Forms of Care shared reading list.

‘What forms does care take? What does taking care of oneself, another, or each other look and feel like?’ Members of the Waiting Times team recently joined scholars from critical medical humanities, disability studies, the environmental humanities, literary studies and feminist theory in response to the call to think about form as ‘that which might productively organise but also capture the protean nature of care’. These books, articles and projects are a selection of the work engaged in presentations and discussions across the workshop. They are shared here as a resource for others and to mark the event which took place online on the 9th and 10th September. The forms of care workshop was organised by Dr Erin Lafford (Oxford) and Dr Alexandra Kingston-Reese (York) courtesy of the University of York.

Details of individual presentations can be found below the reading list.

 

Forms for care conference – reading list selection:

Burke, L. (2014). Oneself as another: Intersubjectivity and ethics in Alzheimer’s illness narratives. Narrative Inquiry, 4(2), 28-47.

Butler, J. (2021) The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. Verso.

Fuchs, E (2005) Making an Exit: A Mother-Daughter Drama with Alzeheimer’s, Machine Tools, and Laughter. Metropolitan: New York.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) New York: Minor Compositions

Hedva, Johanna. (2015) ‘My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want It to Matter Politically.’ Lecture, Human Resources, Los Angeles, October 7.

Jacoby, O. (1919/2019) Words in Pain: Letters on Life and Death. Ed. by J. Catty and T. Moore. Oxford: Skyscraper Publications.

Karjevsky G., Talevi, R., Bailer, S., (eds) (2020) Letters to Joan Tronto. With Edna Bonhomme, Johanna Bruckner, Teresa Dillon, Joao Florencio, Johanna Hedva, Elke Krasny, Patricia reed, Yayra Sumah and Joan Tronto. New Alphabet School.

Kittay, E. F. (2003) The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency (Feminist Constructions). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Stengers, I., (2011) The Care of the Possible: Isabelle Stengers interviewed by Erik Bordeleau, Landscape, Architecture, Political Economy, (1): 12-17.

Schaffer, Talia (2021) Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

The Care Collective (2020) Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal. The Care Manifesto: the Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso.

The Mind’s Eye (2021) Care Syllabus. MCLA. https://www.caresyllabus.org/about

Mol, Annemarie, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols (2010) ‘Care: Putting Practice into Theory’, in Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, ed. by Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols (Verlag, Bielefeld: transcript).

Out of the Woods Collective (2020) Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions.

Whitehead, Anne. (2017) Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction: An Intervention in Medical Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

 

 

Programme:

Elizabeth Barry, ‘We Hang Up Laughing: Dementia, Care and the Temporality of Laughter’

Marie Allitt, ‘Stratifying Care: Geology and Grammar of Cancer and Hospital Care in Peter Reading’s C

Lucy Burke, ‘Taking time: Reading Ali Smith’s There But For I as a form of care’

Alice Hall, ‘Caring and Curating: Women, Work and the Carers UK Archive’

Zoe Weinberg, Jade Colon, Amira F. Hassan, and Savanna Schaefer, ‘The Free Form of Freewriting as a Form of Care’

Elisabeth Pedersen, ‘The Catholic Worker Care Model: Building Interdependent Caring Communities and Kinships’

Lisa Baraitser and Stephanie Davies, ‘Waiting as Care’s Form: Notes from the Waiting Times Project’

Michael Flexer, ‘Signs You Care: Form in the Semiotic of Caring’

Jocelyn Catty and Laura Sailsbury, ‘Writing into the Future: Letters as Containers of Time and Care’

Jordan Osserman, ‘The ‘Object’ of the Puberty Blocker’

Kelechi Anucha, ‘Form and Fugitive Care’

Nicola Kirkby, ‘Care and Repair: Narrative Infrastructure in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853)’

David James, ‘Pathographic Close Reading’

Levi Prombaum, ‘A No Manifesto for Caring in Cultural Interpretation’

Victoria Papa, ‘Caremaking: Beyond Give & Take’ 

Laura Thompson, ‘Museological Critiques and Accessibility’

 

