ONLINE: Relations of Care Across and After Worlds

press release: Relations of Care Across and After Worlds takes place over two days: Thursday, May 13 and Friday, May 14, 2021. Please see the links below for more information.

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.

Please explore the Relations of Care Across and After Worlds conference for more information:

• Conference website
• Registration
• Schedule
• Conference Speakers
• Ethics of Care website

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?

In addition to more than 100 panel speakers, Relations of Care Across and After Worlds is thrilled to host the following Keynote Dialogues:

  May 13, 10:45 AM  Keynote Dialogue, “Care for Death”

• Stuart Murray, Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric & Ethics in the Department of English Language and Literature, Carleton University.
• Jill Casid, Professor of Visual Studies and Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 
• Moderator: Jalessa Bryant, Ph.D. Student, Curriculum and Instruction, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

May 13, 1:45 PM Keynote Dialogue: Poetry, Care, and Disability Justice

• Kay Ulanday Barrett, internationally acclaimed poet, performer, educator, food blogger, cultural worker, and transgender, gender non-conforming, and disability advocate based in New York and New Jersey.
• T. S. Banks, Madison-based poet and activist, author of Call Me III and creator of the art collective Loud 'N Unchained Theater Co.
• Ellen Samuels, Poet and faculty in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• Moderator: Esaí Ortiz-Rivera, MA Candidate, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

May 13, 6:00 PM Keynote Dialogue: Ethics, Politics, and the Work of Care

• Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, Sociology Department, San Francisco State University.
• Joan Tronto, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota.
• Nancy Fraser, the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research.
• Moderator: Shreenita Ghosh, Ph.D. Candidate, School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

May 14, 12:15 PM Keynote Dialogue: Multispecies Kinship and Care           

• Kim TallBear, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Professor at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Native Studies, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience and Environment. 
• JT Roane, Africana Studies in the School for Social Transformation at Arizona State University.
• Melissa K Nelson, Professor of Indigenous Sustainability, Arizona State University.
• Elspeth Iralu, Indigenous planning concentration of the School of Architecture at the University of New Mexico.
• Moderator: Jimmy Camacho, Ph.D. Candidate, Land Policy and Indigenous Methodologies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

May 14, 6:00 PM Keynote Dialogue: Abolition and CareJasmine Syedullah, Africana Studies, Vassar College. 

• M Adams, Community Organizer and Co-Executive Director of Freedom Inc. in Madison, WI.
• Mia Mingus, Disability Justice activist, writer, public speaker, and political organizer who focuses on disability justice and transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse.
• Moderator: Ceci Moffett, Ph.D. Student, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison.