Speculative Care in Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy: Reclaiming Motherhood through Feminist Poetry

Named after the Ukrainian Orthodox prayer for the dead, the Canadian feminist Decameron Collective’s Memory Eternal (Вічная Пам'ять) is a single user a Virtual Reality work designed for Quest 2 that features seventeen distinct storytelling works which include 360 video, interactive and spatialized sound, AI generated images and video, film, as well as text. Set in a surreal and watery landscape, the works investigate our shared experiences of grief and loss at personal, societal, and planetary scales. The design of the world and the works in it center around a question: In the wake of crises, what do and should we remember, and how? Interactants’ journey through the world takes them through experiences of mourning, sitting with, and awakening to new futures. Research objectives: Memory Eternal was an experiment in finding interactive forms for grieving and memory work in response to personal losses, war, and the climate crisis. Speculative practices: The generation of the world and works in it is the product of a speculative feminist praxis asking what important relationships to the past and what forms of futurity can be attained through digital storytelling and research co-creation. The work results from years long conversations, inquiry, and artistic experimentation between the members of the Decameron Collective (Jolene Armstrong Kelly Egan, Lai-Tze Fan, Caitlin Fisher, Angela Joosse, Kari Maaren, Siobhan O’Flynn, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, and Monique Tschofen) anchored in an ethics of care. Documenting / bearing witness: Memory Eternal designs an experience that asks immersants to bear witness to individual grief, as well as participate in collective acts of grieving at a historical moment of overlapping personal and planetary crises. How can haptic and immersive interactive forms engage the thickness of lived histories? How can digital worlds create spaces of encounter that bring vastly diverse, heterogenous yet overlapping experiences together? Theoretical framework: The theoretical frameworks that informed the production and our current understanding of the work includes memory studies (Nora, Van Abbele, Young ); (an)archives and living archives (Springgay, Sabiescu, Siegel); autotheory (Fournier, Vanyecken, Strom, Puig de la Bellacasa); interactive documentary and co-creation (Gaudenzi, Cizek); care ethics; and research-creation (Springgay, Truman, Loveless). Methodology: The Decameron Collective’s methodologies have been informed more by research creation principles than by those of interactive documentary, digital design, film, or scholarship. Our work is emergent, dialogic, and collective. We begin with an intention, often thematic. Broader research questions emerge through the creation, and engagement with each other as co-creators, as well as with audiences and scholars. Emergence opens space for somatic thinking and knowing as legitimate forms of knowledge. It allows for the making of surprising connections, following threads we previously did not know existed, and experimenting with dimensional thinking. And emergence centre the dialogical. As such, emergence is more of a strategy than a method, a resistance to rigid methodologies that privileges interaction as opposed to results. We will be discussing both the possibilities and the intellectual and aesthetic risks of this methodology.

Smooth Effects: The Erasure of Labour and Production of Police as Experts through Augmented Objects

Safety of Percutaneous Lung Needle Aspiration

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See also Genevieve Lloyd (1984 Lloyd , Genevieve . 1984 . The man of reason: ‘Male’ and ‘female’ in Western philosophy . New York : Routledge .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 2. Please note that this argument also concerns ‘race’/ethnicity. In Harding's work, Haraway gets assigned the role of postmodern/post-structuralist feminist theorist who completes the black feminist disclosure of the racism of second-wave movement feminism. For the underlying pattern, see Hemmings (2005, 122). 3. See also Gayle Rubin (1975 Rubin , Gayle . 1975 . The traffic in women: Notes on the ‘political economy’ of sex . In Toward an anthropology of women R.R. Reiter . New York : Monthly Review Press . [Google Scholar]). 4. See, for example, Bronwyn Winter (1997 Winter, Bronwyn. 1997. (Mis)Representations: What French feminism isn't’. Women's. Studies International Forum, 20(2): 211–24. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Sneja Gunew (2002 Gunew , Sneja . 2002 . Feminist cultural literacy: Translating differences, cannibal options . In Women's studies on its own R. Wiegman . Durham, , NC : Duke University Press . [Google Scholar]). 5. An example that Wylie refers to is Dorothy E. Smith (2004 Smith , Dorothy E . 2004 . Comment on Hekman's ‘Truth and method: Feminist standpoint theory revisited’ . In The Feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies Sandra Harding . New York and London : Routledge . [Google Scholar], 263). 6. See also Prokhovnik's Rational Woman: A Feminist Critique of Dichotomy (2002, 43). 7. I would like to thank Professor Gail Lewis who, during the 6th European Gender Research Conference in August 2006, stressed the importance of thinking ‘multiple tracks’ in response to my paper. Lewis pointed out to me that black women stand in a specific generational relation to one another, and simultaneously to white women. 8. See also Claire Colebrook (2000 Colebrook , Claire . 2000 . From radical representations to corporeal becomings: The feminist philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz and Gatens . Hypatia 15 ( 2 ): 76 – 93 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 9. See Bracke and Puig de la Bellacasa (2004 Bracke , Sarah , and María Puig De La Bellacasa . 2004 . Building standpoints . In The Feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies Sandra Harding . New York and London : Routledge . [Google Scholar]). 10. This is not to say that counter-examples do not exist. See, for example, Alison Assiter (1996 Assiter , Alison . 1996 . Enlightened women: Modernist feminism in a postmodern age . London and New York : Routledge . [Google Scholar]). What I claim is that these examples will not be noticed by the second-wave or post-second-wave feminist epistemologists.

