panel 2
Caring in Action, Connection, and Community
Care as Aesthetic Action
Florence Borggrefe
Since Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher described caring as a “species activity that includes everything we doto maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’” (Tronto, 1993, p. 103), the dimension of care as a doing and practice has formed a fundamental point of reference for care-ethical research. Recent scholarship on Care and Aesthetics builds on this, for example by emphasizing care as an ethical and aesthetic practice (Saito, 2022) or by aiming to dissolve the boundary between artistic and caring actions (Thompson, 2023). It is therefore surprising that there has been a lack of explicit action-theoretical considerations on care so far. The assumption is that this is due to a certain understanding of the subject and conventional conceptions of autonomous, conscious, and rational action (Davidson, 1985; Anscombe, 2011), which are incompatible with the fundamental premises of care ethics (Dingler, 2016).
This paper therefore aims to look at a different philosophical tradition to show the extent to which care can be understood as an aesthetic action in a systematically sustainable and historically informed way. The starting point for this is the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, whose thinking shows fundamental overlaps with Care Ethics (Hamington, 2010), which also concern questions of action theory. Dewey develops a complementary intertwining figure of action and experience, of which the paradigmatic form is aesthetic (Dewey, 1934). More recent approaches at the interface of the philosophy of art, aesthetics and practical philosophy discuss the sociality, openness, and particularity of aesthetic action, as well as its processualism, and can also be made productive for an action-theoretical conception of care (Noë, 2015 and 2023; Siegmund, 2019). A concept of aesthetically caring action thus opens up a new understanding of care and its three dimensions of maintenance doings, affective relations, ethicality and political commitment (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) in their ambivalent interconnectedness.
My name is Florence Borggrefe. I am a Research Associate at the research focus on aesthetics at the Zurich University of the Arts since 2021 and a doctoral candidate in the swissuniversities doctoral program “Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practices.” My doctoral project, which is also anchored at Leuphana University Lüneburg, has the working title “The Art of Caring: An Aesthetics of Action” and is supported by the German National Academic Foundation with a multi-year scholarship. I conduct research at the intersection of philosophy of art and aesthetics, action theory, and care ethics, whereby I am particularly interested in theories of aesthetic and artistic action in a logical and pragmatist tradition (G.W.F. Hegel and John Dewey) and their possible connections with feminist theorizing. I have an artistic background in music (viola, studied in Nuremberg), as well as philosophy, history, and German studies in Freiburg, Stuttgart, and Berkeley.
Welcome & Wonder
Sophie Thunus & Maya Duverdier
Our contribution discusses a film and research project that we have been carrying out in the “lieux de liens” of Brussels for the past two years. These spaces are open to all and they welcome people with mental, physical, or socio-economic vulnerabilities. They are co-managed spaces and allow for mixed communities to be formed through social and creative activities. The aim of these spaces is not to provide medical care but to care for their members, communities and social environments. Care arises from conversations, the interweaving of encounters and activities, and the oscillations between joy and sadness, void and excess that punctuate each day. It's care that's lived, embodied in a sense of welcome and wonder.
In this paper, we present the research and cinematographic work that we carried out to enable members to give a spontaneous, embodied account of their spaces. We then explain how this horizontal work made it possible to explore modes of representation whose codes no one mastered, leading members, researchers and filmmakers into a collective learning process. Finally, we suggest that this work has cared for each and every one of us, nurturing a sense of self and community, and fostering new understandings of strength and fragility, madness and normality.
Sophie Thunus is Dean of the Public Health Faculty and Professor of Health Services Management at the Faculty of Public Health, UCLouvain. She is a member of the Health and Society Research Institute (IRSS) and the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Work, State and Society (CIRTES), UCLouvain. Sophie’s research interests focus on workplace meetings and on the organisation of community mental health and primary care services. Sophie is an experienced qualitative researcher, and she is experimenting with innovative writing methods and research design combining, for example, filmmaking and participatory research. Sophie’s research on university meetings and gender inequality has been rewarded with the ARES "Gender and Covid-19" award (2020).
Maya Duverdier is an author and director of documentary films and a musician. She began her training at the fine arts in Biarritz (France) and continued her studies in the Cinema master's degree at the Ecole Cantonale d'art de Lausanne (Switzerland). After making several short films, taking the form of intimate and social portraits, she co-directed the feature-length documentary Dreaming Walls (2022) with director Joe Rohanne. Now, through her work as a documentary director, she seeks to question the very ethics of this practice and to put at the center of her approach the issues of care, the place of each person within a creative process and of transdisciplinarity, in order to encourage the emergence of new stories and new narrative threads. Maya is also active within the feminist collective Elles* fait des films and the Association of Francophone Directors in Belgium (ARRF).
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman