panel 23Dwellings: Caring Places, Spaces, and Atmospheres
Doing Home: Resonance as a Care Ethical Approach
Hartmut Rosa & Henrike Katzer
In the 1990s, Tronto and Fisher presented a definition of care that includes all kinds of relations and practices that maintain and repair ourselves, others, and the world we live in. This broad understanding enables us to understand a fuller meaning of care beyond classical practices of nursing and education. In this context, we want to contribute to the theoretical development of care.
Care in this meaning is closely linked to questions of good life, because we care for people, objects, and even nature in order to live a good life. Because caring for someone or something is based on a “strong evaluation” (Taylor), it is highly interwoven with the way we live and is, therefore, a strong sociological indicator for the question of why we live the way we do. In this context, Hartmut Rosa has presented a theory that includes those fundamental motivations in a sociology of our relationship to the world. In our talk, we want to start a discussion within the debate on care ethics and show the theoretical linkage between resonance and care. We would therefore engage in a twofold question: What can the concept of resonance learn from being conceptualised within the paradigm of care ethics? And also: What helpful distinctions can be seen in the concept of resonance for the debate on care ethics?
From a socio-phenomenological theory of property, we see that creative and aesthetic acts of care can be seen especially in dwelling and living together. Therefore, we want to bring together these analyses of care and resonance in the field of dwelling. Within practices of doing home such as furnishing, decorating, and cleaning we want to investigate an everyday aesthetic of care.
Hartmut Rosa is Professor of Sociology and Social Theory at Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany, and Director of the Max-Weber-Kolleg at the University of Erfurt. He also is an Affiliated Professor at the Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, New York. In 1997, he received his PhD in Political Science from Humboldt University in Berlin. After that, he held teaching positions at the universities of Mannheim, Jena, Augsburg, and Essen and served as Vice-President and General Secretary for Research Committee 35 (COCTA) of ISA and as one of the directors of the Annual International Conference on Philosophy and the Social Sciences in Prague. In 2016, he was a Visiting Professor at the FMSH/EHESS in Paris. He is editor of the international journal Time and Society. His publications focus on Social Acceleration, Resonance, and the Temporal Structures of Modernity, as well as the Political Theory of Communitarianism.
Henrike Katzer studied psychology and sociology at the University of Koblenz-Landau and sociology at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, as well as Israel Studies during a stay abroad at Haifa University, Israel. Since April 2021, she has been a research assistant at the Department of General and Theoretical Sociology at Friedrich Schiller University and conducts research within the subproject “Making Things Available: Property as a Specific Form of World Relationship" of the Collaborative Research Centre TRR 294 "Structural Change of Property." She is doing her PhD on practices and forms of relationships in the platform-mediated sharing of living space and is investigating the change and persistence of care relationships in the domestic sphere. Henrike Katzer is interested in sociological theory and the methods of qualitative social research, particularly with regard to feminist theory, gender studies, and care relationships.
Caring Spaces: How Graphic Design Can Respond to Human Needs
Sarah Clark Miller & Joel Priddy
In recent work, care ethicists have noted important resonances between design thinking and the ethics of care, including their shared relational and responsive dimensions, connection to empathy and inquiry, and desire to foster social aesthetics characterized by interdependence (Hamington, 2019, p. 91; Saito, 2022). Designers have also begun to recognize the importance of care, as represented in graphic designer Alison Place’s insightful question: “How might design be approached as a practice of care” (Place, 2022)?
In this paper, we answer this question by arguing that design can create caring spaces when guided by the idea that functional and aesthetic decisions should be grounded not in the preferences of the individual artist or the demands of a client’s capitalistic goals but rather in empathic response to articulated human needs. To demonstrate this point, we analyze an innovative design project that intentionally embodies both principles and practices of care. In The Evanisko Project, a multi-year collaboration between Penn State’s Department of Graphic Design and the University Libraries, design students have engaged in human-centered research to identify the needs of library patrons, paying special attention to the elements that help or hinder the meeting of those needs in the library’s spaces. Students have identified “engagement opportunities,” where patrons become relationally receptive to novel experiences that responsively address information needs they realize only through extended interaction with the library’s resources, thereby building epistemic trust. From this research, students have created visual and experiential artifacts that foster a sense of care within the library.
