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.
Luxury Care
Mercer Gary
Where does luxury fit in a theory of care? There is broad consensus that care is concerned with the meeting of needs and possibly some wants, though exactly what these categories include remains up for debate. If luxury is whatever goes beyond our base needs, and care is primarily concerned with needs, then luxury should lie beyond the bounds of care. But at the same time, political theorists of luxury have shown that certain standards of social respect, for instance, demand luxury consumption (Matheowetz, 2010). The delimitation between essential needs and luxurious wants is therefore rather blurry and highly political. Building on my existing and forthcoming work on the normative ambivalence of care, along with the work of Joan Tronto, I clarify that I am interested in how broad a descriptive definition of care should be. Concentrating on personal hygiene and wellness practices, I go on to identify several reasons why care theorists might hesitate to endorse luxurious forms of care, including the impossibility of distributing them equally to all people, their frequent dependence on systems of injustice for their production and distribution, and their potential to detract from socially and politically marginalized practices of caregiving. At the same time, I argue that while care theorists shouldn’t prioritize luxury care, nor should they deny that luxury can be caring, as private, high-priced wellness centers demonstrate. My analysis examines how increasing demands for luxury affect our understandings and expectations of care.
Mercer Gary is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Drexel University, USA, and a Presidential Scholar at the Hastings Center. Her work has been published in Philosophy Compass, The Hastings Center Report, IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics , and Bioethics. Her first book, The Limits of Care: Making Feminist Sense of Technology Relations, is under contract with Oxford University Press.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman