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WTMC PhD Workshop

Care as Concept, Method,
Ethic



1 - 3 April 2020





Location:

Study and Conference Centre Soeterbeeck
Elleboogstraat 2
NL-5352 LP Deursen-Dennenburg

The Netherlands



While STS has a long tradition of studying 'care' as an object of research, of
talking about care, recent approaches challenge the conventional readings and
uses of 'care'. For example, Joan Tronto proposes to "explore its significance
as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human
worlds of technoscience and natureculture" in her endorsement for Matters of
Care. For while STS has profoundly questioned the categories of
human/non-human, nature/culture, it has so far largely failed or refused to
take this questioning and its consequences onto itself: while our objects of
study have become hybrid and messy, STS still seems to assume " that our own
research is not directly related to these more than human worlds it is
situated in" (Jerak-Zuiderent, 2018, p. 56).

In this workshop, we will engage with care as proposed by the ground-breaking
writing of Haraway, Puig de la Bellacasa, Tsing, and Nading and others. This
work aimed to explore the possibilities of care in/with our multispecied and
diverse world. Here, care is about the responsibilities of STS researchers to
attend to the (often invisible) labour that gets us through the day, to
articulate the work it takes to live in this world as well as possible - and
to do research as well as possible. Care is also about an ethic that contrasts
with engagement with matters of fact or matters of concern. Can care further
help us explore how human-machine associations (machine-learning, care-robots,
tracking devices) tend to train us to leave unquestioned the human care-work?
Can attention to care help clarify the risks we run, if care is rendered
useless or largely transformed into data for others? In addition, the workshop
will address how to re-engage with affect: is care an alternative to critical
distance between ourselves and those we study? Engaging with care is thus not
only about revealing invisible care-work beyond situations we are used to
associate with care, but also about generating care by pausing over these
engagements. It is also about exploring the epistemic potential of "the
affective, ethical and hands-on agencies of practical and material
consequence" (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 4). We will look at what it means
to move from thinking and writing about care, to (critically) thinking and
doing with care.

Guest lecturers: Israel Rodrguez
Giralt (UO de
Catalunia), Iris Wallenburg (EUR),
Christian Ernsten (UM), and
Esha Shah (WUR).



The workshop is residential. It starts on April 1st at 10.30 AM and ends on
April 3rd at 4 PM.



The registration form for this workshop is now available
here.



Please register by 15 January 2020!



After their acceptance, participants will receive an email with an invoice and
online-payment request and receipt.

To participate, you must pay the fee via the online payment request.
Registration to the workshop is final after the advance payment has been
received by WTMC.



Costs for WTMC members: meals 10 EUR /day.
Costs for everyone else: 695 EUR, including fee, accommodation and meals.

If you have any content-related questions regarding this workshop, please feel
free to contact the training coordinators Anne Beaulieu: j.a.beaulieu@rug.nl
or Bernike Pasveer: b.pasveer@maastrichtuniversity.nl
For practical questions please contact Elize Schiweck: e.schiweck@utwente.nl

References:

Jerak-Zuiderent, Sonja (2018), Review of Matters of Care. Science & Technology
Studies, 31(2), 55-58.

Haraway, Donna (2015). Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene,
chthulucene: making kin. Environmental Humanities 6, 159-165.

Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in
More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

Nading, Alex (2014). Mosquito Trails. Ecology, Health, and the Politics of
Entanglement. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Tsing, Anna (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility
of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
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