Phase one of the project featured interactive video installations designed to help patrons explore themes of resilience. Phase two involved games, apps, and augmented reality that invited playful investigation of what it means to flourish. The third and current phase of the project aims to foster connection between patrons and the library, as well as between patrons themselves. The overall effect has been a care-inspired transformation of the possibilities of relationality with information science.
Sarah Clark Miller is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Bioethics, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. She is a Faculty Affiliate of the Rock Ethics Institute, where she previously served as Acting and Associate Director. An ethicist by training, Miller also works in social and political philosophy. Her publications include The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation (Routledge) and articles on relational dignity, care ethics, sexual violence reproductive ethics, global responsibility, social epistemology, and harm and moral injury in journals such as The Journal of Social Philosophy and Social Theory and Practice. She is currently writing two books – one on sexual violence and sexual agency and a second on relational ethics.
Joel Priddy is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Graphic Design at Penn State University. He is an award-winning illustrator and cartoonist. His graphic novels include Pulpatoon: Pilgrimage, The Preposterous Voyages of IronHide Tom, The Gift of the Magi, and, most recently, First There Was Chaos: Hesiod’s Story of Creation. He currently serves as co-principle investigator of the Evanisko Project, a three-year, $100,000 collaborative project with Penn State Libraries. He has taught design, illustration, and sequential art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Memphis College of Art, and Penn State.
A is for Aurora, C is for Care
Towards Atmospheric Care (Hanna Husberg & Agata Marzecova)
Structured as a vocabulary, the lecture performance A is for Aurora, C is for Care inquires into the techno-ecological, political, and material circumstances that make the upper atmosphere visible, and explores the planetary electromagnetosphere (Earth-Space interactions) as a matter of care. Departing from the elusive and ever-changing auroral display, it explores how the planetary atmosphere is made knowable, how environmental imaginaries emerge (often through technoscientific apparatus), and how these contribute to novel ways of perceiving the environment. By extending the notion of care to air and atmosphere our project asks: How can we care for what is inaccessible to direct experience, yet in far-reaching ways structures both our daily lives and our future?
Rather than explaining the aurora, the incomplete vocabulary keeps the narration fragmentary and open-ended, offering a multiplicity of different routes and connections, proposing layers of information, details, and references rather than imposing priorities between valuable and disposable, scientific and anecdotal. Similar to air, care escapes easy categorisation and requires situated knowing. Therefore, care is approached as a proposition to think with and as a transformative ethos, rather than a normative value. Critically, we propose that atmospheric care and the reimagining of less coercive planetary futures cannot rely on individual knowledge, expertise, and action alone. Cultivating meaningful engagements with our planetary atmosphere requires radical and collective experimentation with environmental thought and practice.
A is for Aurora, C is for Care has been developed as part of an interdisciplinary collaboration that uses installation, lecture performance, mapping, and critical analysis informed by in-depth field research of situated cases. It seeks to examine the overlapping boundaries between the aesthetics, science, and politics of air, while reimagining the planetary atmosphere as a matter of shared interdisciplinary concern.
Towards Atmospheric Care (https://towardsatmospheric.care) is a research collaborative between Hanna Husberg and Agata Marzecova. Through a multiplicity of outcomes that allow sharing the problematics of air across different platforms, contexts, and audiences, the project seeks to examine the overlapping boundaries between the aesthetic, science, and politics of air and the atmosphere envisaging them as a techno-ecological phenomenon that requires critical engagement with perception, representation, and materiality.
Hanna Husberg is a visual artist and researcher who often collaborates across disciplines. Developed through several art projects and collaborations her doctoral research Troubled Atmosphere: On Noticing Air looks at layered, inconsistent, muddled, unruly, contaminated gatherings of air, inquiring how air has been conceptualised and perceived, and how the construction of environmental imaginaries enables specific ways of engaging with the world and excludes others. Hanna works as Assistant Professor of Performative and Media-based Practices at the Research Center, Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH), and has previously worked as assistant lecturer for the Collective Practices: Symbiotic Organizations research course at the Royal Institute of Arts (KKH, Stockholm).
Agata Marzecova is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of science, art, and ecology. She has contributed to articles in Boreal Environment Research, Die Erde, Anthropocene Review, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, and The Baltic Atlas as well as interdisciplinary and artistic projects, such as the Baltic Pavilion (15th International Architecture Venice Biennale, 2016), The Baltic Material Assemblies (Architectural Association & RIBA London 2018) and the research collaborative Towards Atmospheric Care. She is also an associated lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn.
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