarian reason” (2012) is used to better understand both imperatives in focus, leading to a biopolitical analysis of the implications of a combined ‘humanitarian palliative care’. This analysis suggests that palliative needs inhabit a liminal position in humanitarian healthcare – at the threshold of humanitarian concern.   The liminality of humanitarian palliative care is then explored with particular attention to the infrastructure and relevant temporal aspects of humanitarian healthcare. While addressing abstract concepts, the analysis draws upon case examples to illuminate each analytical point in practice. Finally, I conclude with a discussion reflecting on the suggestions made by this thesis, and ultimately, the – arguably ambiguous – dynamic between palliative care and humanitarian action.

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[pt] Esta tese busca analisar, definir e delimitar os contornos da categoria da animalização e as experiências que elas são vinculadas. Identificando a insuficiência de algumas teorizações que desenvolvem suas análises sob o prisma do sexismo, do racismo ou apenas do capitalismo, esta tese o faz a partir da leitura biopolítica das espécies, o que permite compreender como a animalização se funciona como uma operação do biopoder através da constante e ambígua divisão entre humano e animal. Ocorre que, diante de diversas experiências pré-modernas, não é possível equalizar a emergência da animalização, entendida nos termos desta tese, ao contexto da modernidade colonial. Assim, na segunda parte desta tese, são rastreadas algumas experiências que permitirão compreender por que a animalidade, enquanto uma técnica do poder, é condição para a operação da animalização. Nesse sentido, a animalidade se revela como uma técnica do poder a partir da qual o biopoder e a governamentalidade se desenvolvem e se articulam. / [en] This thesis seeks to analyse, define, and delimit the contours of the category of animalization and the experiences that it can be linked to. Identifying the insufficiency of some theorizations that develop their analyses under the prism of sexism, racism, or only capitalism, this thesis does so from the species biopolitics reading, which allows us to understand how animalization functions as an operation of biopower through the constant and ambiguous division between human and animal. It happens that, in the face of several pre-modern experiences, it is not possible to equalize the emergence of animalization, understood in the terms of this thesis, to the context of colonial modernity. Thus, in the second part of this thesis, some experiences are traced that will allow us to understand why animality, as a technique of power, is a condition for the operation of animalization. In this sense, animality reveals itself as a technique of power from which biopower and governmentality develop and articulate.

The aim of this thesis is to present the situation of the intravenous drug-users (IDUs) living with HIV in Romania, with a focus on Bucharest. The study follows the IDUs experiences from the environment they live in, to the day-to-day examples of structural violence they face. The questions followed regard the lives of the IDUs in Romania, as well as how they are handled by various authorities and institutions’ representatives such as medical staff in hospitals, the national healthcare system, social workers, law enforcement representatives and other public servants. The fieldwork was conducted around Bucharest through the use of observation while volunteering on outreach with an NGO, and interviews in the form of life histories in a hospital, as research methods. The thesis offers a background look at the communist and transition periods that influenced everyday life in today’s Romania. I argue that because of the stigma attached to them for being part of risk groups, the IDUs face many different forms of structural violence. Whether it comes to governmental authorities, law enforcement or medical staff, the IDUs, as well as other vulnerable risk group members, are continuously pushed outside of society through various measures. This creates a continuous state of isolation from which they cannot remove themselves without outsider help.

This study aims to identify potential ways in which the African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa (Kampala Convention) improves the quality of life for IDPs. Relying on the concept of bare life, it answers if and how the convention prevents bare life. Drawing on theory and previous research on bare life in relation to IDPs, the analytical framework forms four theoretical dimensions to which the Kampala Convention, Translating The Kampala Convention Into Practice: A Stocktaking Exercise (ICRC, 2017) and The Kampala Convention: Key Recommendations Ten Years On (ICRC, 2019) are applied. Based on a grading, the results tell of the convention’s effects. The IDPs’ rights and political agency are adequately respected; quotidian culture and prevention of exclusionary practices are promoted yet insufficiently. Adding humanitarianism, biopolitics and host communities as additional findings, there are areas that should be carefully respected, but bare life is mostly prevented. Hopefully, this study can add knowledge to the progress of the Kampala Convention and provide a framework for similar analyses of policy and practice on aiding people in distress.

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This study employs Michel Foucault's conceptualization of governmentality, or dispersed rationalities that seek to calculate and maximize the health of the population, to study how eating regimes of truth influence how individuals relate to their bodies and each other. Importantly, the study of eating regimes elucidates how food rules are portrayed in the discourses, institutions, philosophical and moral propositions, administrative measures, and technologies (what Foucault refers to as societal apparatuses of power, or dispositifs) that address what and how to eat. In this dissertation, I specifically analyze dispositifs that promote certain foodstuffs as devotional objects that can be utilized as forms of pleasure and/or self-control. I conceptualize artificial sweeteners as ingestible stores of self-control and biopower, arguing that they provide a lens through which to view how mealtime rituals, temporalities of eating, and the intersubjective perceptions of the relationship between food consumption and the ideal healthy body have transformed in the face of discourses that emphasize the need to strip food of carbohydrate- and calorie-loaded consequences. The dissertation analyzes how contemporary dietary discourses in the United States encourage individuals to view freedom of food choice as a binary selection between binge and restrict eating practices. I argue that this notion of dietary balance is part of what I refer to as the neoliberal binge-restrict eating regime. I analyze the binge-restrict eating regime on three different yet supplementary registers: 1) that of neoliberal discourses of dietary balance, which are premised on logics and technologies of rigid, machine-like correction and anticipatory compensation through carefully planned periods of restriction and healthy eating followed by food binges, or periods where an individual indulges in seemingly unhealthy foodstuffs; 2) that of discourses that encourage the individual to consume endlessly but not allow signs of "excessive" consumption to develop in the body; 3) and that of edible instantiations of the binge-restrict eating regime, with a particular emphasis on artificial sweeteners. The dissertation concludes that the contemporary notion of dietary balance as "binge-restrict" is informed by a popular interpretation of food rules as rigid, algorithmic truths and contributes to a loss of embodied knowledge regarding how to eat well. / Doctor of Philosophy / This study provides an analysis of forms of dietary advice and food rules that problematize the use of individual dietary discretion, prompt individuals to rely on systems of dietary advice, and present certain foodstuffs, such as artificial sweeteners, as ingestible stores of self-control. I argue that certain accepted ways of understanding, categorizing, and portraying food knowledge mold and shape how individuals experience reality, and that these ways of understanding can be referred to as regimes of truth. The study examines how eating regimes of truth, or ways of portraying food knowledge that influence how individuals define and categorize normal and abnormal eating behaviors, can be discerned across diet manuals, advertisements for diet products, life insurance pamphlets, governmental documents, and weight loss technologies from the 17th century to the present in Western Europe and the United States. More specifically, I analyze how food rules are increasingly shaped by advertising media that portray food knowledge as an object of expert control since food selection is perceived to be an increasingly risky activity. Given the extensive ingredient lists on food labels, along with the shifting regulatory and scientific statements that characterize how foodstuffs are grown or produced, prepared, packaged, labeled, and sold, embodied relationships to food remain difficult to cultivate given that the lines between natural, artificial, toxic, and safe ingredients and foodstuffs have been blurred. Even the consumption of seemingly "natural" products must constantly be monitored, since grocery store produce items often contain lead, arsenic, cadmium, and other synthetic materials that are portrayed as being dangerous to the health of consumers. Through advertising and digital technologies, food rules are portrayed as rigid algorithms that must be rigorously and rigidly applied to one's food selection and eating habits.