Performing Care and Carelessness Conference 2024

Description

Conference topic
Care is a topic of enormous complexity that is relevant to all of us. In a turbulent era, scholars from many different fields are returning again and again to consider care, or a lack of care, in political spheres, in relation to the environment, in a globalised world, in everyday life, amidst health crises, and in our mediatised and digital lives.

Care is both an affective orientation (i.e. ‘caring about’) and a practice (i.e. ‘caring for’, or ‘taking care of’). As such, it is something that is both performed, and performative; attached to embodied subjectivities, in which it takes on polysemic potential as a communicative and symbolic as well as relational act.

As intimate and everyday as it can be, it is also recognised as being both political and politicised; entangled with systems of power at both macro and micro/everyday levels.

As James Thompson observes, while care was once considered the province of the household, it is now ‘a crucial issue within public policy’ (2020: 41–2). This is perhaps especially true given that 21st century care politics have been deeply concerned with aims such as unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present (Woodly et al. 2021: 891). A lack of care – or a carelessness, can also become routinely embedded in many social institutions.

As we acknowledge structures that represent barriers to care/ing, we can also acknowledge that caring despite these can stand as a form of resistance, an articulation of particular ethical commitments, an expression of collective identity, or an act of political imagination. As such, amidst shifting and challenging contemporary contexts, we consider how a call to care (for marginalised groups, for the natural world, for the people around us, and for distant others) can generate tensions and dilemmas. We focus on how both care and carelessness are performed, negotiated, and communicated, in both public and private settings, in response.

Period	14 Feb 2024 → 16 Feb 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Dunedin, New ZealandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International