panel 1uncanny encounters: caring for ghosts in neoliberal universities
Embodied Theory Assembly
uncanny encounters: caring for ghosts in neoliberal universities
Embodied Theory Assembly
Our collective experience informs this presentation proposal of caring for the body – its deep, visceral capacity for sensing and feeling – by generating caring in feminist academic spaces. To generate feminist academic spaces within university spaces, which are by default uncaring spaces, we feel it first necessary to address how today’s neoliberal universities in the West shape pedagogy: through manufacturing exhaustion, isolation, repression, epistemic violence, physical threats, and harm to insurgent bodies – and currently by being complicit in the genocide of Palestinians.
Within such a hostile environment, caring is to become cognizant of the oppressor planted deep inside each of us, resist oppression, and build coalitions animated by the politics of everyday life (Ahmed, 2017; hooks, 1994; Lorde, 1984; Simpson, 2021). One way that we, students and alums of the Research Master’s Gender Studies at Utrecht University, sought to do this was to design and facilitate the tutorial “Experiments on Embodied Theory” (November 2022 – February 2023) within the program. Within the care frame, we want to share a specific session, Embodying Ghosts as Refusal, which focuses on evoking present-past histories that reside in us, such as colonial heritage, epistemic violence, and capital accumulation.
We aim to share our experience of designing and facilitating the tutorial as a case study to offer ways of questioning care within a neoliberal structure and knowledge system. We will address the following questions: In what shapes does care take place in the university? What are the demands of embodiment, of histories shaping present materialities/bodies, that care makes of us? And what are the hopes and possibilities of instigating a feminist practice within care-less neoliberal academia? As a partial answer, we propose that by accepting and embodying ghosts as part of our lives, we can reorient and animate ourselves to address the ongoing violence with greater care.
Embodied Theory Assembly (ETA) is a feminist research collective co-instigated by Muhammad Khurram, Rita Sousa, and Kiek Korevaar (since February 2022, the Netherlands). Evolving out of the ReMA Gender Studies program at Utrecht University, ETA directly responds to the institutions’ pedagogy and methodology by refusing the Cartesian body-mind distinction at the heart of the academic white-European epistemological approach, for the body cannot be left behind (as Mia Mingus reminds us) in radical resistance, imaginaries, and the liberation struggle. As such, we depart from an activist intervention seeking to “stay with the trouble” (as Donna Haraway invites us) of working at the fringes of the institution. We do not aim to dismiss the theory. By moving in and out of theory and practice, our experiential work constantly unfolds to lay bare power-imputed structures interwoven on/into our bodily fabric of everyday life. Through our shared background in queer, decolonial, and feminist theory, our practice extends its tendrils into the nurturing compost of theorists, activists, and poets, cultivating futures in the fields above, thus providing us with generous, arable soil for feminist intervention.
panel 2Matters of Mutual Aid: Caring Assemblages and Collective Action
Ephemeral Islands: Matters of Care and the Weaving of Collective Worlds in the Mediterranean
Myrto Karampela-Makrygianni
The Mediterranean Basin, defined and restricted by its own watery boundness, embodies the mesocosm of a “damaged” planet facing the concatenation of multiple crises. Its thick surfaces contain much more than water alone: highly colonized, politicized, appropriated, and instrumentalized, the Mediterranean embodies all the fragilities and urgencies that characterize living in the 21st century. In its deep – and often intentionally obscured – space, the notion of coexistence is constantly re/negotiated through overlapping (re)territorialization processes, accelerated climatic, material, and geological transformations, as well as complex interactions between human and more-than-human assemblages. As the climate crisis shifts the focus from the land to the sea, the question of care and its aesthetics become central for the establishment of a counter-paradigm for the worlding of the ocean: a paradigm that opposes the prevailing practices of domination, alienation, expulsion, and colonization that accompany anthropogenic practices and unitary “truth claims” typical of the capitalist state regime nexus.
In this light, it becomes paramount to develop experimental methodologies, alternative conceptualizations of care, and cartographic practices that bring about more desirable worlding dynamics. The present paper addresses these concerns from both conceptual and designerly perspectives: firstly, it critically re/maps the Mediterranean Basin by painting its fragmentary portrait as a material (re)configuring of interconnected and conflicting political, cultural, historical, and environmental forces, while simultaneously revealing traces of immanence and resistance. Secondly, it deploys practices of care for the creation of a common “grounds” where contextual encounters and entanglements “weave” together existential and material threads into a rich texture of synergies, tensions, and contradictions, resulting in the emergence of new subjectivities and more-than-human agencies capable of co-evolving on a “damaged” planet. To do so it focuses on the ephemeral island formations of the Mediterranean seamounts as speculative (re)fabulations that hold in their terra nulla legal status and in their inherent unknowability the ability to induce caring types of knowledge. Understood as prototypical “in-between-scapes” and as assemblages of neglected things, stories, relations, and worlds, seamounts blend conventional dichotomies such as nature/culture, zoë/bios, human/non-human, or subject/object, into reformulations of onto-epistemological import, thus weaving an affirmative-repairing model not only for the urbanization of the ocean but generally for the cohabitation of the “damaged” planet.
Myrto Karampela-Makrygianni has graduated cum laude from the MSc at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft. Her areas of expertise are guided by her research on more- than-city and more-than-human urbanization, and on critical cartographies as a medium of new materialism worlding practices. The proposed paper is based on her graduation project “The Sea as Island: Borderscaping the Mediterranean Basin,” in which she uses the case of the Mediterranean to critique prevailing worlding paradigms and to investigate processes of knowing-in-becoming and alternative forms of co-existence between human and more- than-human assemblages founded on practises of care.
Utopias of Care: The Powers of Mutual Aid and Collective Action. A Case Study of the Barcelona-based Collective Madrecitas
Laura Del Vecchio
The present work takes the case study of the Barcelona-based collective Madrecitas as an inspiration and starting point to delve into the powers of mutual aid and collective action as storytelling practices to build utopias of care. Madrecitas is a political collective formed by migrant mothers that started their activism in 2020 in order to fight for recovering the custody of their children. By taking Madrecitas’s activism as the main source of knowledge and experience, this work compares different types of discourse related to the ethics and politics of care in the city of Barcelona and the Spanish State, observing how discourses (and storytelling as well) shared by public institutions do not match the reality lived by those affected by their programs. While exploring the singularity of the Madrecitas collective, their knowledge and experience serve as a solid statement to assess how colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and cisheteropatriarchy deeply intervene in the elaboration of public policy and dynamics of social services. Instead of focusing on the social, cultural and economic hindrances faced by Madrecitas’s members throughout their daily routines, this work pays particular attention to the transformative potential of their actions as a political group, relating their testimony with additional academic resources drawn from abolitionist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial practices. Together with the theoretical framework of this study, in collaboration with Madrecitas, a utopian narrative was written with the intention to put name to the nameless things and to potentially lay the basis for the construction of new worlds powered by mutual aid and collective action.
Laura Del Vecchio (she/her) is a translator and editor, interested in the aspects that interfere in the conception of the political, social, and cultural surrounding our way of thinking as humans. Laura has contributed to developing methodologies and participated in research groups focused on emerging technologies, collaborating with third-sector institutions and companies such as UNESCO, the Austrian Economic Chambers (WKO), armesuisse, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, BNP Paribas, and many others. Laura published articles and collaborated with Uol Tab, Up Future Sight, Foro Social de Economías Transformadoras, Trop.soledad, tech Detector, and La Directa. Currently, she is a student in the Master of Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities at the University of Barcelona, in the branch of globalization, migrations, and alterity, focusing her research on the concepts of responsibility and commitment within post-human feminist theory and with an emphasis on the ethics and politics of care.
