This seminar in medical anthropology is open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.  It will explore the norms, practices, and forms of reasoning which shape processes of care and abandonment across a range of contemporary cases.  We will begin with Michel Foucault’s writings on biopower, or how “making live” and “letting die” became central to liberal forms of governance, exploring how this form of governance is enacted in a range of contemporary contexts.  Along the way, we will also step back to take a wider view of the turn towards the theorization of caregiving in anthropology as it relates to questions of morality, kinship, personhood, and medicine and how a focus on abandonment and abjection has altered the field of anthropology in recent decades.