Workshop | Rethinking the Feminist Politics of Care in an Age of Crisis: Dr Lucile Richard (University of Basel)

Please join us for these two workshops about the politics of care. They take place in Grand Parade, and will be catered. All welcome. Please distribute widely. Dr. Lucile Richard is a queer political theorist of feminist care politics, who studies systematic forms of abuse, negligence and exclusion in care reception.

In Person G63 Grand Parade, University of Brighton

On Teams: Group-CAPPE Events | General | Microsoft Teams

Wednesday 19^th of June 10.30-12.30

Workshop 1: Theorizing Carelessness: Sovereign Biopolitics,

Post-Foucauldian Resistance and the illusion of Care Work.

Thinking with and against Foucault’s conception of modern governments as “managers of life and survival, of bodies and of the race” (Foucault, 1976, 137) post-Foucauldian theorists characterise sovereign power and global bio-politics as the “right to decide life and death” with the sacrifice and abandonment of some, targeted killings, induced precarity and debilitation. They characterise governmentality as a careless mode of power. This workshop reflects on uncaring as a coercive mode of subjugation, and the loopholes in re-conceptualizing resistance and liberation without rethinking practices of care work today. I discuss Mbembe’s seminal text Necropolitics (2016) to consider how the gendered and racialized organization of care work trouble Western understandings of freedom, while recognizing the importance of the devalued practices of support, aid, and nurture in contrast to the politics of refusal. Taking Mbembe’s “ethics of the passerby” as its point of departure, the workshop considers methodological and conceptual questions about the relationship between care and critique. It defends a hermeneutics that centeres care matters and supports a queer-feminist ethics developing new lexicons of dissent and collective struggle.

Thursday 20th June 10:30-12:30

Workshop 2: Politicizing Care Beyond Straightness:

Notes Towards a Coalition of the (Un-)Cared For.

Long mocked, deemed secondary, and oft confined to feminist circles, care matters have recently acquired greater political value. Scandals about negligent care in old age homes, long waiting lists for daycare centers, and images of burnt-out carers popularise the feminist diagnosis of a multifaceted “crisis of care” (Fraser, 2017). The feminist case for a radical revalorization of care work is increasingly popular. The central demand is to transform the labor conditions of overworked and under-resourced caregivers. Implicitly, it is assumed that this will improve the situation of those who depend on their care, the very young, very old and/or incapacitated individuals. But why assume such a trickle-down effect? What about the risk that assumed ally-ship sidelines the perspective of those subjugated as care-receivers, through infantilization, ostracization and debilitation related to patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy?

In this workshop, we critically examine this focus on caregivers. We utilize queer, crip, and Black feminist literature to rethink the emancipatory subject of feminist struggles for better care. The under-theorization of care-receiving in the politics of care scholarship decentres those dependent on care. Central to the discussion is the potential to leverage the shared, albeit distinct, experiences of being carelessly treated to reanimate coalition work among social groups differentially subjugated by the hegemonic caregiver/care-receiver relationship.