Difficult Reciprocities: Matters of Care in a State Secondary School
Junn Kato
This exploratory study takes permission from the excessive potential of Fisher and Tronto’s definition of care, to assemble caring research from care ethics theorising, Actor-Network Theory, and Feminist New Materialisms. Set in an Australian state secondary school serving a community affected by poverty, the study traces matters of care and concern raised by four young people preparing for their senior years of secondary education. Following María Puig de la Bellacasa’s critique of Latour, a method has been developed that seeks new ways to care. The study traces assemblages which gather at sites young people say matter to them, gathering in a cast of actants including coffee mugs, unauthorised murals, guinea pigs, budget guidelines, earbuds, curricula and a host of other entities, some surprising and some mundane. By tracing more-than-human caring assemblages, the study sought to conceptualise care separately from liberal ideologies that inform state education. In doing so, “vibes” as continuities of bodies, spaces, and materials, emerged through the concept of umwelt as articulated in the theorising of Elizabeth Grosz.
Vibes drew attention to two school spaces, Artcave and the restorative room, whose caring architectures assembled them as sensors, or means by which the school as an entity feels, and becomes responsive. Tracing actants through these entities, and then what they go on to do, provided an opportunity to think critically about difficult reciprocities, being mindful of Frans Vosman’s warnings regarding romanticising care. In this study, in order to be cared-for, there was a silencing of complaint, a silencing that was corrosive of institutional trust. The term “difficult reciprocities” highlights limitations of liberal ideologies inherent in care as a compensatory act, and indicates hidden costs in the assumed unequalness of liberal care, limiting its potential for justice.
Junn Kato (he/him) is a final year PhD candidate at the Queensland University of Technology, and Deputy Principal at a state secondary school in Queensland, Australia, with thirty years of experience in Queensland state schools. Junn’s doctoral thesis seeks to apply the ethics of care to research into socially just public schooling practices using methodology informed by Actor-Network Theory and Feminist New Materialisms. Together with Jessica Leonard, a fellow doctoral candidate working in the tertiary sector, Junn co-leads a small online reading group focusing on care ethics research, specifically applied to education contexts. When he grows up, he would like to explore the possibility of becoming a practitioner-researcher in public schools, as a way of addressing the lack of theory-informed creativity in the global school improvement agenda, particularly as it pertains to socially just schooling.
Junn’s relevant work as an administrator includes a commitment to socially just schooling through employment partnerships with industry bodies, restorative justice, as well as university transition programs for students at schools serving communities affected by poverty, especially for students interested in teaching and nursing. In his spare time, Junn gardens with his partner Jenny on their acreage outside Brisbane where they experiment with the permaculture principles that inform Jenny’s work as a permaculture designer and educator.
panel 3Time to Care: Aesthetic Interventions and Everyday Life
Notes Towards Creative and Caring Research Practices
Noa Roei, Mariska Zwartsenburg, Jeanette Pols, Maya Lane & Simone Stergioula
Classic evaluative methods, with their insistence on impact measurement and tendency to discipline research subjects, are not ideal for studying the aesthetic experience of caregivers in care practices under pressure. Answering to this predicament, we argue for the need to reconceptualize what research entails in settings of emergency care, and address the importance of artistic events as partners for formulating creative and caring research methodologies. To do so, we reflect on the trajectory of our research project at the Emergency Department of a hospital in one of NL’s big cities. In this project, we work together across disciplines (anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, medicine, creative arts, curation) and institutional partnerships (hospitals, museums, universities) to explore: (a) how aesthetic interventions in the shape of artistic events and co-creations may mitigate some of the problems experienced by caregivers in the spaces where they care, and (b) how these events may be researched in ways that do not disturb care practices nor aggravate their problems. This premise originates in an understanding of aesthetic experiences as important determinants in the way daily institutional care is experienced by caregivers.
In our research, we created a series of artistic events, and experimented with more and less traditional evaluative methods, ranging from surveys and field notes to sensory mappings and confession booths. Our presentation will share our ongoing search for the kind of experiences that emerged through these events, and the insight gained in the processes of their organisation and introduction, in specific relation to the setting of emergency care. We unpack processes of working towards both art events and research experiments, to show how our work benefitted from a more dynamic understanding of the relation between creativity, research, and ethics of care, and the role that cross-institutional collaboration and artistic practices played in this trajectory.
Noa Roei is Assistant Professor at the Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. Her current research focuses on art and visual culture in relation to institutional design and infrastructure, building on previous research in the fields of performance and visual arts, nationalism, conflict and war. Upcoming publications engage with care infrastructure and the need to rethink existing research methodologies in the Humanities.
Mariska Zwartsenburg is an Emergency Physician at OLVG and principal investigator in the OLVG research team. She has a background in medical journalism and (science) philosophy, and is actively involved in several pieces of research toward a more humane approach to medicine. She co-created the Pediatric Emergency Department, the Project Learning from Excellence that focuses on what goes well in healthcare, and coaches fellows in Emergency Medicine.
Jeannette Pols is Professor of Anthropology of Everyday Ethics in Healthcare. She works with the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, and with the department of Ethics, Law & Humanities of the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam of the same university. Her recent publications address the aesthetics of everyday care and the way artistic events enable specific social meanings to emerge. In 2023, she organized the festival Unexpected Subjects, a cross-over festival for Art, Science & Philosophy.
Maya Lane is a medical anthropologist based at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include queer ecologies, multispecies care, eating and cooking practices, employing queer, feminist, and crip theory throughout her work. She currently works on multispecies “toxicities” at the Meertens Institute and is part of ArtiC, an interdisciplinary working group exploring aesthetic interventions and care in an Amsterdam hospital.
Simone Stergioula is a researcher in critical theory and affective justice based in Amsterdam. They are currently part of the project Art in Care: Aesthetic Configurations, Impact, and Spaces of Care (ArtiC), where they develop creative-research methodologies to account for the complex entanglements between subjects and architecture in hospital spaces.
Pads on Stage! Re-telling Stories of Living with Incontinence through Puppet Theatre
Riku Laakkonen, Tuulia Lahtinen, Anna I. Rajala, Timo Uotinen & Tiina Vaittinen
Adult incontinence pad users and their daily lives are in many ways overlooked in society. This paper presents our reflections on a theatre performance that is based on autobiographical and anonymous “pad stories” written by research participants who either use adult incontinence pads themselves or by people who help others to use them (e.g., care professionals, carers, and personal assistants). The pad stories were re-told by incontinence pads, animated as puppets by the presenters of this paper, who do research around the topic of incontinence and/or incontinence pads in different fields. Because of the taboos and stigmas associated with the subject, our performance is deeply political, and in this way, it relates to a rich tradition of documentary theatre. Our performance protagonists, the puppets, alienate and, at the same time, protect the owners of the stories. Another performance tradition from which we borrow is the reading drama, where the performers read the text directly from the script, meaning that there is no attempt to memorise the lines. In this way, we aim to give attention to the stories themselves. Through the performance, our research team wanted to bring the hidden and silenced everyday stories to the stage. At the same time, we wanted to test alternative ways of sharing information and research results through art. When pads speak on stage about the silenced lives of human society, it may become possible to address the stigma of incontinence and the need for pads in a different way than the way it is told by human characters. This is what we set out to explore in our performance, together with the audience. At the heart of the presentation is, therefore, the question of how to transmit adult incontinence pad users’ experiences in an ethical, caring, and reparative manner. Communicating these experiences is also important for the development of incontinence care and for shaping the way we approach incontinence.
Artist-researcher Riku Laakkonen started his artistic doctoral studies at the Tampere University in August 2020. His research focuses on intra-actions between older adults with dementia and material objects, including adult incontinence pads. He is currently co-convener of TaPRA Applied and Social Theatre working group.
MSc. Tuulia Lahtinen (Tampere University) is working on her doctoral thesis on prevention and treatment of incontinence in Finnish maternity clinics. She has a background as a public health nurse and has worked with people with incontinence.
Dr. Anna I. Rajala (Tampere University and The University of the Arts Helsinki) is a critical theorist and social scientist currently working on her postdoctoral project on the politics of excrement. She is also working on how Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic experience might critically inform narrative medicine.
Dr. Timo Uotinen specialises in Shakespearian drama, critical theory, and early modern philosophy. He is currently working on the concept of incontinence and its historical connotations of immorality.
