May 13-14, 2021

Hosted online by University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Questions of care—practices addressing the fundamentally interconnected needs, abilities, and responsibilities of embodied others and selves and our environments—are at the very heart of this moment. The brutally uneven impacts of COVID-19, police violence, incarceration, accelerating hunger, houselessness, and poverty, unpaid and underpaid care labor, environmental destruction, and ongoing Indigenous dispossession name only a few of the converging crises impinging on relations of life, kinship, community, reciprocity, and solidarity with humans and more-than-humans alike. These crises both perpetuate and reveal the fundamental co-constitution of capitalism, anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, White supremacy, imperialism, xenophobia, heterosexism, and ableism.

At the same time, care also marks horizon-shifting analyses and praxes with powerful purchase for this moment and beyond. Growing numbers of scholars, artists, and organizers are taking up urgent questions of care, among them relations of tending and attention across time, space, generations, and species; responsibility and interdependency; narration and listening; labor; kinship; and intimacy. Care in its many senses threads through a wide range of intellectual and artistic work, particularly in sites joining theory and practice.

This international conference, hosted by the Borghesi-Mellon Workshop on Care: Politics, Perfomances, Publics, Practices at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, invites participants to consider care as a framework for addressing the intersections between racism, settler colonialism, gender-based violence, health inequities, reproductive justice, immigration/migration, poverty, ecological destruction, imperialism, policing and incarceration, ableism, child and elder care issues, and unequal representation in the public sphere. Building on the Workshop’s collective study, it also enthusiastically invites considerations of care that refuse and rework these systems of violence and oppression, including:

• disability scholars and activists’ illumination of care webs that sustain life and love;

• transnational feminist attention to the links of caring labor uniting ostensibly distant sites;

• Indigenous feminist approaches demonstrating the deep links between gender-based violence and environmental destruction in in the face of ongoing apocalypses of colonization—and, conversely, link care for bodies, lands, and waters;

• Black feminist accounts of the violence that travels under the name of care, as well as of worldmaking kinship and care practices in the face of ongoing legacies of slavery;

• Queer of color artistic and performative enactments of care;

• scholars, performers, and organizers who emphasize mindfulness and self-care as bridging individual and collective transformation.

How is care given and received, denied and demanded, exhaustible and renewable? How can it reveal transformations toward relations of justice, acknowledgment, repair, and liberation?

FOLLOW THE CARE: POLITICS, PERFORMANCES, PUBLICS, PRACTICES WORKSHOP

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