Séminaire : ‘WHO CARES?’ In Contemporary Women’s Writing & Film

Le Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing prépare une série de trois séminaires virtuels (7, 21 et 28 mars 2022) dirigés par Jasmine D Cooper (Cambridge) et Katie Pleming (Edinburgh). Pour connaître tous les détails, s’inscrire et assister au séminaire, rendez-vous sur le site de la School of Advanced Study de l’Université de Londres.

Description :

‘Who cares?’ speaks to a paradox at the heart of ethical and political discourses of care in the contemporary. It is an interrogation of who performs care, an examination of the intersections of capital, care, and exploitation, a making visible of those upon whom the burden of care falls. Yet it also captures feelings of apathy - both individual and institutional - which seem to mark the contemporary. While the institutional refusal to care results in forms of systemic violence, the individual and collective turn away from care is more complex, bound up with questions of privilege, agency, and resistance. While a politics of care may align with progressive politics, narratives of care are easily appropriated or inverted: co-opted by reactionary, nationalist political groups. As such, care orbits a crucial negotiation between self and other, between self-centredness and other-centeredness. It is linked to vulnerability and forms of precarity. Ultimately, care speaks to relationality: how we relate to others, to ourselves, to the Earth, and to non-human lifeforms.