Stephanie Davies

The Last Breath Society: A Seminar. Online on Thursday, September 16, 2021 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM BST

An evening of talks and discussion emerging from ideas in Martin O’Brien’s installation-performance The Last Breath Society: Coughing Coffin

Please join Martin O’Brien, Kelechi Anucha, Lisa Baraitser, Dominic Johnson, Zack Mennell, Laura Salisbury, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Shabnam Shabazi, Nisha Ramayya, and Sheree Rose for an evening of discussion of Martin O’Brien’s recent performance piece, The Last Breath Society (Coughing Coffin) performed at the ICA, London, and his theoretical work on ‘zombie time’.

 

The evening will include contributions from members of the Waiting Times research team, and from artists, poets, academics and collaborators whose work was commissioned for The Last Breath Society, to explore questions of endurance, waiting, time and care.

‘The coffin is sealed shut; the faint sound of coughing can be heard from inside, ringing out through the night. In another place, a group are meeting. The Last Breath Society gather to breathe together, to mourn their own life and rehearse for the inevitable. ‘– Martin O’Brien

Martin O’Brien was born with a life shortening disease and recently surpassed his life expectancy – as such he is living in ‘zombie time’. The Last Breath Society (Coughing Coffin) continued Martin’s exploration of mortality through physical endurance, and long durations, considering the act of ‘waiting’ as a mode of survival. The work was performed for four hours a day, over eight days at the ICA, London. The performance developed over the days and explored how we wait for death. Each day, the performance used the remnants of the previous in a growing and changing installation.

As a living installation and exhibition, The Last Breath Society (Coughing Coffin) featured daily durational performances by Martin O’Brien and a series of 10 commissioned video works by Franko B, Ansuman Biswas, Rocio Boliver, Noëmi Lakmaier, Lechedevirgen Trimegisto, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Kira O’Reilly, Sheree Rose, Shabnam Shabazi, and Nicholas Tee.

Martin O’Brien is an artist and zombie. He works across performance, writing and video art. His work uses physical endurance, long durations, and pain based practices in order to examine what it means to be born with a life shortening disease, and to live longer than expected. He has shown work throughout the UK, Europe, USA, and Canada. This has included at Tate Britain, Spill Festival of Performance (both London), Kapelica Gallery (Ljubljana), Performatorium Festival of Queer Performance (Regina), Venice Week of Performance Art (Venice), In Between Time Festival of Contemporary Performance (Bristol), Grace Exhibition Space, Abrons Art Centre (both New York) and as artist in residence at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles). Martin has cystic fibrosis and all of his work and writing draws upon this experience. In 2018, the book Survival of the Sickest: the Art of Martin O’Brien was published by Live Art Development Agency. He is currently senior lecturer in Performance at Queen Mary University of London. He recently surpassed his life expectancy and is enjoying life as a zombie.

Conceived and performed by Martin O’Brien, with sound by Suhail Merchant. Produced by Joseph Morgan Schofield, and production managed by Thomas Wilson. Martin is assisted in the performance by Zack McGuinness.

The Last Breath Society (Coughing Coffin) has been commissioned as part of Waiting Times, a Wellcome Trust funded research project by academics from Birkbeck, University of London and the University of Exeter. Waiting Times offers a fundamental re-conceptualisation of the relation between time and care in contemporary thinking about health, illness, and wellbeing.

The Last Breath Society (Coughing Coffin) has been supported with public funds from Arts Council England.

Images taken during the performance by Manuel Vason.

Please register via the Eventbrite page. 

Forms of Care: An Interdisciplinary Workshop. 9-10th September. A two-day interdisciplinary workshop exploring care and its form(s) at the intersection of ethics, affect, and aesthetics.

Thu, Sep 9, 2021, 11:30 AM –

Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 3:30 PM BST

organised by  Alexandra Kingston-Reese and Erin Lafford

Continue reading “Forms of Care: An Interdisciplinary Workshop. 9-10th September. A two-day interdisciplinary workshop exploring care and its form(s) at the intersection of ethics, affect, and aesthetics.”


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