The geological epoch of the Anthropocene provokes the reconceptualization of responsibility as response-ability. Going beyond bounded individualism and human exceptionalism, this notion emphasizes the constitutive relationality of heterogeneous more than human beings that allows for response. Feminist STS scholar and biologist Donna Haraway has developed response-ability primarily as an epistemological notion with ontological and ethico-political aspects, crucial in the context of professional technoscientific research practices. This article articulates a nonprofessional, everyday response-ability, by rereading it as a combination of forms of care that are worldmaking, an etho-ecological practice, and experimental in nature. Thinking through María Puig de la Bellacasa’s multispecies care and Isabelle Stengers’ etho-ecological practices, I articulate everyday response-abilities. Response-abilities, like Puig de la Bellacasa’s worldmaking care, are ubiquitous. They constitute multiple, conflicting worlds in need of sustenance. Response-ability is self-reinforcing, which is both promising and problematic since it leads to unequal burdening and overburdening. Relaying response-ability as Stengers’ etho-ecological practice lays out its immanent obligations that both limit and allow for agency to respond beyond self-reinforcing appeals and amid conflicting obligations. This agency in response-able practices requires careful experimentation. Everyday response-abilities are something we are all engaged in yet need cultivation in times of crises through careful tinkering.

Review of Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, by María Puig de la Bellacasa (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)

This article takes seriously the claim made by 19th century antivivisectionist Anna Kingsford that experiments on animals constitute a type of malevolent sorcery, more specifically a demonic blood sacrifice. In so doing, the paper follows the work of Pignarre and Stengers in their explication of sorcery and how to “get a hold” of its operations despite its stupefying powers. To that end, I will investigate the pragmatic potential of understanding experiments on animals in this way, and more broadly, following the work of posthuman and material feminists, as a type of onto-theological phenomenon of spacetimemattering (in Karen Barad’s terms). This understanding will pay particular attention to the intra-active exclusions that haunt the laboratory space and, following a neo-Spinozist feminist approach, I will explicate the ways in which the human-animal power relations within the laboratory inhibit the creation of joyful multispecies “common notions.” In order to respond to the ghostly presences which haunt the laboratory space, and to affirm joyful, multispecies relations for “as well as possible worlds” (Puig de la Bellacasa), I will finally argue for an affirmative multispecies politics of what Rosi Bradiotti calls “zoe-centered egalitarianism” through a posthuman politics of “grace,” or “the leaving be of nonhumans” (MacCormack) which I frame as an enactment of an enchanted animal ethic.

In this exploratory inquiry, the research team investigates community-based data practices in climate and environmental justice initiatives. We set out to learn from the long history and current activities of communities seeking to hold corporate and government actors responsible to enact care for the climate and environment (e.g., monitoring air quality and waterways affected by petrochemical industries). Through a critical intersectional care ethics lens, we follow how groups respond to harms to ecosystems and seek healing, positioning their epistemic authority as they work with data (e.g., Ottinger, 2023; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). This work draws insights from inquiries which have examined how communities engage with climate action and efforts toward environmental sustainability (e.g., dos Santos et al., 2024; Kaczmarek, 2023; Nathan, 2012). Through a poster reporting on preliminary research, we share early analyses highlighting communities’ labor of resisting corporate delay, denial, and other dis- and mal-information practices, which slow or block urgently needed action and truth-telling. Methods involve analysis of archival records created by and about communities affected by the Love Canal toxic waste crisis in Western New York. The project aims to appreciate differences and similarities in community-based data practices, identifying further possibilities for information professionals and libraries, archives, and museums to uphold these data practices and associated knowledge and memory work, research, and storytelling. In turn, the team proposes future work to trace the development of community-based practices with climate and environmental data over time.

