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On 13 October, the Gender, Diversity and Global Justice platform will organise an international workshop and brainstorm session that brings together various perspectives on carelessness from different disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Several speakers will pitch their views on carelessness, and the brainstorm session will focus on developing future initiatives.

Interdisciplinary collaborations

The event will pay particular attention to the disciplines of history, criminology, critical medical humanities, and human geography. Attendees will exchange insights into how their disciplines study care and carelessness and how they develop steps to build interdisciplinary collaborations on this topic.

Care as relational practice

‘Care’ can be understood as a set of intimate, material, embodied, and affective practices and institutions that are connected through local and global scales. They are used ‘to maintain, continue and repair’ people’s lives, as Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto write in their Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring (1990).

Feminist, postcolonial, and comparative philosophy scholars argue that care is a relational process and practice. These perspectives highlight how caring is not a singular or linear process, but is shaped by a myriad of other relations, such as intersectional identities. This exposes how care and power can be co-constituted.

Care, carelessness, and violence

By situating care in other relations of power, we can explore the more complex issues around care, especially how care, carelessness and violence work relationally. The denial of care can in itself be an act of violence, where care is, for instance, unevenly distributed amongst people.

In recent years, there have been manifestations of active carelessness – a form of harmful ignorance against bodies that escape or challenge normative frameworks of subjectification. Moreover, attempts to care for people can become careless. The outcome of trying to care cannot always be predicted, meaning that acts of care become careless for the caregiver or care receiver.

The event will be followed by drinks and bites. More information will be shared closer to the time.