Care aesthetics - with James Thompson
Episode 11 of Careful Thinking
For the eleventh episode of the Careful Thinking podcast, I was joined by James Thompson. James is a theatre practitioner, academic and researcher, and he's currently Professor of Applied and Social Theatre at the University of Manchester. James’ professional practice has included 10 years developing arts programmes in prisons and over 15 years documenting and supporting arts projects in sites of armed conflict and humanitarian disaster. He helped to set up the TiPP Centre, which develops participatory arts projects in prison contexts, and also In Place of War, a global organisation that uses artistic creativity in places impacted by conflict.
James’ books include Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect and Performance in Place of War, both published in 2009, and Humanitarian Performance: From Disaster Tragedies to Spectacles of War, from 2014. He also co-edited the collection Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance, which was published in 2020. James’ most recent book is Care Aesthetics: For Artful Care and Careful Art, which came out in 2023. He currently leads a cross-disciplinary team of theatre and nursing academics and practitioners working on the Care Aesthetics Research Exploration Project, based at Manchester University, which includes the activities of the Care Lab, a space for exploring artful care and careful art.
I've been keen to invite James on to the podcast since I first heard about his work. As someone who is myself originally from an arts and humanities background, but who is now working in the care field, I’ve found the way that James’ work bridges care and the arts fascinating and thought-provoking. Before becoming an academic, I also spent a number of years working with ex-offenders (see this blog post), organising education projects in Essex and London, which brought me into contact with Clean Break, a theatre company set up by women ex-prisoners, which is featured in James’ collection Performing Care. So I’m also intrigued by that particular aspect of James’ practice. We also have Manchester University in common: I was a postgraduate research student there many years ago, and it turns out that, at different times, James and I were both volunteer literacy tutors at the same inner-city education project, run by the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders.
James Thompson (via www.thecarelab.org.uk)We began our conversation on the podcast by reflecting on James’ work in prisons and his experience as a theatre practitioner in places of conflict, exploring connections between these earlier activities and James’ more recent interest in issues around care, which had its roots in both his personal and practice experience. Turning to James’ recent book on care aesthetics, we talked about the challenge he offers to traditional aesthetics and his advocacy of an alternative, everyday aesthetics, focussed on appreciation of relationships rather than objects. We discussed whether self-care can encourage care of the other, and whether engaging in intimate care necessarily leads to concern for the wider community. James had interesting things to say about the relationship between art, play and care, and about the role of performance in care. We also explored what ‘careful’ art might look like, as well as what it means to describe care as ‘beautiful’, or as ‘artful’. Turning from the book to James’ current work with the Care Aesthetics Research Exploration Project, we talked about the ways in which it’s bringing together artists and care practitioners to develop a new language for articulating the aesthetic dimensions of care, with a particular focus on dementia care. Finally, James talked about his vision for the future of the project, based around the ongoing work of the Care Lab as well as some of the ways in which research around care aesthetics might develop.
In the course of our conversation, we noted connections between James’ developing theory of care aesthetics and some of the ideas explored on previous episodes of the podcast. In particular, we noted the similarity between James’ focus on sensory, embodied communication, in both art and care, and Christine Leroy’s work around kinaesthetic empathy, which I discussed with her in Episode 7. And our discussion of the connections between art, care and play recalled the work of Petr Urban on these same issues, which I explored with him in Episode 4. More broadly, James’ work in care aesthetics is indebted to Maurice Hamington’s pioneering work on embodied care (see Episode 6).
Here are a few quotes by James from the episode:
There's an idea within a lot of aesthetic theory that aesthetics is a separate zone of human practice. It's an autonomous place. It's something apart from other aspects of life. And my approach...would say, no, that aesthetics is part of our daily life. It isn't a separate realm. It is actually part and parcel of how we live our lives.
....
If there is an experience that happens between bodies, and not necessarily two, it could be multiple bodies in a space, where you locate that experience is quite problematic... I will have an experience and the other person has an experience. But I'm trying to say we need to think of an aesthetic experience as belonging to all the people there. And we know...that if you're with your friend at the cinema and you both watch the same film...you both will have a slightly different experience of the film, but also there'll be things that flow between you and you have in common. And I'm trying to capture, often [in] caring relationships…there is a flow of practice between people that creates the experience, both just by their mere presence together, but also about the way they touch and work off each other.
...
I don't think we live our lives with nice, neat, complete roles which we unpack in different environments. Actually, it's more about our capacity to...be aware of the sensory worlds that we live in, and to be aware of the way we use our bodies, we use our voices, we use the different sensory capacities we have in relation to other people. And by practising…those, and being attentive to those in different environments, it is more likely we are sensitive to other environments and other worlds...If you're working intimately with somebody, people assume that's private and it's maybe in your domestic space, and then something global often is seen to be more noble or more significant or more important. And I would say, well, if I'm working on the care of refugee rights in the world, I will still have to go and meet a refugee, or I will have to be in a room with other people...And the sensory world of that room, the sensory way that I might engage with a family of people who have a migration experience in the UK, is all a register that I think involves attunement to your body, attunement to the way you have relations with people.
...
I've noticed a lot in doing work in care settings where often the family carer, and the way the family of a person receiving care is part of the care environment. And they're often not...talked about sufficiently, and so they are like a witness to the care also, they'll be actively involved in the care. But there's something about when you witness care. There's an aesthetic because you are looking at how care looks, and there's quite a lot in dementia care, which is about the relationship between you as a carer, caring for a person living with dementia, anticipating how the family carers will see the care that you've done. So they anticipate the power of the witness...And that's then linked to performance, because...one definition of performance, obviously is around anticipating the audience for the practice that you have. You're thinking how this might seem, how this might be as if you were being watched, and that can cause problems or cause a particular dynamic.
...
If you think about the hospital ward...we know that...strip lights, inaccessible windows, industrially white walls, a certain style of flooring, the quality of the bed linen, the quality of the bed - there's a whole range of aspects of that environment that are judged for their aesthetics, how they look, how they feel, how they shape an experience. So there's an aesthetic already at play. And then I would put people into that. You might say...it's a cold ward, but you also use ‘cold’ for the way someone behaves - ‘that was a cold person’. So I think we have a language of aesthetics that is already judging the quality of a care experience...which I don't think we've properly incorporated into really thinking through what a healthcare experience or a social care experience might be.
...
There is a sort of social-political emphasis here...that to build communities that are more just and more equal and to live with people in those ways isn't just a matter of structure and rhetoric, it's also a practice of how we are with the people that we live with, in the broadest possible sense. And I think that is a political call, in a way, in the book, but it's also immediate in the sense that, you know, you cook for your neighbour and if you cook for your neighbour, you're not going to make something that tastes awful, you're going to try and make it taste really nice. We know that aesthetics and care are simultaneous in the way we look out for each other and it's that call I suppose I'm making.
You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can download a transcript of the episode here:
The header image is a photograph of the Care Lab at Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester (via www.thecarelab.org.uk)