Kristine Krause is an anthropologist working at the intersections of political and medical anthropology, interested in subjectivities and health, citizenship and care.

At the University of Amsterdam she is a member of the Health, Care and the Body and the Long-term Care and Dementia Research Group. Together with Jeannette Pols she runs the Anthropology of Care Network.

In her current research - Relocating Care in Europe -  she and her team look at care outsourcing within Europe, in which geographic discrepancies in cost and access are played off. Taking private care homes in CEE countries for elderly German speaking clients as example, they analyse care as a social-material practice involving many different actors, driven by flows of people, and capital, but where family, state, and market remain influential.

In her previous research Kristine looked at transnational therapeutic networks, travelling spirits, circulating medicines and how both are related to spaces of care in the context of migration from Ghana to Europe. Another angle of her work looks at how therapeutic and care encounters provide interfaces of incorporation and articulations of political subjectivity.

Previously she worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen, coordinating a working group on medical diversity, and as a research fellow at the Humboldt University Berlin in a German Research Foundation funded project on transnational networks, religion and new migration.

Her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford with COMPAS (Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society) was based on long-term fieldwork with migrants from Ghana in London, focusing on how legal status and transnational networks play out in what people do when they are sick. Based on this research she developed a strong interest in how health is linked to political subjectivities and dealt with across national boundaries.

ERC Project Relocare: Relocating Care within Europe. Moving the elderly to places where care is more affordable

Research Project led by Kristine Krause (PI), funded by an ERC Starting Grant (€ 1.5 million), 2021-2026

Team members: Veronika Prieler Mariusz Sapieha, Matouš Jelínek

Within care studies, the transnationalization of care has been mainly understood as drawing on (female) migrant care workers and resulting in a ‘care gap’ in the places such workers leave behind. This project looks at the reverse phenomenon: care relocation, in which the ageing body is relocated to places where care is more affordable. This hotly contested trend, described as ‘grandmother deportation’ or ‘geriatric colonialism’, can be seen as an extreme example of the marketization of care, and entangling welfare states as entitlements are carried across national borders within Europe.

This multi-sited anthropological study will take as case studies care homes in Central Eastern Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) that recruit patients from Austria and Germany, and offer care at roughly one-third of the cost of similar institutions in the home countries. What does care relocation do to the people and places involved? Most of these care homes are located in regions characterized by a long German and Habsburg-Hungarian history, adding historical complexity to the story. Some serve only German-speaking patients, others serve local, wealthier elderly people as well. They are run by former migrant care workers and by international companies, bringing labour migration and real estate investment into the picture.

ReloCare breaks new ground by encompassing all of these aspects in one study. Alongside in-depth ethnographic studies of daily life in these care homes, the researchers will investigate the nexus of care entrepreneurs and state insurances, and the histories of places and regional migration, providing an understanding of these new transnational entanglements of welfare states. In perceiving care relocation as both part of future making and a response to the privatization of care landscapes in the region, it asks what it means to become old and in need of care in an increasingly intertwined Europe.

Since my arrival at the University of Amsterdam in 2014 I have been teaching various courses in the Research Master Social Science, Master Medical Anthropology and Sociology, Bachelor and Master MA Cultural Social Anthropology

• Theory of Ethnographic Research (Research Master Social Science)

• Core specialization model Health, Care and the Body (Research Master Social Science)
• Political subjectivity, citizenship and belonging (Thematic elective Bachelor Cultural and Social  Anthropology)
• Theorising Practice, Practicing Theory (Master Medical Anthropology and Sociology, together with Patrick Brown)
• Theory of Ethnographic Practice (Master Cultural and Social Anthropology)
• Writing Ethnography (Master Cultural and Social Anthropology)
• Working with Fieldwork Data (Research Master Social Science)

I supervise

• Bachelor end presentation within Anthropology
• Master theses in the Research Master Social Science, the Master Medical Anthropology and Sociology, Master Cultural and Social Anthropology

I am honored to be part of the supervision team of the following PhD students:’

Completed (co-promoter)

1. Annelieke Driessen (promoter Jeannette Pols) A good life with dementia: Ethnographic articulations of everyday life and care in Dutch nursing homes, defended 4 July 2019.
2. Natashe Lemos Dekker (promotors Robert Pool and Anne-Mei The): Timing death with dementia: An ethnography of temporal and moral configurations, defended 4 Sept 2020.
3. Annekatrin Skeide (promoter Jeannette Pols): Configurations of Selves and Bodies in German Midwifery Care, defended 7 Oct 2020.
4. Linda Musariri Chipatiso (promotor Eileen Moyer, co-promoter Lenore Manderson): Masculinities, migration, precarity in Johannesburg inner city, defended 17 Feb. 2021.
5. Ashley Witcher (promoter Barak Kalir, co-promoter Rene Gerrets): Formal and informal aid practices to border crossers in Greece. Tensions, contradictions and practices of care, defended 1 June 2022.

Writing phase, (co-promoter)

1. Susanne van der Buuse (promoter Robert Pool): Self-reliance doesn't exist. Culture change in care institutions.
2. Maja Langen-Farell (promoter Jeannette Pols): Knowing Diabetes, Doing Diabetes: Practical Knowledge in urban Indigenous Australia (funded by NWO Research Talent Grant).
3. Leonie Dronkert (promoter Jeannette Pols): Confusing Categories: The category of LVB and the access to care (funded by NWO Research Talent Grant).

Fieldworkphase (PhD students on ERC grant, promoter)

1. Mariusz Sapieha (since March 2021)
2. Matous Jelinek (since August 2021)