Dr. Tiina Vaittinen (Tampere University) is a care ethicist and political economist whose most recent work in the Pad Project has focused on developing holistically sustainable continence care. She dreams of a world where everyone’s care needs, including the most silenced ones, could be met within planetary boundaries.
The Time to Care
Poornima Sardana
In 2019, in between my chemotherapy cycles, I developed dental problems. The pain was inexplicable but so was the hurriedness of decisions to be taken. In their rush to resolve the issue, the dentist removed a fairly healthy tooth and the chemotherapy was resumed. I often think of that hasty decision, the strength applied by the dentist and her assistant to pull out a tooth that was not ready to decay. And it transports me to uprooting of great old trees for a highway, to exploitative mining, deforestation, to capitalism and its application of power. Above all, it makes me wonder about time. If time was not perceived to be less, was careful attention and deliberation possible? This “accelerated time” and resulting “volatility,” says Harvey, “makes it extremely difficult to engage in any long-term planning.” How does such experience of time affect care, whether for an individual or the planet, its ethics and its aesthetics? (Harvey, 1989, pp. 286-287).
As an antidote, I am often drawn to the art of Rafoogari (darning) in India, slow, deliberate movements of fingers, threads healing a piece of textile through “appropriate care action” (Saito, 2022, p. 22). I find solace in Hayao Miyazaki’s storytelling, the aesthetics of the animation revealing the sublime in everyday life, reciprocity in nature, consciousness, and a more caring pace of life unfolding. And I wonder if these acts of care through art, or caring within the art, are these windows into perceptions of time and ways of living that could inform our ways of understanding and “knowing”? Building on current literature on Care Aesthetics, I am eager to find resources in art that could shape an “epistemology of care” (Dalmiya, 2016, p. 2), and juxtapose it with personal experiences of illness, haste, and “bad care” (Tronto, 2013). Through this curation of lived and aesthetic experiences in care, I wish to enquire about time.
References
Dalmiya, V. (2016). Caring to know: Comparative care ethics, feminist epistemology, and the Mahābhārata. Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Blackwell.
Saito, Y. (2022). Aesthetics of care: Practice in everyday life. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. NYU Press.
Poornima Sardana is Founder of the Museums Of Hope and is currently engaged in designing her art toolkit for patients and caregivers, Seasons of the Mind, with the support of Hyundai’s Art for Hope Grant 2024. She has been a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar at NYU for her MA in Museum Studies, a Young India Fellow at the Ashoka University, and studied BDes from NIFT, New Delhi. She researches and works at the intersection of museums, well-being, and care, and contributed a chapter to the edited volume Flourishing in Museums. She co-founded the Museums Mazzedaar Collective to experiment with playfulness in museums.
panel 5Woundings: Archives of Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation
Transforming Historical Trauma: “Wounding” and Repair in Contemporary Art
Amy Louise Stenvert
During the spring of 1863, a man known by the name of Peter escaped from a plantation in Louisiana and found safety among Union soldiers encamped at Baton Rouge. Before enlisting in the military, he underwent extensive medical examination. His back was heavily mutilated and filled with horrific scars. The photograph that was taken of Peter’s back, often referred to as “The Scourged Back” and in some instances as “Whipped Peter” or “A Map of Slavery,” became proof of slavery’s brutality and was used by the abolitionists in their efforts to end slavery. A journalist for the New York Independent wrote: “This Card Photograph should be multiplied by the 100,000, and scattered over the States. It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe cannot approach, because it tells the story to the eye” (as cited in Collins, 1985, p. 45). And this is exactly what happened: copied by engravers for publication in Harper’s Weekly, July 4, 1863, the picture was reproduced many times and spread across the country soon after.
Now, more than 160 years later, the image still provides a powerful imprint of the horrors of slavery. It doesn’t come as a surprise that recently Emancipation, a Hollywood blockbuster film, was produced in which the story of “Whipped Peter” takes center stage. Interestingly, the image has also been reproduced in contemporary artworks, most notably by Arthur Jafa, Victor Sonna, and Fabiola Jean-Lewis. During this presentation, I will analyze Jafa’s “Ex-Slave Gordon,” Sonna’s “Wall of Reconciliation,” and Jean Lewis’ “Madame Beauvoir’s Painting” through the lens of Griselda Pollock’s approach to trauma. Rather than focusing on the common “model of cure,” Pollock (2013, p. 27) argues for an understanding of trauma that confronts “wounding” and shows how aesthetic practices might mediate and transmit traces of trauma (after-affects). Through close visual analysis, I will argue that each of these works have the power to transform – going beyond cure or repair – historical trauma in their own specific way.
References
Collins, K. (1985). The scourged back. History of Photography, 9(1), 43-45.
Pollock, G. (2013). After-affects, after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum. Manchester University Press.
Amy Louise Stenvert is a freelance curator, writer, and researcher living and working in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She holds a BA in Classical Archaeology from the University of Groningen and a MA in Curating Art and Cultures from the University of Amsterdam. She has worked together with many artists and curated several exhibitions of contemporary art, amongst others Freehaven (2019), Empathy: No Man is an Island(2020), Where the Wild Roses Grow (for Trudi) (2022), and Do for Love (2023) for Museum IJsselstein. Currenty, she works for The Mondrian Initiative, an international artist residency programme which takes place in the former studio of Piet Mondrian in Laren. Her main research interests and topics on writing include: curating, applied arts around 1900, discrepancy between theory and artistic practice, and the themes of loss, repair, and healing in contemporary art.
Re-futuring the Soil: Interdisciplinary Artistic Collaborations with the Inclusion of Art Education
Brenda Bikoko & Toshie Takeuchi
In part 1 the presentation focuses on the artistic research titled “Refuturing the Soil,” which delves into the overlooked history of the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This mine supplied the majority of uranium for the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This exploration, grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration, involves artists, geologists, activists, and archivists. The aim is to integrate anthropological and decolonial perspectives to re-narrate the impacts of war from the scarcely documented local Congolese viewpoints, re-linking the narratives between the exploited land, uranium, forced labour, ongoing colonial impacts, and the representations of atomic bombs globally. The presentation will demonstrate why collaborative approaches are vital in reconstituting these connections and what “care aesthetics” have emerged from this process, referencing scholars like Arturo Escobar (2018), and Su-ming Khoo and Anique Vered (2020). The artistic outcomes of this research will be showcased at the Biennale de Lubumbashi 2024 through a collaborative performance and video presentation with artists Sixte Kakinda and Roger Peet.
In part 2 the process of presenting “Refuturing the Soil” to art students as an introduction to ethics of care is addressed. Furthermore, the students will be introduced to the Arte Útil methodology (Saviotti, 2023), which advocates artistic thinking to imagine, create, and implement tactics that change how we act in society. Within this context, the students will contemplate in different groups about what could be a sustainable Arte Útil project with special focus on care. The participation of the students from Sint-Lucas Karel de Grote University College Antwerp is assured. Depending on the availability of financial resources a joint with students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa will be instituted.
References
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
Khoo, S. & Vered, A. (2020). Including the “invisible middle” of decoloniality. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21(7), 225–242.
Saviotti, A. (2023). Hacking art education: Arte Útil as an educational methodology to foster change for curriculum planning [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Liverpool John Moores University.
Brenda Bikoko specialises in the re-appropriation of colonial archives in contemporary art at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, focusing on female artists. A lecturer at Sint-Lucas Karel de Grote Hogeschool Antwerp, she teaches Anthropology of the Arts and Art and the Congo, blending historical narratives with identity and art. She is also part of Troubled Archives, a project reassessing colonial legacies and a board member of Sophia the Belgian Gender Studies Network.
