This roundtable workshop will introduce ANU researchers in SOA&D and other disciplines, (such as environmental and gender studies) to LaTrobe University’s Care Project and invite them to join the Care Network research community. The workshop will discuss key themes and practices that have emerged from the Care project so far, as well as provide the opportunity for participants to discuss their own research and projects in light of care. International practice-led and interdisciplinary research is turning to care to shape ways of being in the world and to offer alternatives to neo-liberalism across human rights, climate change, feminism, and human and more-than-human interdependencies. The Care Project connects to research around contemporary art practices and ethics across environmentalism, feminism, social engagement, and de-colonisation.

Associate Professor Jacqueline Millner is co-leader of the Contemporary Art and Feminism Research Cluster, University of Sydney and LaTrobe University, and a widely published writer on contemporary art and art theory. She leads the LaTrobe University funded Care Project. Collaborators include Sydney and Melbourne University and more than 40 artists, theorists and curators, across Sydney, Melbourne and regional Victoria. Exhibitions, symposia and publications are due in 2020-21.

The workshop runs all day, but it is possible for people to come along for the morning or the afternoon if they are pressed for time but still interested.

Please register for the workshop here.

Workshop schedule:

9:30-10:00 Meet and morning tea

10:00-12:00 Care as a research approach and a method: seminar led by Millner, participants to prepare by reading extracts from some key texts on care, ethics and art.

12:00-1:00 Walking as care with Rebecca Mayo 

1-2 Lunch (A light vegetarian lunch will be provided)

2:00-4:00 Roundtable discussion of participants’ research projects and practice, moderated by Millner

Reading list:

The texts are selected to offer different disciplinary perspectives on care, including a focus on caring for ecologies, for democracy, and for artists. Common to all is an interest in how uncovering care as a fundamental condition of life can be a politically transformative move: can paying attention to practices of care allow us to glimpse alternative realities at the heart of dominant systems?

•Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, Chapter 5: ‘Soil Times: the pace of ecological care’

•Joan Tronto, Who Cares? How to reshape a democratic politics, Cornell Scholarship online, 2015, Chapter 2: ‘When we understand care, we’ll need to redefine democracy’.

•Helena Reckitt, ‘Support acts: curating, caring, and social reproduction’, Journal of Curatorial Studies, 5:1, 6-30, 2016 

•Care Project literature review commissioned by Millner and written by Dr Barbara Campbell

For PDFs of the reading list, or any questions please email rebecca.mayo@anu.edu.au

Care: forging an alternative ethics through art is kindly supported by Visual Arts Endowment funding.

Image: Rebecca Mayo, It’s in the Bag, 2019. (guided walk, Melbourne CBD, Art + Climate = Change 2019) Photo credit: Yarrow Ruane