panel 26
Strings of Care: On Love, Attention, and Attunement
Attentive Care as Ameliorative Affect
Erica Bigelow
In this paper, I provide a genealogy of care in feminist ethics, with special attention paid to its roots in Iris Murdoch’s ethical thought (namely, her idea of the “just and loving gaze”). I argue that such an understanding of care – which I term attentive care – supersedes traditional understandings of care in its ability to prescribe what we owe to (and how we ought to respond to) others’ emotions. I envision attentive care as a disposition, rather than as a hyper-specific principle; I think of it as something that resides in the moral agent, rather than outside of them, precisely because of how in-and-of-the-world care is.
Attentive care calls for a heightened eye toward others’ emotions, while maintaining (as a consequence) that some emotions may have more normative “weight” than others. These weighty emotions, as briefly mentioned above, are those that result from background structures of injustice. That is, when deciding where to direct our attention, given that we cannot expect individuals to be omniscient, there ought to be some reflection about whether an affective response, particularly when about a recognized marginalized group, reifies such structures of marginalization and oppression. For this reason, the kind of ameliorative intervention I’m proposing might be particularly effective for those “well-meaning” perpetrators of (e.g.) ableism, rather than those who would endorse it wholeheartedly.
Erica Bigelow is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington. Erica's dissertation considers the nature of our obligations to others' emotions, particularly the messy entanglements of these obligations with structural injustice (namely, ableism). Erica is also interested in epistemic injustice frameworks, “hard problems” within disability studies, and digital media.
Listening as Loving: Considerations for Music Education and Care Ethics
Marissa Silverman
This presentation theoretically examines and centers “love” and asks: How can a feminist ethic promote love for music teaching and learning? And, in what ways can music making and music listening exhibit and embody love-as-action? Given the phenomenology of music – e.g., enactive listening, enactive world-building – music teachers can teach students that music education be understood as an avenue of and vehicle for connection, care, compassion, and concern (Hamington, 2015; Noddings, 2010; Tronto, 2013; 2015), or, stated differently, love (hooks, 2000). Fundamentally, to be a feminist is to choose love (hooks, 1984; 2000; 2015); to choose a global revolution of freedom, justice, and peace that respects and values each person’s autonomy and vulnerability. Thus, when music teaching and learning are framed through feminist ethics, a musical education, too, can become love-as-action.
Thus, this presentation considers “love” as a method of knowledge generation (Toye, 2018) through vulnerability (Butler, 1997; 2004). Additionally, by framing love as caring for oneself and others and collectively being with and for oneself and others through musical engagements, love as “affective energy” (Toye, 2018) is positioned in a way that can be both intimate and activistic/artivistic; shared on both a narrow scale and a much wider scale, depending on its reach and context. In pursuing love as affective energy, the author acknowledges the decolonizing work of Dawn Rae Davis (2006). Davis’ willingness to love through “not knowing” suggests that, for music education, curious, engaged listening is the starting point for music making, which furthers “knowing and not knowing, proximity and distance, intimacy and inaccessibility” (2006, p. 267; Irigaray, 1996). The main argument of this presentation places Luce Irigaray’s understanding of “love” as a core aim for music teaching and learning, specifically, and potentially, for care ethics, more broadly.
Marissa Silverman is Professor at the John J. Cali School of Music, Montclair State University, NJ. A Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Silverman has published invited chapters in recent research handbooks, as well as journal articles in the International Journal of Music Education, the British Journal of Music Education, Research Studies in Music Education, Music Education Research, the International Journal of Community Music, Visions of Research in Music Education, and The New York Times. Her research agenda focuses on dimensions of music education philosophy, general music, artistic interpretation, music teacher education, community music, and interdisciplinary curriculum development. Dr. Silverman is author of Gregory Haimovsky: A Pianist’s Odyssey to Freedom (University of Rochester Press, 2018) and co-author of Music Lesson Plans for Social Justice: A Contemporary Approach for Secondary School Teachers (with Lisa DeLorenzo, 2022), as well as the co-author (with David Elliott, 2015) of the second edition of Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education (both with Oxford University Press). She is co-editor of Eudaimonia: Perspectives for Music Learning (Routledge, 2020); The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical and Qualitative Assessment in Music Education; Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (Oxford University Press, 2019, 2016); and Community Music Today (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). As a secondary school teacher, Dr. Silverman taught band, general music, and English literature at Long Island City High School (Queens, New York).
Sharing String in Care-Full Gestures
Rachel Epp Buller
Stretch a loop of string between your hands, pulling the string between your fingers in varied repetitions. Share the motions with another person and let their gestures mimic your own. What kind of listening can you make possible, without words, without sounds? How will it shift your relations?
This presentation explores ways that sharing string can become a mode of enacting care. More than thirty years ago, Fisher and Tronto proposed a definition of care that includes “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (1990, p. 40). String figures and string games open up relational possibilities, for teaching and learning in a back-and-forth that Haraway (2016) describes as giving and receiving patterns that cultivate collective knowing and response-ability. In this talk, I frame the sharing of string as a Slow method of creative interaction that embodies and facilitates different ways of listening, caring, and being in relationship.
This research is grounded in my manuscript-in-process, Listening as Artistic Practice: Essays and Invitations, which relies on expansive possibilities of listening – not only with ears but also with hands and feet, gestures and movements. Sharing string enacts a process of what I call handheld listening, a capacious and multisensory way of paying attention. This haptic engagement, giving and receiving string, opens up a space for greater attunement that might move us along the path toward understanding how to renew and repair relations with others.
This provocation will weave together academic research with narrative writing and creative explorations from my social artistic practice. These musings draw on my experiences of handheld listening in which sharing string figures has facilitated care and connection across ages and geographies as well as across barriers of language and physical ability.
Dr. Rachel Epp Buller is an art historian, educator, visual/sound artist, curator, and mother of three, roles that each impact her socially engaged work. Her publications on the maternal body and feminist care, including Reconciling Art and Mothering (2012) and Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and the Maternal (2019, with Charles Reeve) are central to the growing field of maternal art studies. Her current research addresses caring labors more broadly: her manuscript-in-process is titled Listening as Artistic Practice: Essays and Invitations, and her SSHRC-funded research project with Sheena Wilson, Walking the Talk: Climate Moves, considers the urgency of relational connections across species for climate action. Her 2023 solo exhibition at the Mulvane Art Museum, Invitations to Listen, offered multimedia, multisensory modes of engagement to student and community audiences. She frequently collaborates across disciplines and she is a member of several international research collectives, including Activating Care, Shifting Relations with Sheena Wilson and Natalie Loveless (Canada), Slow Practices and Research Creation with Deirdre Donoghue (Netherlands), and Care, Time, and the Maternal with Elena Marchevska (United Kingdom) and Charles Reeve (Canada). International exhibitions include Winter Walking at the Sound Studies Institute in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (2023) and Taking Care and Other Words at Borough Road Gallery in London (2019). She is a two-time US Fulbright Scholar (to Germany in 2011-12 and to Canada in 2021-22), a national board member of the Women’s Caucus for Art (US), a certified practitioner in Deep Listening, and Professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College (KS/US).
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
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