Toshie Takeuchi (she/her) is a visual artist, filmmaker and organiser of community art activities. She was born in Aichi, Japan, and currently living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her art practice explores micro stories such as personal memories, site-situated local tales and folk traditions to widen critical perspectives on hegemonic historical and geopolitical narratives, which are often shaped by imperial colonial systems of memory and sensorial control. Her works emerge from layered of collective engagements in transformation and making relations. Her works has been shown e.g. at Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK), De Appel Amsterdam (NL), Wadden Tide Vadehavsfestival (DK), Galleri Image (DK), Artspeak (CA), and Australian Centre for Photography (AU). toshietakeuchi.com/
Mending as the Means: Yasmine El Meleegy’s Enactments of Care and Reimagination of Colonial Memory through Craft
Jamila Abdel-Razek
Can craft practices mend colonial memory and help reimagine processes of resistance? This paper engages with the Egyptian artist Yasmine El Meleegy’s site-specific intervention, Scaffolding a Familiar Epoch (2021). The Cairo-born (b. 1991) and based artist’s performative intervention was undertaken over three months in which she renovated, cleaned, and archived Stephenson Pharmacy, a British colonial-era pharmacy in Downtown Cairo. Producing a participatory museum-like experience, El Meleegy’s intervention explores craftwork’s potential to work through trauma and reimagine political imaginaries. Drawing on Glen Adamson’s theorisation of craft and memory (2018), Sara Ahmed’s inquiry on “use” (2019), and Marianne Hirsch’s conceptualisation of “postmemory” (1997), I ask whether El Meleegy’s processes of craft have the potential to mobilise forms of care such as mending colonial memory, working through familial mythologies, and creating political imaginaries. Beyond craftwork, I will consider whether the role of the craftworker and pharmacist act as caretakers of memory and tradition while disrupting conventional notions of healing.
I will answer such questions by exploring the following: discussing how craftwork, through its haptic gestures, mimics the act of “working through” trauma, how the continuity of craftwork through family businesses conflates personal and collective memory, and how laborious efforts of craftwork protest the impersonal and capitalistic production of the current pharmaceutical industry. Throughout, I will discuss El Meleegy’s insertion of her own craft-based objects that contest notions of “use” and rely on postmemory to fill the void between an object and its maker. To conclude, I will consider how the pharmacy, which is still in use and has been run by an Egyptian family since Egypt’s independence from British colonial rule, stands as a testament to reclamation, especially of the role of museums in Egyptian colonial history, while reimagining political resistance.
References
Adamson, G. (2018). The invention of craft. Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s the use? On the uses of use. Duke University Press Books.
Hirsch, M. (1997). Family frames: Photography, narrative and postmemory. Harvard University Press.
Jamila Abdel-Razek is a Gallery Assistant at Gypsum, Cairo, and a writer whose work has most recently been featured in Frieze Magazine. She holds a BA in History of Art from University College London, where she completed a dissertation titled Mending as the Means: Reconstruction and Repair in Egyptian Postmemory. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art and the cultural history of the Middle East and North Africa, with a particular interest in craft-based practices as acts of love, solidarity, and care.
panel 6Arts of Death, Grief, and Transformation
Explore Life and Death with Munch
Christiaan Rhodius
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was confronted with death during his youth. Both his mother and sister died when he was young. He was sick himself as well and as a result was bedridden a considerate amount of time. Death is one of the main topics in his work. This focus on death was criticized and called “sick.” Munch disagreed. In response to his critics, he writes that he paints so people can learn “from it and live after” (MM N 46, Munchmuseet. Datert 1930–1934. Notat.) So in a way, Munch saw his art as therapeutic and “care.”
Paradoxically, by deliberately facing death together, some of the threat death confronts us with is diminished. This relational dynamic is also described as “the palliative paradox.” These perspectives form the basis in the educational program in the MUNCH museum (Oslo) called “Explore Life and Death with Munch.” Initially used in the training of medical students, it has now also been used for nurses and priests in training. During the program the conversational model “coming to the essence” is introduced. This model points towards factual, emotional, and existential aspects in life. By engaging with the art of Munch, participants practice with the model. Groupwise, participants go through the exhibition and apply the model to a painting the group selects themselves. All group members engage with the painting personally and share their experiences together. In a plenary meeting all groups share about their experience while interacting with a work of Munch. Participants are encouraged to not only reflect on what actually happened (the factual level in the model), but also put words to how this affects their own feelings, existential point of view, and, ultimately, their future clinical practice. During this presentation, participants will be introduced to the model and put it to practice themselves.
Christiaan Rhodius is an elderly care physician who has worked as a consultant in palliative medicine in Hospice Bardo in the Amsterdam region. He currently lives in Oslo with his wife and four children and serves as a consultant in palliative medicine at the Lovisenberg Diakonale Hospital. Besides his clinical focus, he has been involved in an array of educational settings. He strives to engage with society at large around the topics of life, death, and palliative care. He is author of the book Omdat we leven – met met zicht op het einde(Because we live – with the end in sight). The relational aspect of care and how attachment theory can inspire us motivated him to write “How Attachment Transformed My Palliative Practice: Discovering the Palliative Paradox.”
Aquatic Alchemy: Navigating Grief Through Slow Swimming as a Transformative, Aesthetic Practice of Care and Healing
Deirdre M. Donoghue
For this conference, I would like to present my ongoing artistic research project exploring specifically framed aesthetic experiences as transformative practices of care and healing. My inquiry departs from a personal question of “How to live with grief?” and employs slow swimming as an artistic methodology together with creative writing, a performance practice, and the production of audiovisual work. This project began from a personal need to manage the everyday affective labor required by grief through the enactment of small-scale daily acts of establishing connection with my local ecologies. I first began exploring with what I here refer to as “slow swimming” in March 2022, after a diagnosis of a rare autoimmune disease attacking my organs through scarring and hardening, causing loss of function and ultimately failure. Over the course of a year my daily, eco-somatic, sensory, aesthetic encounters with different bodies of water, their visible and invisible inhabitants, and my own body as a living organism growing fibrosis began transforming my perception, experience, and understanding of myself as a broken body. I began experimenting with “slow swimming” as a transformative aesthetic practice through framing my swims as collaborative performances with the more-than-human bodies around me. For my presentation, I will present some of the recorded performances, while thinking further with them in relation to ecological relationality, reparative (aesthetics of) care, and healing.
Dr. Deirdre M. Donoghue is a visual and performance artist, practicing birth-doula, and an academic affiliated with Utrecht University where she is a lecturer at the Graduate Gender Program and KU Leuven, where she is a Researcher Associate. In her artistic work she most often sets up social scenarios and specifically framed human encounters where multiple relations can be set into motion, through which the production of new knowledge systems via cross-disciplinary approach becomes mobilised. Her doctoral dissertation ‘The Aesth-Ethics of Interruption’ examined maternal subjectivity and practices of care as aesthetic, political, and environmental forces in the creative processes of contemporary mother-artists (Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University, 2021).
Research interests: care aesthetics, ecology, and the environment; medical humanities and care ethics; arts-based methodologies in care ethics.
A Masculine Art of Care? Exploring Men’s Creative, Playful, and Embodied Responses to Grief and Loss
Martin Robb
Research has shown that men are less likely than women to access conventional talking therapies in the aftermath of bereavement and other traumatic experiences. However, recent years have seen the development of a variety of creative initiatives that successfully engage men who have experienced grief, anxiety, or depression, through forms of shared, creative, and embodied activity. These have included bereaved fathers forming sports teams, “walking and talking” mental health groups, and projects that involve the collective creation of artworks, all of which can be described in the broadest sense as “playful,” and which have enabled men to achieve healing and repair. These developments prompt important questions for care theory. How exactly do embodied movement and shared, creative activity facilitate men’s psychological healing? What part is played in men’s emotional repair by caring with and for others? Is there something specifically “masculine” about men’s preference for active and embodied forms of care and self-care, and if so, what are the implications for thinking about caring masculinities? This presentation will explore these questions, drawing on the findings from a recent qualitative interview study with bereaved fathers in the UK. The paper will also discuss recent “grief memoirs” by creative artists, as well as a BBC documentary which followed a popular singer as he explored his and other men’s mental health experiences, for which the author was the academic adviser. The presentation will build on Maurice Hamington’s influential work on embodied care, as well as Christine Leroy’s recent research on “kinaesthetic empathy,” both of which draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. Reference will also be made to the work of Petr Urban and Alice Koubová on the connections between art, play and care.