This is an important and timely book that contributes to debates on the importance of care in Early Childhood. It is the third book in the series curated by Professor Jayne Osgood and Professor Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw entitled Feminist Thought in Childhood Research. The chapters include international perspectives with scholars drawn from interdisciplinary fields including, education studies, sociology, critical disability studies, social care, philosophy, social pedagogy and arts-based backgrounds. There have been long-standing debates about the dichotomies of education and care. This has included the type of workforce that might meet the needs of children, and policy focussing on a ‘school ready child’ (Fairchild & Mikuska, 2021). The contested nature of care in Early Childhood is the core focus of this book where educators need to balance the demands of professionalism, pedagogy and practice, along with deficit perceptions of the work from policy-makers and the wider population (Langford, 2019). The pressing need for this book mirrors the call for a more egalitarian vision of caring practices (The Care Collective, 2020). This also chimes with Matters of Care where Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 7) notes that care and ethics are intertwined as ‘a political commitment’, needing a critical eye and focussing on feminist traditions which avoid any normative essentialized and gendered framings of care. In the book's introduction there is a problematization of care and the links to gendered, maternal, exploitative perceptions of care and professionalism. Throughout the book, the turn to feminist theory builds on the germinal work by feminist scholars that challenges masculinist modes of knowledge production. Langford (2019) argues that employing feminist theory, scholarship and practices provides an alternative to the neoliberal perspectives of contemporary care to highlight political, contextual, and emotional nuances in caring experiences. The book is divided into three sections: major developments in ethics of care scholarship which brings careful conversations to the foreground; the ways educators in training can be prepared to develop feminist ethical caring practices; and the materialization of care practices in Early Childhood post training. The first section highlights the history of care scholarship as a site of contestation and transformation. This includes how posthuman and poststructural theory articulates an ethics of encounter encompassing human and non-human bodies. The notion of care as an ethical encounter and orientation is a thread in this section. This is used to unpick and understand how caring subjectivities have been produced and constructed, sometimes reifying a particular version of care. The authors offer alternative perspectives on how understanding historical and contemporary care scholarship can shape different ways to think about caring practices. Preparing educators is the focus of the second section, as the authors consider international reflections of caring practices taught in Higher Education. The acceleration in Higher Education's measurement of knowledge accumulation has bought a call for a more slow scholarship. Here slow scholarship ‘is about deceleration as a means to create focused and nurturing ways of working against damaging conditions’ (Taylor, 2020: 266). These types of slow practices challenge mind: body dualisms are often associated with care and caring practices when working with young children (Fairchild & Mikuska, 2021). The chapters call for an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach with clear links to practice that can provide ways for care to be reconceptualized as an act of social justice. The final section illuminates what occurs in Early Childhood settings. These chapters draw on a range of theoretical positions to consider how care is materialized and operationalized in practice. The authors articulated how the ethical and political nature of care is an intrinsic part of Early Childhood educators work, alongside supporting children to develop their own caring and autonomous selves. Overall this book is an essential addition to the discussions and debates surrounding education and care in Early Childhood. This is important as considering care in contemporary society is an imperative where neoliberalism, nationalism and the challenges faced by the Covid-19 pandemic envelope societies. Foregrounding the importance of care and careful practices ‘is a social capacity and activity necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life’ (The Care Collective, 2020: 5) and this volume joins wider conversations and debates on care and caring.

This paper explores how ‘caring collaboratories’ advance new possibilities for imagining and enlivening early childhood education and research. Thinking with María Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) feminist materialist theory of care the authors bring a retrospective analysis to their research experiences within three different climate change focused collaboratories. The paper begins with an overview of their research sites, anlaysis method for this paper, and common worlds orientation. This is followed by a brief introduction to Puig de la Bellacasa’s conceptualization of care and an offering of three research stories to examine what carrying her triptych of care into the collaboratory proposes to researchers and educators committed to human and more-than-human living well together. The paper concludes with speculative considerations for what such caring collaboratories might offer childhood studies with/in the conditions of our times.

In this paper we explore how smartphone users in Victoria (Australia) used mobile and non-mobile media to find and manage information, emotions and networks during the 2019-2020 Australian summer bushfire crisis. Through arts-based methods that deployed drawing, critical reflection and group discussion, we sought to use techniques that elicit the emotional responses and motivations of our participants in and after the crisis. We draw on the concept of affective witnessing (Papailias, 2016; Richardson and Schankweiler, 2019) as a process whereby the boundaries between mourner and witness blur through the affective intensity of mobile media. We contextualise affective witnessing in terms of feminist materialism of care practices (Pols, 2012; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011; Lupton and Hjorth, forthcoming) to focus on the importance of taking seriously care—care at a distance of family and friends, self-care and care of intimate digital publics.

