Call for papers
Date: Friday, November 27th, 2020
Time: 14:30 to 17:00 (CET).
Format: Online
Language: English (unfortunately, we cannot provide translation to the workshop. Note, however, that most conference activities will be translated to English, French and Spanish).
Led by : Marianna Fernandes & Silvia Wojczewski
Input talks by: Parvati Raghuram, Open University, UK; and Silvia Wojczewski, University of Lausanne, CH.
Registration: click here and register until November 10th!
Places: 20 (in the registration form, you will be asked to choose between online and in-presence participation. Switzerland-based attendants are invited to participate in-presence.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made legible stark inequalities in the global distribution of care. Building on feminist and anti-racist perspectives, the conference Geographies of Alternative Care: Spaces, Ecologies, and Methods (University of Lausanne, November 26-27th 2020) opens an interdisciplinary conversation on three key dimensions of caring: caring for and through spaces; caring across species and scales; caring as a research method.
Within the framework of the conference, we invite participants for the workshop Care as Method.
While global care chains and reproductive work have been the main focus of much feminist scholarship, this workshop shifts attention to care as a political and ethical basis for doing research.
For instance, Hamilton and Neimanis (2018) propose feminist composting as a methodology to carefully incorporate, in a non-extractivist way, feminism as well as theories and praxis concerned with race, coloniality, sexuality, ability, class, and other related power asymmetries into the field of the environmental humanities. Many feminist scholars propose that care has a radical potential for changing the way research is conducted. Feminist critique, as Mayanthi Fernando points out, can be a practice of care for the self, others and the world (Fernando 2019). Careful research tools may include co-writing between participant and researcher (Blasco & Hernandez 2019), or paying particular attention to caring for the body in research contexts (Sutton 2010, Lorde 2012).
Assuming that, as Puig De la Bellacasa (2017) puts it, care involves non-innocent political and ethical interventions that affect also those who are researching it, the issue of methodologies that allow engaging with care without “smoothing it out of its disruptive potential” imposes itself. Beyond aiming at grasping the state of the art of methods in care research, our goal is to discuss the theoretical and practical implications, as well as the risks and possibilities, of approaching care as method. Drawing on methodologies and epistemologies distinctive of feminist research (Harding 1987), the workshop will mainly focus on care in research practices and research institutions. It is aimed at being a space of self-reflection about positionality (but not only) and about how care can be perceived as a methodological tool, or posture, to advance ethical research.
The workshop will be interactive and include input talks by two scholars as well as moments for peer feedback. It will be possible to publish the participants’ authorial pieces on the event’s website. We particularly invite contributions from young scholars (Ph.D., Post-Doc) from geography, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and other related fields.
Preparatory work: Participants are strongly encouraged to read two short pieces that will be circulated beforehand. Prior to the workshop date, participants should share one short authorial piece of work connected to the topic Care as Method. This could be a short essay (max 500 words), a poem, an image, collage, etcetera.
Do not hesitate to contact us at geographiesofcare@gmail.com if you have any questions.
Geographies of Alternative Care is organized by Marianna Fernandes, Christophe Mager, Simone Ranocchiari, Miriam Tola and Silvia Wojczewski with the support of Thaïs Hobi and Louisa Malatesta.
The event is sponsored by the Institute of geography and sustainability (IGD) and the Plateforme interfacultaire en études genre (PlaGE).