Martin Robb is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care at The Open University (UK), where he leads the Master’s programme in Childhood and Youth Studies. Originally trained in the arts and humanities, he also holds qualifications in psychology and child development. Before entering academia, Martin spent a number of years organising education projects with socially marginalised groups and communities. His academic research has focused principally on issues related to men, masculinities, and care and has included studies of male childcare workers, involved fatherhood, bereaved fathers, and young masculinities. Martin is the author of Men, Masculinities and the Care of Children: Images, Ideas and Identities (Routledge, 2020) and co-editor with Kerry Jones of the forthcoming Men and Loss: New Perspectives on Bereavement, Grief and Masculinity (Routledge, 2025). Martin was the academic adviser to the BBC programme James Arthur: Out of Our Minds, exploring men’s mental health, for which he co-developed the animation Man Up or Open Up. He is co-editor of the international interdisciplinary journal Children & Society and host of the Careful Thinking podcast series, in which he explores ideas about care in conversation with writers, researchers, and practitioners at the cutting edge of current thinking about care.
panel 7Caring in Tension: Aesthetics, Justice, and the Ethics of Care
Navigating Novel Aesthetic Care Practices with/in Architectural and Medical Undergraduate Training
Alex Noble & Veronica Mitchell
Our interdisciplinary presentation takes up a common interest in arts-based practices to enhance student learning amidst prevailing injustices. We use feminist new materialism and visual methodologies drawn from our recent doctoral research projects related to developing socially just pedagogical caring practices in undergraduate architectural studies and medical training. Derrida’s notion of a justice-to-come, developed further by Barad, has inspired us to diffract different theoretical concepts to illuminate the places and spaces of violence in student learning in the spatial arrangements of institutional practices. We use artwork/diagramming/photography and theory with an ethics of care to explore the multidirectional forces intra-acting with/in the learning environments.
Our inquiry is emergent as we respond to student encounters and relationships with their curricular content, a previously hidden or silenced aspect of their learning. We ask, how can we foster care in/to student learning amidst problematic human/more-than-human relationships? In South Africa, the legacy of apartheid prevails in spatial structures that tend to perpetuate inequality and injustice. This paper’s first author has taken extended curriculum students embarking on their studies in architectural technology through past/present/future spaces, thereby creating occasions that alert them to social and spatial injustices within the built environment of the city in which they reside. The paper’s second author engages with fourth-year medical students entering into their initial practical clinical experiences in obstetrics, addressing their experiences in the public birthing facilities in which they learn their skills amidst the abusive practices that prevail.
We delve into an understanding of care dynamics with/in curricula by probing the intersections of care aesthetics with spatial planning and public health. We put forward propositions as potentials for transforming current practices. Central to our exploration is the concept of justice-to-come, which serves as a guiding principle in envisioning a more equitable future.
Alex Noble (PhD Candidate) is a Lecturer in the Department of Architectural Technology and Interior Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town. Alex is a professional architect with an Honors degree in Visual Art and has a keen interest in both teaching drawing to students and using art-based practices in her design teaching. Her teaching work predominantly takes place in the extended curriculum programme (ECP) with her related publications in journal articles and a book chapter taking a focus on pedagogical practices with the ECP students. Alex’s recent doctoral thesis under the supervision of Professor Vivienne Bozalek at the University of the Western Cape, is presently under examination. The title of the thesis is (Re)configuring Socially Just Pedagogies with Posthumanism and Decoloniality: Experimenting with Processual Learning in the Architectural Technology Extended Curriculum Programme in the Western Cape, South Africa. The research project explores integrating processual learning interventions into the Architectural Technology curriculum in South Africa, with an aim to foster transformative learning experiences and promote social justice. Framed within posthumanism and decoloniality, it investigates how these theoretical perspectives can take up a perspective of care to inform socially just pedagogies in architectural education. By employing research-creation inquiry and conducting pedagogical interventions focused on developing students’ awareness of social and spatial inequalities, the study seeks to challenge conventional paradigms in architectural education and equip students to address pressing societal issues. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6894-9672
Veronica Mitchell (PhD) is a Research Associate in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape and a facilitator in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her physiotherapy background and her experiences in human rights education led to her interest in exploring the undergraduate medical curriculum with a specific focus on obstetric violence and the impact it has on student learning. A recent collaborative art-making embroidery project with Professor Puleng Segalo and the Intuthuko Community of women (reflecting on their birthing experiences) has led to exhibitions, conference presentations, and publications. During a residency at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva, Veronica worked together with Professor Inge van Nistelrooij to engage more deeply with the relationship of mothering and the ethics of care towards their edited book that is nearing completion. Her involvement with advocacy work for patients with psoriatic disease has led to the development of a recent online Learning Journey hosted on the Moodle platform. Her work extends further to a passion for opening and sharing knowledge for the public good and supports Faculty members to produce their textbooks as Open Educational Resources. Her publications include journal papers, book chapters, and an experimental art-making research blog. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3436-5185
Expanding Ethics through Aesthetics in Design for AI-driven Mental Health Technologies
Karin Bogdanova
The increasing demand for the improved availability, accessibility, and efficiency of healthcare services endorsed extensive innovation through artificial intelligence (AI) including digital mental health. The most cutting-edge emergent technology of digital phenotyping (DP) thus promises radical innovation of psychiatric diagnostics enabled by the analysis of passive and device interaction data from personal mobile devices and wearables. As a result, there is a valid concern about the need for standardisation, formalisation, and interoperability requiring digital phenotyping algorithms to employ generalisable digital biomarkers that convert culturally and socially specific expressions of health, well-being, and illness into uniform, detectable, and quantifiable measurements. DP’s slow development and implementation on a large scale have been attributed to ethical challenges, alongside technical limitations. Yet, critical literature on DP either has a narrow focus on data ethics while outsourcing the responsibility to governance and policy, or challenges the epistemological assumptions without providing alternatives or interventions.
In this paper, I argue that solely an ethical framing for the concerns around the development and implementation of DP might be insufficient to address its possible harms. Thus, I am proposing an ethico-aesthetic framework for the design of AI in DP that is grounded in pragmatist aesthetics and aesthetics of care. Three propositions are thus developed. Firstly, the understanding of care as practice and sensibility encourages a dedicated definition of algorithmic care as a distinct type of posthuman care. Secondly, this definition enables the deliberate development and design of the human-AI collaboration elements. Thirdly, four key domains of DP design that reflect the aesthetic approach are identified. Those are perception, representation, experience, and relationality. This paper contributes to the expansion of pragmatist aesthetics – and aesthetics of care specifically – to design practice and explores alternative approaches to AI design.
Karin Bogdanova is a PhD researcher at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft. She is a part of AI DeMoS Lab, which is an inter-faculty, interdisciplinary lab that aims at developing AI to enable democratic engagements through the fusion of philosophy and design. With her background in anthropology and science and technology studies, her current research is positioned within critical HCI. Karin’s current project focuses on the development of an aesthetic approach towards algorithmic care, specifically in the context of digital phenotyping for mental health. Her immediate interests include socio-technical ecologies of care, critical psychiatry, and medical anthropology.
panel 8Experiential On-line Warm Data Lab “People Need People”
An interactive workshop offered by Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri with other Warm Data hosts
Experiential On-line Warm Data Lab “People Need People”
Join the People Need People session, in which we will be tending together to the art of care across multiple contexts (economy, education, art, technology, science, media, ecology, family, and others). It is an invitation for tasting the vitality by immersing ourselves into our relationships and living stories. Our conversations will include participants across diverse care aesthetics (re)search fields to discuss what is present for us as we explore our various experiences. People Need People sessions tend to intimacy-in-relationship, of humility and integrity, of love and caring, alive, warm and human, through mutual learning. Sharing our personal stories within the ecology of relationships reveals our interdependencies and feelings how our conversations build relationships and life.
