Careful thinkers in action

An update on recent work by podcast guests

A number of the guests on my Careful Thinking podcast have been busy recently, organising events and publishing articles, and I thought it might be helpful to provide an update on their activities.

From 21^st to 23^rd November, the Care Lab, ‘a space for exploring artful care and careful art’, based at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester (England), is hosting a ‘Festival of Care’, three days of practical workshops and discussions, showcasing ‘different forms of care, each with different kinds of sensory and practical skills’. The Care Lab is part of the Care Aesthetics Research Exploration Project (CARE), which is led by Professor James Thompson, who was my guest on Episode 11 of the podcast. The organisers of the festival invite anyone with an interest in care to ‘come join us in exploring care differently, beyond what is usually seen, felt, or recognised as “care” in care work.’ You can find more details of the festival, and book your place, here.

                                                                 James Thompson

James Thompson’s work features in the latest issue of the International Journal of Education and the Arts, a special open access issue devoted to the topic of ‘Art for the sake of care’, for which he has co-authored an article on ‘Care aesthetics and “being in the moment” through improvised music-making and male grooming in dementia care’. The special issue also includes an article on ‘Performance and bodily anchoring of care: dance’s power to care’, by another of my podcast guests, the French philosopher and dancer Christine Leroy, whom I interviewed for Episode 7. I think I’m right in saying that this is Christine’s first English-language publication.

                                                                Christine Leroy

The special issue is edited by Merel Visse and Elena Cologni, who are collaborators on the ‘Art and Care’ project, which ‘aims at facilitating a conversation…on ways in which creative, practice-led research and care ethics and theory can impact society’. Merel’s writing is also featured in a new book, published last month, with the title Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege: Critical Care Ethics Perspectives. Edited by Sophie Bourgault, Maggie Fitzgerald and Fiona Robinson, the collection consists of twelve chapters by scholars from a variety of countries, disciplines, and intellectual traditions, discussing ‘the ways care ethics contributes to the decentering of dominant epistemologies and to the challenging of privilege...by considering how to decenter care ethics itself via an encounter with non-Western philosophical traditions and alternative epistemologies’. The book cites the work of a number of key care theorists, including Maurice Hamington, my guest on Episode 6 of Careful Thinking, and a valued friend and supporter of the podcast.

                                                          Maurice Hamington

Maurice is also quoted extensively in an article published in the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine, with the title ‘The branch of philosophy all parents should know’ and the tag line ‘Care ethics might just transform the way people think about what they owe their children’. The article is by the journalist Elissa Strauss, author of the widely-praised book When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others, which was published earlier this year.

                                                                 Elissa Strauss

In the article, Elissa writes about her discovery of care ethics, citing the work of care theorists such as Carol Gilligan, Nell Noddings, Daniel Engster, and Sarah Clark Miller, and describing how it made her ‘something of a philosophy convert’ and transformed the way she thought about her own experience of parenting. Like her recent book, Elissa’s latest article performs the useful function of spreading the word about care ethics to a wider public audience beyond academia. As Maurice commented when promoting Elissa’s article on Facebook: ‘Care ethics makes the big time!’  

Elissa links to the Atlantic article in a recent post on her own highly-recommended Substack newsletter, ‘Made with Care’, in which she also kindly provides a link to this Substack, and to the Careful Thinking podcast.

I’m delighted to announce that Elissa will be the guest on the next episode of Careful Thinking, which is coming soon. Watch this space for further details - and if you want to receive regular updates on the podcast, and related topics, why not subscribe to this newsletter (it’s free!), if you haven’t done so already? And while you’re at it, please consider subscribing to the Careful Thinking podcast on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The header image for this post is a photograph of the Care Lab at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.