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Practicing Care in Art, Activism, and Academia
Care as a Historical Category
Hélia Marçal
How does care as a category help us both analyse and reinvent sociomaterialities and the ways in which they are historically expressed? Echoing the pioneering approach prompted by Joan Wallach Scott in "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" (1986), and then reiterated by this author in 2010, this paper will investigate care as a category and its intersections with artistic production, with a particular focus on works created from the 1968 and onwards.
I position this paper explicitly in the arena of feminist posthumanisms, which means that I will inevitably adopt an ethico-onto-epistemo-logy (Barad, 2007) that recognises care as a practice (in the Baradian sense) from all to all, a notion of we that is inclusive, and otherness as a productive concept to rehearse forms of solidarity. I will specifically draw on feminist approaches to care, from Tronto to Puig de la Bellacasa and Raghuram, while engaging also with the works of Butler (Frames of War, 2009, and The Force of Non-Violence, 2020), hooks, Larrabee, and Nash.
The work of Franco “Bifo” Berardi is also paramount here – in particular, the author’s analysis of three critical historical years, which, according to him, are in themselves producing temporal drags: 1968, 1977, and 1999. Bifo’s analysis of the long 1968 as a form of celebration of political ruptures, the melancholy of the end of the 1970s, and the sharp critique of the “schizo-economy” and forms of capitalistic acceleration will serve as basis to rehearse the ways in which care as a category intersects with these periods. Specifically for this short presentation, I will focus on three works to complicate these relationships: FMI, José Mário Branco, 1979, Good Housekeeping, Marlene Smith, 1985, and University Exercise, Public Movement (f. December 2006 by Dana Yahalomi and Omer Krieger), 2010.
Hélia Marçal is Lecturer in History of Art, Materials and Technology at UCL. Her current research interests are positioned within feminist new materialisms, material histories of activist artworks, ethics and performativity of cultural heritage, the conservation of time-based media and performance art, and both the materiality of contemporary art and the ways it is positioned and negotiated by museum, heritage, and conservation practices. She has published about conservation theory and ethics, embodied memories and the body-archive, and public policies of participation and stewardship of cultural heritage. Her recent book project is on posthumanism and collection care practices in museums (under contract with Routledge, co-authored with Dr Rebecca Gordon).
Exploring Agency in Artistic Activism and Sisterhood through the Lens of Relational Care
This study delves into the intricate dynamics of marginalization and change agents through the lens of relational care ethics focusing on a group of female immigrant artists in Sweden. Grounding our study in the literature of feminist activist art, and informed by feminist care ethics, we investigate how their endeavors in artistic activism help empower migrant women to counter racism and discrimination both in their home countries and in the hosting country, Sweden. Specifically, we examine how they transform their marginalized position into one of courage, strength, and agency through caring attentiveness, responsiveness, competence, and responsibilities.
Empirically, we draw on interactions with a heterogeneous group of women migrant artists originating from Kenya, Iran, Belarus, Greece and Chile. Utilizing mixed methods including interviews, observations, film/audio recordings, and photography, the analysis explores the voices, performances, actions and the interactions of these women artists and their relations and interactions with their audiences.
Through a postcolonial stance, and a framework of relational care ethics, we deconstruct a conventional understanding of caring relations following a norm-periphery order, exploring how these artists from marginalized backgrounds engage in artistic actions to connect with each other and with their audience to initiate change. We investigate how they acquire and apply affective knowledge of their marginalized experiences to cultivate collective strengths and instigate change, challenging discriminatory processes of “othering.”
Our findings will shed light on the transformative role of artistic endeavors in turning the force of marginalization into avenues for sisterhood, possibility, and reflexivity through relational care. Furthermore, the study contributes to understanding arts-based methodologies in eliciting ethical caring attentiveness, responsiveness, competence, and responsibilities to caring for (vulnerable) others.