The space will be held by hosts trained in the People Need People (PNP) and Warm Data Lab processes, developed by Nora Bateson and stewarded by the International Bateson Institute. This two-hour session is participatory in big groups and small breakout rooms. In each group you will converse with a new set of people guided by a fresh set of contexts. Whatever is alive in you in the moment, this space invites you to share that which wants to emerge.
Some resources for those considering joining the session
Bateson, N. (2023). Combining. Triarchy Press.
Bateson, N. (2022). New worlds to hold the invisible world of possibility: Warm data, symmathesy and aphanipoiesis. Unpsychology, 8. https://www.unpsychology.org/
Bateson, N. (2021). Aphanipoiesis. Journal of the International Society for the Systemsm Sciences: Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the ISSS, 1(1).https://journals.isss.org/index.php/jisss/article/view/3887
Bateson, N. & Explorers of liminality (2020). Warm data and iced lemonade: A deeply human response to complexity is possible. https://thesideview.co/articles/warm-data-and-iced-lemonade/
Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri is pharmacist, transdisciplinary researcher, and warm data host, taking part in warm data practices and community work since 2020.
panel 9Maternal Aesthetics
Dutiful Daughters, Difficult Mothers, and Sanctioned Spheres: Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie and My Mother Laughs
Laura Haynes
In 2013, Chantal Akerman flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her mother, Natalia (Nelly), who was dying. Nelly was the only member of her Polish-born family to survive Auschwitz, having fled in exile to Belgium in 1938. Repairing geographical distance and staying with her mother in her apartment, the filmmaker records, on camera and in writing, a melodious ceremony of their days together. The semi-surreptitiously shot vignettes of her final film, No Home Movie (released in 2015), eliminate incident and story to cinematically render the repeated gestures and essence of quotidian days of daughterhood/motherhood during palliative care in the space of the domestic.
The grey Belgian autumn fills the apartment with the diffuse light and the balcony peers onto the neighbour’s garden below. Sequestered at the end of the hall in her mother’s home (“a refuge where I can write and smoke with the window open,” she notes), Akerman writes My Mother Laughs, first published in 2013. A book that resembles a “sneeze,” so says Eileen Myles in the preface to the 2019 edition, captures the (in)tolerant, fraught love and duty of a daughter. The sneeze is a syncope that interrupts. These diarised works frame her mother’s long quiet days of confinement within the walls of her apartment, hidden from the unseen and unseeing world in motion. A life destined to end.
In its close attention to the late work of Chantal Akerman (and others including Roland Barthes and Lynne Tillman), this paper will consider reparative caregiving and impossible, irrecoverable absence or territories. It will review the diarised form as mutually aesthetic and therapeutic and extend to consider the ethics of intimate documentary and the quotidian biographical. The paper will take a hybrid form, weaving comparative, critical, and theoretical analysis with narrative poetics to propose and enact a compelling relation of reparative aesthetics in visual culture and literature.
Dr Laura Haynes is a writer, editor, and academic based in Glasgow. She is co-director of MAP magazine and at The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) is leader of the studio-based interdisciplinary Master of Letters Art Writing postgraduate programme, where she also edits The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing. Laura’s writing and research is concerned with autotheory and biomythography as poetics for critique. Her work is interdisciplinary and cross-form, often presented in multiple registers including academic or literary publication, exhibition and performance. Her writing both embodies and examines the intimate, cerebral, and emotional voice as a rhetorical form where criticality is charged by correlation to the everyday. Her work is underpinned by a feminist approach to understanding social relations between writers and artists, and she has frequently written on forms such as anecdote, conversation and gossip as powerful and political forms of “minor literature.”
Publishing internationally, and across various forms, her work is published in journals including MuseMedusa: Revue de Littérature et D’Art Modernes (Review of Modern Literature and Art, University of Montreal), Journal for Writing in Creative Practice (Intellect) and magazines and presses including Sternberg, Freelands Foundation, Nothing Personal and MAP. Alongside her position at GSA, Laura has played a pivotal role in advancing art writing and performative publishing practices in Scotland as an Editorial Director of MAP, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the discussion and support of artist-led publishing and production, established in 2005. In this role she regularly commissions new writing and editorial projects.
Research and artistic interests include: expanded forms of biographical writing, autotheory, critical memoir, cross-form and cross-genre writing, interdisciplinary writing, feminist theory, behavioural theory, reproductive labour, class, ethics and moral theory, somatic practices, matrescence, grief and loss.
MATERNAL FANTASIES: The Art of Care and the Care of Art
Magdalena Kallenberger
This presentation focuses on MATERNAL FANTASIES, a feminist art collective based in Berlin, and how it has established an “aesthetics of care” through its collective artistic production. With Thompson, “aesthetics of care” encompass not only small, imaginative interactions or grand exhibitions but also are always attuned to the interpersonal connections evident in the creation and presentation of artistic endeavors. Founded in 2018, MATERNAL FANTASIES’ collective art emerges from a maternal perspective through a relational process emphasizing intergenerational engagements between the members and their (growing and changing) children over time. Their collective artworks span film, photography, performance, installation, and text. They are all produced in and through a self-organized rotational care/work mode, which considers care/work part of the production process. A non-idealized concept of care is the basis of their non-hierarchical mode of production that pays attention to the reciprocal relations of giving and receiving on unequal terms – considering interpersonal relations, skills, resources, ambitions, capacities, and life choices of the members and their participating children. Through creative exercises, their rotational working mode facilitates re-learning collectivity and communal care, following Joan Tronto’s guidance in recognizing that care requires seeing the world from someone/something else’s perspective. On another level, their collective artistic practice integrates sensory, bodily, affective, and lived experiences carved out in performative exercises and collective automatic writing sessions as collective material in their artistic production. In this presentation, I will use my entangled position as an artistic researcher, initiator, co-founder, and active member of MATERNAL FANTASIES to examine two artworks by the collective and point out how these “aesthetics of care” manifest in and through their collective artistic practice.
Magdalena Kallenberger is an artist, writer, and researcher. Her mediums span video, photography, performance, installation, and text, combining research into feminist histories and writing with autobiography, theory, and performative elements. Kallenberger’s research-based and often collaborative practice investigates themes around radical care and feminist practices tackling the in/visibility of care/work and motherhood(s) not just in the Arts.
Kallenberger graduated from the University of the Arts Berlin and is a PhD candidate at Bauhaus University Weimar, supported by a Friedrich-Ebert Foundation scholarship. Her practice-based PhD explores autotheory and collective art production as knowledge-building practices within the context of artistic research. Her thought-provoking creations, produced in solo and collective constellations, have been exhibited internationally, most recently at Múzeum Ludwig Budapest, Arnolfini Bristol, Galerie Arsenal Bialystok, Museum of Memory and Human Rights Santiago de Chile, HKW Berlin, and Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.
Kallenberger’s articles and essays appeared in publications with Routledge (2023), MIT Press (2023), k-Verlag (2023), demeter press (2023) and gender(ed) thoughts (2024). She has co-edited “Re-Assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices” by MATERNAL FANTASIES, published with onomatopee in 2021, second edition in 2022. Magdalena Kallenberger is initiator, co-founder, and active member of MATERNAL FANTASIES collective.
M/Othering and Care
Sonakshi Srivastava
In Susan Sontag’s essay, “Illness as Metaphor,” everyone who is born holds a dual citizenship, in the kingdom of well and in the kingdom of sick. This dwelling is treated with “care” in Pinto’s “Em and the Big Hoom,” where the narrator’s mother, Em suffers from bipolar disorder and in Avni Doshi’s “Burnt Sugar”, where a daughter reassesses her own life as she assumes caregiving duties for her mother. While both the novels share certain similarities – both talk about mothers, about madness and sickness – what particularly stands out are the contested negotiations and the everyday transactions that colour the child-mother relationship. The caregivers’ narratives (here the children become the caregivers) work as a testimony of how filial ties are sustained through acts of care during illness rather than an account of how illness alone necessitates care.
