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The social fabric of existence is woven by care. But how is care actually being cared for? And who cares for care, politically, socially, epistemically? How is care understood as knowledge? And how does knowing our relations to the world change if knowing starts from the relations of care? In the name of care, nation states have promoted the colonial supremacist project of patriarchy. In the name of freedom, so-called second wave feminism identified caring labors as burden hindering women’s creativity, intellectual productivity, and economic mobility. Tracing how modern ontologies of gender were linked to mammalian epistemologies and their political economy of care essentialism this lecture asks what it would take to free care from the patriarchal violence of domination and extraction. This lecture asks if we can learn to imagine care otherwise and looks at activism, art, and theory providing hope, resistance, and endurance to collectively imagine and practice the freedom to care.

https://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/program/gondoskodo-gyakorlatok-szimpozium-vigyazat-torekeny-handle-care-cimu-kiallitas-zaroesemenye

The 2023 Architecture Humanities Research Conference, AHRA, is dedicated to: Situated Ecologies of Care.
Elke Krasny’s keynote lecture “Living with a wounded planet. On building care” will address how historical acts of care violence and structural carelessness of capitalist-colonial-patriarchal regimes of modernity and their spatialization through architecture and the built environment have wounded the planet. Today, humans and all other living beings inhabit the air and the water and the earth and the infrastructures and the buildings and the technologies of a deeply wounded planet. At the same time, the lecture will address that architecture as a primary form of care has not only defined the spatialization of care and reproductive labors according to patriarchal-colonial-capitalist logics, but also has the potential to create and provide an emancipatory and transformative care praxis. Introducing the notion of scales of care, the lecture examines how scales of care can be understood through feminist epistemologies-as-embodied practices and thus become scales of concern, curiosity, cure, and worry that have to be brought into the reproductive, regenerative, and restorative capacities of architecture for everyday lived lives and for beginning to heal a deeply wounded planet, we are part of.

Information on the AHRA conference can be found here: https://ahra2023.org

Writing this book began in mid-March just after the WHO had officially declared Covid-19 a and it was published on May 5, the very day World Health official end of pandemic. Yet, pandemics do not end. Pandemic effects are lasting, and they continue to change bodies and minds. They are inside bodies, minds, and imaginaries. Pandemic effects have largely impacted on care and produced new forms of care exhaustion and care violence. Pandemic thinking and pandemic memory work are crucial to understanding what it means to be living with a planet that has been infected and wounded by capitalist-colonial-imperial-patriarchal violence. Feminist pandemic thinking builds imaginaries and insists on policies for recovery.

Order or download (open access) here: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5915-3/living-with-an-infected-planet/?c=313000000

»We must declare war on the virus,« stated UN chief António Guterres on March 13, 2020, just two days after the WHO had characterized the outbreak of the novel Covid-19 virus as a pandemic. Elke Krasny introduces feminist worry in order then to develop a feminist cultural theory on pandemic frontline ontologies, which give rise to militarized care essentialism and forced heroism. Feminist hope is gained through the attentive reading of feminist recovery plans and their novel care feminism, with the latter’s insistence that recovery from patriarchy is possible.

»Wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary, this book is an important critical reflection on the militaristic language that frames public imaginaries of care in times of global health emergency.«
— Athena Athanasiou, professor of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece, and author of ›Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black‹

 »Living with an Infected Planet provides an astute analysis of the politics of the Covid-19 pandemic and the language through which it was framed. Elke Krasny reminds us that it matters what metaphors we invest in to give meaning to our worlds.«
Emma Dowling, author of ›The Care Crisis ‒ What Caused It and How Can We End It?‹

»Balancing feminist worry and hope, Elke Krasny’s rich book leaves the reader with a call for action as much as self-reflection on the Covid-19 pandemic as a crisis of care.«
Henriette Steiner, associate professor, Copenhagen University, Denmark, and co-author of ›Touch in the Time of Corona Reflections on Love, Care, and Vulnerability in the Pandemic‹

»I was deeply moved by this thoughtful book’s trajectory from ›feminist worry‹ about the ubiquitous war metaphors to describe the pandemic to ›feminist hope‹ for a genuinely transformative recovery imagined as a new care feminism.«
Joan Tronto, professor emerita of Political Science, University of Minnesota, USA

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230 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-8376-5915-3

Elke-Krasny,-Living-with-an-Infected-Planet,-front-cover_transcript_2023_