Colloquium – In Conversation with/through Feminist Politics of Care: Putting Care in Context

Image Description: Detail of Jess's left hand touching the rug she hooked for the exhibit Productive Discomfort at Toronto's Xspace. She wears a gold ring with a red stone on her third finger; the rug beneath her hand is neon pink with a yellow, brown, black, and white abstract flower nearly centred and incursions of deep blue, mint green, and lavender around the edges.

Colloquium Description

A feminist ethics of care, as Virginia Held (2006) notes, “reconceptualizes traditional notions about the public and the private,” and conceives of “persons as relational” (12, 13). Care is critical and necessitates a critical engagement with its ethical application; care is not abstract. Care is also not delimited by familial relations. As a manifestation of respect, responsibility, love, and tenderness, care is integral to the interdependent nature of performance: performing care, performing our selves, and performing our ability to function.  In this Colloquium, Jessica Watkin (ABD) and Professor T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko would each like to speak briefly, but then to open up a broader conversation amongst colleagues and peers about feminist acts of care within academia.
 
The following invitation is from Jess and Nikki:
 
This is not only a conversation we have been having in the past four years of our ongoing collaboration, but also part of the vast majority of conversations we have with our colleagues, particularly those who also identify as marginalized by or within academia. That even as we challenge the institutional structures in which our professional and personal lives collide, what holds us here, and holds us up, is a continuum of care. This colloquium is an opportunity to articulate the significance of care, as a radical feminist act, that is both at the centre of and centres us in the work we do.