Fiona Robinson rethinks care ethics through a critical feminist lens to reveal the different forms of power that keep the values and activities of care hidden from “public” view. Reflecting on the tensions that abound in mother-daughter relations, this paper is an attempt to explore how the two novels posture “motherhood,” “labour,” and “care ethics” in the Indian scenario, and what it means to be an “ill mother” in a society where motherhood is pedestalized. Reading the two texts with and against each other sharpens the critique of the ethics of “care-giving” – is it a duty more than feeling? What can the novels teach us about care-giving and solidarity in the face of the uneven times that we inhabit? I will unpack these questions and more to understand how care-work is negotiated in literary texts and what it means for our entangled patriarchal existence.
Sonakshi Srivastava is a writing tutor at Ashoka University, Sonepat, India. She previously graduated from the University of Delhi where she read English Literature. Her MPhil dissertation is on the biopolitics of ability and debility in contemporary fiction. She is a resident researcher for ForeignObjekt. She is one of the recipients of South Asia Speaks mentorship programme, working on translating the Hindi novel Titli into English under the mentorship of Arunava Sinha. She is a contributing translator columnist at “The Bilingual Window.” She was also shortlisted for the 2020 Serendipity FoodLab Residency, and was a Tempus Public Foundation Fellow in 2021. Her works have previously appeared in or are appearing in Hakara, potluck zine, orangepeel mag, and Rhodora among others. She is widely passionate about discard studies, food literatures, astromancy, posthumanism, zines, and animal studies.
panel 10Global Perspectives on Care, Aesthetics, and Moral Sense
Abolition Aesthetics: Aging, Incarceration, and World-Making in Tokyo
Jason Danely
Abolition is an aesthetic process, one of care and imagination as much as resistance, as much about repairing the world as it is about dismantling structures of oppression. Abolitionist aesthetics envision a world where prisons and other sites of punitive confinement are no longer necessary, refocusing our attention on states of disrepair and neglect. It is based on the claim that not only are criminal justice institutions broken, but also that this brokenness exists in a continuum with other forms of brokenness: trauma, impoverishment, fragmented families, and ableist exclusion. I argue that aesthetic practices of repairing sensibilities broken by incarceration provide the grounds for transformative world-making. This brokenness is particularly evident among older incarcerated people, who make up the most rapidly growing segment of the prison population in many countries. Based on five-months of ethnographic fieldwork with formerly incarcerated older adults, this paper describes the reparative work of ex-offender resettlement organizations in Tokyo. Most important was the attention to creating what Aisha Khan calls “carcerality's kinship,” or the feelings of love and solidarity growing out of relationships based on similar experiences of incarceration. For isolated older adults, this kinship was not only a safeguard against reoffending, but a way of imagining life otherwise. Although the increase in older Japanese ex-offenders challenges organizations that lack expertise in the care of older people, these same challenges also offered potential for organizations to shift away from a focus on employment and independence and towards an abolitionist aesthetics of care, vulnerability, and dependence.
Jason Danely is Reader in Anthropology and Chair of the Healthy Ageing & Care Research Network at Oxford Brookes University. Jason’s work focuses on aging as a way to understand the social and political logics that shape the frail and disabled body, and as a window into the phenomenology of chronicity, aesthetics, and care. He is the author of Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Japan (2014), Fragile Resonance: Caring for Older Family Members in Japan and England (2022) and Unsettled Futures: Carceral Circuits and Old Age in Japan (2024). He has edited two collections, Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course (2013) and Vulnerability and the Politics of Care: Transdisciplinary Dialogues (2021). Currently, he is co-editing the Routledge Handbook of Aging in Anthropology and Development Studies. Jason’s current research continues to focus on the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated older adults, fragmentation/repair, and the uses of distraction and humour in carceral settings like prisons and care homes.
The Aesthetics of Care in Ghanaian Rites of Transitions
Sarah Dsane
The care concept has evolved in many fields, including mythology, religion, philosophy, psychology, theology, morality, and practical application, influencing moral attitudes and actions. In recent decades, attempts to understand the practices and meanings of care have led to many approaches to conceptualizing care. These efforts have developed from the concerns of the Women’s Movement, conceiving an ethic of care perspective in women’s moral development. However, Saito argues that care ethics and aesthetic experience are shared, emphasizing that aesthetic experience intertwines with care. When we engage with the world aesthetically, we cultivate a caring relationship. In the rich tapestry of African cultures, rites of passage weave intricate patterns that mark significant transitions in an individual’s life. These rituals are not merely functional; they permeatewith symbolism, community, and caring aesthetics, adding depth and sensory richness to the transformative moments. Symbolic elements include colors, sacred spaces, music and dance, costume and attire, sensory experiences, body movement and gestures, and more. All suggest an understanding of inter-human activity, relational experience, and social practices as having human qualities that understand their aesthetics and influence how they care for others. This paper uses interviews and selected literature to discuss the transition rites for birth, marriage, and eldership among the Ga of Ghana, focusing on the artistic significance, symbolic representations, and care aesthetics that embed the celebrations and performances.
Dr. Sarah Dsane worked as a lecturer and Head of Broadcast Journalism Department at the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI) (2010-2016). She also worked as a lecturer at the University of California Education Abroad Programme (UCEAP), at the University of Ghana International Programmes (2009-2010).Prior to that, she spent over two decades working in broadcast media as a film/video editor at GBC (1977-2003), and then afterwards at Pentecost Media (PENTMEDIA (2002-2005). She attended Boa Amponsem Secondary School and thereafter obtained a Higher National Diploma (HND) from the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI) 1992-1995). She also holds a BFA in Theatre Arts, Masters, as well as a PhD in African Studies with specialty in African Family Studies, all obtained from the University of Ghana, Legon (2001- 2009). She also holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education from the University of Education, Winneba (2013). Sarah has two publications: “Changing Cultures and Care of the Elderly,” which sought to explore the situation of elderly women in Teshie – categorized into childless women and grandmothers to examine the care they received from their adult children and relatives, and a co-authored chapter “Aspects of Sexual Violence Among the Ga of Accra.”
Care and Moral Sense: From First World Moral Perceptions to Critically Caring Motifs of the Third World
Amrita Banerjee
Various representational schemas of the Global North continue to project the Third World as threatening and disruptive to global order. I argue that underlying such representational aesthetics, are specific moral schemas (Johnson, 1993), which, in turn, anchor moral perceptions across the North/South divide. On these schemas, the Third World and Third World subjects become a source of moral distress. While the West sees itself in terms of a commitment to moral universalism, Third World cultures are either perceived to be epistemologically ignorant about universal values or taken to have not arrived at them. These moral schemas, along with repeated moral perceptions guided by them, come to constitute a generalized moral sense about the Third World. The moral sense ensures self-assuredness for the West, and justifies the propagation of neo-colonial epistemologies in the transnational sphere.
I argue that care ethics, with its ontological commitments of relationality and concreteness, along with its epistemological commitments such as reception (Noddings, 1984), the will to care (Hamington, 2010), an evolving notion of the ethical self, and a process-based understanding of moral reasoning, contributes to a new understanding of moral sense. This notion of moral sense is neither based on intuition (unlike versions of classical moral sense theory), nor on a knowledge of universal values. Rather, moral sense is defined as an imaginative capacity with rational and affective dimensions, and based in negotiations and praxis. If moral perceptions are guided by this notion of moral sense, greater reciprocity in ethical relations across the North/South divide might be possible. However, as we seek to extrapolate care ethics to model North/South relations, we also need to be cautious that conceptual resources within the tradition may become double-edged swords within a transnational space marked by global stratification processes and complex colonial histories. There is the need for a transnational intervention into an ethics of care (Banerjee, 2020; 2022). As I articulate a new framework for moral sense to anchor moral perceptions across the North/South divide from the lens of care ethics, I therefore also subject the framework to critical scrutiny from the lens of transnational feminism. The aim is to see whether critically caring motifs of the Third World can emerge.
