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Conceptualizing & Creating


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Caring Relationalities and the Arts of Attention


The Arts of Attention
Nathalie Zaccaï-Reyners

Twenty years ago, while accompanying my disoriented grand-mother, I started an empirical and conceptual inquiry about care relations in healthcare institutions. In contrast with most of the nursing homes where caregivers are asked to put the maintaining of the biological life as the first concern of the care, the main question was: what could be the conditions of a “human” place to live for vulnerable people and their caregivers? To address this question, the ethics of care studies use especially to underline the importance of attention, particularly to notice the needs in a large sense – and not only the biological ones – of the living beings we are responsible for. In this communication I propose to explore this attentive moment of the care from a dialogue between artistic performances in elderly institutions (the violoncello Claire Oppert and the dancer Thierry Thieû Niang) and some recent philosophical inquiry on the attention’s ability (Schaeffer, 2015; Citton, 2014). This leads to assume first that not all type of attention is able to open to a care relation. I will argue that a moment of disjunctive attention is needed, a kind of attention which is mainly associated with aesthetic agency. And second that the possibility of an effective care attention, which is a condition among others for a just gesture, that maintains a human lifeworld, needs specific contextual training and organizational support.

PhD in social sciences, Nathalie Zaccaï-Reyners is a Senior Research Associate of the Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). She is member of the Institute of Sociology at the Senior (ULB), where she assumes the direction of the Groupe de Recherche sur l’Action Publique (GRAP). She is founding member of the Séminaire International d’Études sur le Soin (SIES), which publishes the collection Questions de soin in the Presses Universitaires de France since 2012.

Her PhD research explored the concept of Lifeworld and different ways social and cultural sciences understand the ordinary intercomprehension processes. NZR enlarged this inquiry from the social comprehension to the scientific controversy between explaining and understanding. In the early 2000, the situation of her grandmother was the turning point in her work, opening a research field on care relations in elderly nursing homes from where she started to describe and analyze morally and cognitive asymmetric relations.





Aesthetic Education to Care? Reclaiming “Affective Virtuosity” on the Continuum of Care/Attention/Desire
Kelly Gawel

This talk argues that embodied ethical practices generated by radical social reproductive laborers (especially care workers and sex workers) offer crucial guidance when it comes to the revolutionary, aesthetic, practices of care that this conference is collectively addressing. These alternative forms of affect and material cultures are ever so present in the work of Spanish Collective Precarias a la Deriva (Precarious Women Adrift), a collective of precarious feminized and migrant workers coalescing in Spain in the early 2000s, whose “militant research” on caring labor and ethics has been especially influential in Latin American traditions of social reproduction feminism.

Using the idea of a continuum of "care/attention/desire," the collective highlights the exploitation of racialized and feminized labor under racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy. They shed light on how these systemic dominations alienate care from attention and desire by limiting our capacities to feel and relate and the time we have to do so. These women, in their own words, say, "When work accumulates, you don't stop to eat," and that there is "no time for real life." They realize the need to fight for their spaces of care, and call for embodied, affective, and aesthetic changes that relationally re-constellate care/attention/desire. 

This talk points to how reclaiming our caring practices and relations can be an aesthetic education: illuminating how our divisions due to colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy don’t fully subsume the collective agency we use to reconstitute our spaces of care and desire. I argue that the aesthetic, indeed political, aspiration of “Affective Virtuosity” that Precarias call upon offers a critical and generative framing that promises to contribute to debates in the fields of care ethics and social reproduction feminism—as well as to facilitate dialogue between these distinct, and crucial, feminist lineages.


Kelly Gawel (they/she) is a feminist philosopher and scholar-activist and has been part of radical experiments in queer and feminist politics in California, Mexico, and New York for over fifteen years. Their political and intellectual work centers on radical care, social reproduction, and embodied ethics. They are Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Governors State University and received their PhD in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research.





The Role of Expression in Caring Relationships
Anderson Harris

Care ethicists take the role of emotion to be central to ethical relationships. Most discussions about the role that emotions play deal with their capacity to motivate our caring activities (see Pulcini 2017). To be motivated by emotion does not, however, tell us enough about the relationship between emotion and care. Indeed, it might be a descriptive fact that all ethical activity is motivated by emotion and yet we would not call all ethical activity caring activity.

To put the point in the language of care ethics, the caregiver who is overwhelmed by emotion but does nothing, may be said to care about but not for her charge. In the same way, the person who is angered by climate change but does not channel that anger into some project may be said to care about climate change but not stand in a caring relationship to it (understood in the negative sense: as wishing to end climate change). 

I argue that more needs to be said about the role of emotion in care by way of describing how emotions are employed in caring practice. I want to suggest that caring relationships are characterized by the expression of a motivating emotion through a medium. I build my account of expression primarily out of John Dewey’s work in Art as Experience. Dewey takes expression to be crucial to the generation of aesthetic experience and defines it as an act where one clarifies, orders, and brings fulfillment to some turbulent emotion. Importantly, when this clarification, this expression, is complete, it endows the objective result of the expressive activity with an aesthetic quality (1932, p. 67). By understanding expression to be a necessary feature of caring relationships, I take emotion to play an active and constructive role in care and suggest that it is by way of expression that relationships can take on qualitatively consummatory dimensions.


My name is Anderson Harris. I am entering my fifth year in the philosophy PhD program at the University of South Carolina. My interests are in American Pragmatism, Care Ethics, Care Aesthetics, and Somaesthetics. My dissertation deals with the role and use of emotion in caring relationships where I argue that discussions about care that do not take into account the importance of qualitative experience fail to capture an important element of the concept.


Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg

Online
30-31 January 2025 (Zoom links to be published later)

OrganizerCare Ethics Research Consortium
Contact info 
Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy

design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman