Care Feminism: Words, Conversations, Walks, July 1, 2022

This workshop contributed to Avtonomi Akadimia run by artist and activist Joulia Strauss and took place in Athens in the Akadimia Platonos, now known as Akadimia Platonos Jungle, in 2022.The global Covid-19 pandemic has (re)named care as essential infrastructure. Those, who perform caring labors, were defined as living infrastructure, as care was, and is being stretched to the limits. The realities of care are defined by austerity, precarization, and exhaustion. The imaginaries of care are filled with ethics, relationality, choice, empathy or kindness. Arguing that there is still a lack of everyday language to articulate labours, experiences, and feelings of, care, and that there is furthermore a profound lack of public articulation of care, this workshop connects the widely held notion that care is invisibilized to this lack of ways of speaking care. Examining words used to speak about care, including empathy, exhaustion, choice, skills, competence, exploitation, persistence, humility, feminization, interruption, or conflict, to name but a few, the interest is on how words of care produce socio-environmental effects at the level of material semiosis and political imaginaries. This workshop collectively examines meanings, practices, ethics, politics, and imaginaries closely associated with care. Together, we will talk, write, and walk.

http://avtonomi-akadimia.net/event/elke-krasny-care-feminism-words-conversations-walks/