ReferencesBanerjee, A. (2022). Decolonizing solidarity and reciprocity. In M. Jal, J. Bawane & M. Ali (Eds), An imbecile’s guide to public philosophy (pp. 130-153). Routledge.
Banerjee, A. (2020). A transnational intervention into an ethic of care: Quandaries of care ethics for transnational feminisms. In L. Ayu Saraswati and B. L. Shaw (Eds), Feminist and queer theory: An intersectional and transnational reader (pp. 92-97). Oxford University Press.
Hamington, M. (2010). The will to care: Performance, expectation, and imagination. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 25(3), 675-695.
Johnson, M. (1993). Moral imagination: Implications of cognitive science for ethics. University of Chicago Press.
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral imagination. University of California Press.
Amrita Banerjee is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India. She received her PhD in Philosophy and the Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Oregon, USA. Banerjee was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, Oregon State University in Oregon, USA prior to joining IIT Bombay. She specializes in Moral and Socio-Political Philosophy, which she approaches from the perspectives of Feminist Philosophy, Classical Pragmatism, and Twentieth century Continental philosophy. Banerjee focuses on marginalized intellectual spaces within Philosophy, and especially work by women philosophers and philosophers of color within these traditions. She is also interested in decolonizing Western philosophy, and engaging with hegemonic traditions from a transnational perspective. Her papers have appeared in prestigious journals such as Hypatia, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Pluralist, and Philosophy in the Contemporary World. She is co-editor of the special issue of Philosophy in the Contemporary World titled, “Mothering from the Margins.” She is currently serving on the Advisory Boards of Pragmatism Today, published by the Central-European Pragmatist Forum and the Book series on “Ethics of Care,” published by Peeters in Leuven, Belgium, EU. Banerjee is also on the Advisory Committee of the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India.
panel 11Layers of Loss and Care: Navigating Motherhood, Fertility, and Unintended Pregnancy
“Becoming-Motherhoods”: Crafting Care in the Context of Child Removal
Faye Green
The UK care system is in crisis; the number of children removed from their birth families continues to increase, as does the number of women subject to successive child removals. Child removal is undoubtedly a traumatic experience, yet it is also deeply stigmatised, and support for birth parents is often limited. The scarcity of research into the experiences of women who have children removed is perhaps also indicative of the societal attitude towards this group. Care is central to conceptualisations of parenthood, reinforcing the profound loss of identity for mothers who lose practical and material means of caring for their children. In this paper, drawing on participatory craft research in a women’s drop-in, I focus on working with a participant to make a patchwork blanket for her child following removal. I explore the loss of maternal identity through feminist ethics of care and new materialist approaches to subjectivity. Framing selfhood as an ongoing and emergent process, entangled in material-discursive relations, I develop the concept of “becoming-motherhoods,” to surface multiple and contingent maternal identities enacted and embodied through care-ful creative practice. Making the blanket engages practices of care across temporalities, offering a counter to what Morriss (2018) described as the “haunting” effect of child removal, wherein past, present, and future motherhoods are intertwined and under threat. In this paper, I explore the creative processes of 1) re-membering shared histories, 2) present practices of care, and 3) collective forms of hopeful futuring. I argue that the participant was able to enact becoming-motherhoods through material practices and symbolic acts of care, and to be cared for, through the shared experience of making in the drop-in. This paper contributes insights from work with women who are repeatedly marginalised, considering the reparative possibilities of creative practice to enact care in the context of child removal.
Faye Green is a PhD researcher in the School of Design at Northumbria University. She is interested in creative approaches to therapeutic work in community settings, and completed a Master’s degree in Dance/Movement Psychotherapy at the University of Derby. Her doctoral research is in collaboration with the UK charity Changing Lives and explores the use of craft in trauma-informed drop-in support services for women. Her work is rooted in feminist and queer approaches to trauma, mental health, and social justice.
Existential Repair in Uncertain Fertility Trajectories
Annelies Hommens-van de Steeg
Becoming a parent is considered a major life-event, full of meaning. Relatedly, the failure to conceive can raise serious questions concerning the meaning of life. One in six people of reproductive age experience infertility in their lifetime, they do not conceive after “12 months or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse” (WHO, 2023). Infertility has generally been considered a social stigma (Sharma et al., 2018; Archetti, 2017). Medical Assisted Reproduction (MAR) and Artificial Reproduction Techniques (ART), however, have changed the experience of infertility profoundly. The medical paradigm views infertility as a physical problem that can be solved (cf. Duffy et al., 2021). We know, however, that only 50 percent of all couples will end up parents after three cycles of ART (the number of treatments covered by the Dutch health insurance system) (Freya, 2018). This alone makes undergoing fertility treatment ambiguous: it is by no means certain that a couple will see their desire fulfilled.
In line with Archetti (2017), who states that the prevailing medical paradigm obscures the existential crisis of infertility, my research focusses on this crisis, where patients question their sense of self, identity, and meaning and purpose in life. Although research shows that patients report existential needs (Schmal, 2016; McCarthy, 2008), to date no studies are known on the nature of these needs. I will argue that a deeper understanding of these needs will help to respond to care needs of patients in a more holistic, reparative way. Accordingly, I will present an autoethnographic memory of a failed fertility treatment, where I navigated alternating hope and despair. Care-ethical insights on embodiment, narrative identity and meaning and sense will then be used to gain a deeper understanding of the existential needs in this experience. For this, the input of the participants in the workshop is warmly welcomed.
Annelies Hommens-van de Steeg (1981) is an external PhD student at the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht (NL). Her research focusses on the existential care needs of patients undergoing fertility treatments and consists of both conceptual and empirical research from a care-ethical and narrative theory perspective.
Since 2010, Annelies has worked as a spiritual counselor in healthcare institutions. She has obtained a master's degree in theology at Utrecht University (2006) and a vocational degree from the Protestant Theological University (2007). Besides that, she is a licensed Moral Deliberation facilitator.
Layers and Voices in Decision-Making About an Unintended Pregnancy
Eline Dalmijn
Per year, one in 16 people are faced with an unintended pregnancy. It is a life experience which oftenconfronts a pregnant person with a difficult, stressful and irreversible decision to carry out or terminate the pregnancy. It is important for a person with an unintended pregnancy to make their own decision; the more it is their own choice the better they can move forward and give it a place in their life story. The importance of making a well-informed decision is clear, but insights into how people with an unintended pregnancy come to a decision are lacking. Research so far is limited in applying a mere rational framework and focusing solely on the outcome of the unwanted pregnancy, i.e. reasons for and certainty about abortion, and not, for instance, continuation of the pregnancy.
We conducted a narrative literature review to gain insights into what is currently known about the major elements involved in the decision-making process of all persons with an unintended pregnancy. This study provides the insight that the decision-making process about an unintended pregnancy consists of navigating entangled layers instead of weighing separable elements. The layers – a sense of knowing, feelings and beliefs, interrelatedness, providers and policy, and norms and social pressure – are both internal and external to the pregnant person. The sense of knowing seems to play an important part. This shows that a rational frame is inadequate, and a more holistic frame is needed to capture this dynamic and personal experience.
In two subsequent empirical studies we are collecting the experiences of people with decision-making regarding an unintended pregnancy. We use a mixed method approach with a writing assignment, interviews and a questionnaire to learn more about the layers and voices that play a part in the decision-making process. I will present the outcomes of my studies so far and create an interactive space to introduce the audience to the layers, voices and ethical dilemmas in decision-making of people with an unintended pregnancy.
Eline Dalmijn, Msc., is a clinical and developmental psychologist with expertise on reproductive health and rights. She has coordinated (inter)national projects concerning empowerment of women, reproductive health care and decision-making. She currently holds the position of program manager Unwanted Pregnancies at Fiom, Centre of Expertise in Unwanted Pregnancy and Ancestry in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, and is conducting her PhD on decision-making regarding an unwanted pregnancy at the Department of Care Ethics of the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
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
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