Dr. Janet Zhangyan Johansson is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor at the Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research primarily centers on issues related to ethics and equality in leadership, sustainability management, and other organizational practices. Dr. Johansson explores and theorizes care ethics in management and leadership within contemporary organizations, aiming to offer socially innovative implications for ethical and socially sustainable strategies. She diligently works on integrating notions of care and ethics of care into business and organizational practices, both in her research and teaching endeavors. Dr. Johansson has published numerous journal articles applying the framework of care ethics.
In her recent research project conducted within a Swedish performing arts organization from 2018 to 2022, Dr. Johansson investigated the agency for change in expressions of vulnerability among minority group members through the lens of relational care. This work has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics (e.g., Johansson & Wickström, 2023). Through this project, she began to delve into the interplay between relational care and artistic endeavors from a feminist perspective, aiming to evoke forces of change through engtanglement between art and care in establishing social sustainability.
In her current endeavor, Dr. Johansson is collaborating with Prof. Wallenberg on a project exploring how migrant women artists utilize artistic activism as a platform to effect societal change, countering racism and discrimination both in their home countries and in Sweden. This work will adopt a postcolonial, feminist perspective in its approach to feminist art activism and care.
Louise Wallenberg is Professor of Fashion Studies at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. She holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from the same university (2002) and she was the establishing director of the Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University between 2007 and 2013. Her research interests include cinema, fashion, gender, and organizational and work life experiences, and she is currently working on a project dealing with representations of opposing masculine ideals in the Swedish 1930s cinema, culture and society. Her publications include the anthologies MODE (2009); Nordic Fashion Studies (2011); Fashion, Film, and the 1960s (2017); Harry bit för bit (2017); Fashion and Modernism (2018); Fashion Ethics and Aesthetics (2023); Ingmar Bergman at the Crossroad between Theory and Practice (2022); and Now about all these women in the Swedish Film Industry (2023).
Aesthetic Aspects of Gender Equality in Academia: The Case of Czech Universities
Iveta Bayerová
The premise of this paper is the idea that the feminist ethics of care can be fruitfully applied to widespread endeavours to promote gender equality within academia. In my research project, I aim to demonstrate how to advocate for changes from a care ethics perspective and how to design our policies if we aspire to foster a “caring” culture in academic institutions. More specifically, I explore whether gender equality plans, which are mandatory for universities to qualify for EU research funding, contribute effectively to this goal. I argue that the outcomes cannot be “caring” unless a “caring” attitude is incorporated into the process as such. Moreover, as this involves changing organizational culture, if our steps to implement change are not “caring,” we might not succeed at all. As an equality officer at a university, I apply this approach and analyze the process using action research methods.
In this paper, I focus on the aesthetic aspects of gender equality in the context of Czech higher education, specifically on the role of language and visual communication. Virginia Held argues that replacing gender hierarchy with equality requires a “transformation of what is thought of as knowledge, of the ways people think and behave at almost all levels, of almost all institutions, of culture, of society” (Held, 2006). Language and visual communication can play a crucial role in this process. If we want to change the way people think, we must use language that supports this transformation, e.g. by eliminating the generic masculine. To make all members of the academic community feel welcome and cared for, we must also consider how we visualize reality, for example, in university media. Thus, ethics of care provides a strong rationale for why it is so important to be mindful of how institutions communicate with all their members.
Iveta Bayerová is currently serving as an Equality Agenda Coordinator at Charles University in Prague, where she is also a first-year PhD candidate in Applied Ethics at the Faculty of Humanities. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Humanities and a Master's degree in Management of Social Services. Iveta's professional background includes experience in the social services sector, where she has worked with people with mental disabilities and provided home-care services for the elderly. She was engaged in youth work, focusing on managing international projects. She collaborated as an expert with the Czech Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, where her responsibilities included developing various analyses for new types of pre-school care facilities. In her current research, she bridges care ethics with practical implications for changing organizational culture in academia, which she identifies as crucial for the success of equality strategies. She is a member of the Equality and Diversity working group in the Coimbra Group. In 2024, she actively participated in a seminar of LERU-CE7 universities focused on recommendations to the European Commission concerning criteria for Gender Equality Plans in the new Framework Programme. She is also a council member in the municipality where she lives, and proudly a mother of two young children.
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
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