Caring Futures: Contradictions, Transformation, and Revolutionary Possibilities

This hybrid conference seeks to bring together artists, activists, and scholars from a range of perspectives, disciplines, modalities, and methods to explore how we can revolutionize the way we care. Care is an emerging and contentious focus across the disciplines emphasizing historical and contemporary contradictions and exclusions in care realities–such as the lack of economic and social support for some care relations, the denial of care, the weaponizing of care, the exploitative conditions of care work, and the privileging of normative hierarchies across the globe. But activist, artistic, and intellectual formations also point to transformative possibilities in the dismantling and rebuilding of care infrastructures and caring relations.

We seek works that examine these contradictions and possibilities in caring, care labor, and care theory from cultural, social, economic, or political perspectives. Potential topics may include but are not limited to: care and social justice; social reproduction; care and exploitation; care and precarity; the economics of care; animal studies; medical humanities; care in the digital age; intimacy; care infrastructures; racism in care; care in/and the family; transnational care and care in/and the global South, the environment; care and dis/abilities; mutual aid; abolition and care; radical care; feminist, queer, and trans studies perspectives on care; histories of care. We are particularly interested in work that engages with questions of power and the social and economic contradictions of care.

This conference is organized with the support of The American University of Paris and Rice University Global Paris Center.

The call for papers is now closed. You may contact the organizers at caringfutures2024gmail.com

You can look forward to the conference program and details for participants in early 2024.

Please register for this event here.