Call for Papers: Futures of Care Symposium

Futures of Care: Relationality and Responsibility in more than Human Worlds 

8 April 2022 at the Thackray Museum of Medicine  
Keynote Speaker: Professor Joanna Latimer 


Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2022 

This interdisciplinary symposium will explore the potential futures of care in light of recent critical interrogations of the human, life and care, the emergence of affective technologies (including social robots), and the turn to entanglement in critical and cultural theory.

We invite proposals from scholars working on care and its adjacent concerns – disability, vulnerability, interdependency, responsiveness, and responsibility — in a range of interconnected disciplines, such as medical humanities, posthumanism, affect theory, new materialism, ecological humanities, Indigenous studies and critical race theory.

We are especially interested in papers that theorize care beyond the human, the animal, or even the biological, exploring how care functions both within and beyond what Elizabeth Povinelli calls “the carbon imaginary”: her term for Western epistemologies’ covert conflation of life and being, biology and ontology.

We are seeking papers that explore the art, technologies, economics, affects and socio-politics of possible care futures in order to initiate conversations that move beyond conventional benefits/risks analysis to consider the broader implications of caregiving relationships in more-than-human worlds.We are especially interested in papers that consider:

-Care (bio)technologies; engineering and designing care technologies, objects, environments, bodies; technosolutionism. 

-Care in the Anthropocene; planetary health and ecologies of care. 

-Indigenous cosmologies; more-than-human kinship; decolonizing care. 

– Queer and trans care. Care and processes of valuation; care and affective economies, value and disposability. 
– Companion species; nonhuman animal care. 
– Care and contagion; COVID futures and pandemic precarity; 

The symposium will run 8 April 2022 at the Thackray Museum of Medicine (in conjunction with the exhibition “Can Robots Care?”) as part of the AHRC- funded project “Imagining Posthuman Care.” A small number of bursaries will be available for PGR/ECR/unwaged symposium participants to cover travel expenses. Please include a brief statement of need with your proposal if you wish to be considered for one of these bursaries. 

Please send your 300-word proposal and a brief bio to Amelia DeFalco a.i.defalco@leeds.ac.uk and Maya Caspari m.m.caspari@leeds.ac.uk by 31 January 2022. 

We will be able to host virtual/online presentations.