December 15, Amanda Stuart Fisher (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London) and James Thompson (University of Manchester) are organizing the symposium Performing Care in London (UK). Keynote speaker is Maurice Hamington (Portland State University, Oregon)

It is thirty years since Nel Noddings asked ‘why care about caring? (Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics 1986). Noddings’s book signaled a shift in moral philosophy away from conceptualisations of an autonomous human subject and towards concepts of relationality and dependence. Hers was not a lone voice, other theorists such as Carol Gilligan (1982), Eva Kittay (1991), Joan Tronto (1993), Virginia Held (1993) began to lay out philosophical frameworks for a terrain of care ethics which would go on to influence a wide range of interdisciplinary fields such philosophy, political theory, education, nursing and social work.

Recently, the concept of care has re-emerged within public consciousness as questions have been raised about our capacity to be caring professionals, live in a caring community, or contribute to a more caring society. These concerns become all the more critical in an era marked by the commodification of care, economic austerity and mass migration. Perhaps as a consequence, there has been a renewed interest in care ethics with scholars and practitioners examining how care should be positioned in relation to issues from social justice to national security, as well as examining what might constitute embodied or affective care and how care becomes present in every day contexts.

However, the concept of care has yet to be fully investigated within performance-based scholarship. This symposium signals the start of a new project that explores how concepts of care can be developed, troubled and enhanced through an engagement with performance-based work and, simultaneously, how performance can be re-thought and re-imagined through a dialogue with care ethics.

More information about the symposium you can find here.