The contemporary fashion system currently stands at a critical crossroads, caught between the legacy of a linear production model—often referred to as ‘disposable’—characterized by exponential growth and profit maximization, and the urgent need to redefine its objectives in light of the multiple environmental, social, and cultural crises of our time (Raworth, 2017). This scenario has reinforced the awareness of the need to transition from a linear economy to a circular one (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2013). This transition can be built on three pillars inspired by the ethical and relational archetype of ‘care’: care for living beings (both human and non-human), for the environment, and for objects. In this sense, design is called upon to play a transformative role rooted in an ethics of responsibility (Tronto, 1993; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). In recent years, the fashion sector has undertaken numerous efforts to reduce its environmental and social impact through a variety of strategies: the adoption of natural, organic, and recycled materials (Fletcher & Tham, 2019), zero-waste design, the promotion of the slow fashion movement, and product traceability via blockchain (Rogerson & Parry, 2020). Additionally, artificial intelligence has been employed to forecast demand and optimize production processes (Caniato et al., 2020); tools such as the digital product passport (European Commission, 2022) and the application of ecodesign principles (Bocken et al., 2016) have also emerged. However, these practices often remain confined to incremental and sector-specific approaches, without challenging the dominant paradigm of unlimited growth. This context is further complicated by greenwashing practices and ethical compromises that undermine the credibility of ongoing transformations (Delmas & Burbano, 2011). Within this framework, new epistemological and design horizons are emerging: from reparative design (Fuad-Luke, 2022) to regenerative marketing (Tavanti, 2020), from the economy of sufficiency (Schneidewind, 2014) to post-industrial design (Tonkinwise, 2015). These approaches revolve around a redefined concept of prosperity, understood not as the accumulation of resources, but as relational flourishing, harmonious coexistence, and shared well-being. The Prosperity Fashion conference emerges from the recognition that transformation must be not only technical but above all cultural. Alongside the digital and ecological transitions, a third and essential dimension must be addressed: the cultural transition. This involves a profound rethinking of lifestyles, values, and models of production and consumption (Vignoli et al., 2021). The conference thus positions itself as a critical space for imagining new relationships between fashion, economy, environment, and society. The challenge lies in overcoming fashion’s historical inclination toward the ephemeral and rapid consumption, and instead assigning it an active role in cultural and social transformation.

Drone affect: Folded points of view as a co-affection method for empathy and care

During the last 10 years the Science and Technology Studies (STS) community has witnessed a flourishing, intense and multifaceted engagement around “care”. While care had been addressed already before in Joanna Latimer’s The conduct of care: Understanding nursing practice (Latimer, 2000) , and in Jeanette Pols’ Good care: Enacting a complex ideal in long term-psychiatry (Pols, 2004), care seemed to be on everybody’s lips around 2010. Around the same time, the edited volume Care in practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms (Mol et al., 2010) and the article Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) were published. With akin, yet partly diverging, agendas and concerns, these two key publications drastically increased the amount of research that identify with something like an area of “care studies” in STS. This can also be seen in the publication of special issues devoted to care during the last years, notably the much-cited 2015 issue in Social Studies of Science focused on feminist technoscience interventions into the politics and “darker sides” of care (Martin et al., 2015), and the more recent on relationalities and specificities of care in East Asian Science, Technology and Society (Coopmans & McNamara, 2020). Noteworthy is also the special issue on “The politics of policy practices” in The Sociological Review Monograph, where Gill et al. (2017) discuss how policy and care are entangled, and how such entanglements could be enacted more “care-fully”. These publications have spurred rich and generative engagements about ways to attend to the affective, ethico-political and/or material layers of care, within and beyond areas traditionally thought of as related to care (such as healthcare and childcare).

Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science has emerged as a viable answer to current sustainability crises with the aim to strengthen collaborative knowledge production. To expand its transformative potential, we argue that Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science needs to thoroughly engage with questions of unequal power relations and hierarchical scientific constructs. Drawing on the work of the feminist philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa, we examine a feminist ethos of care which might provide useful guidance for sustainability researchers who are interested in generating critical-emancipatory knowledge. A feminist ethos of care is constituted by three interrelated modes of knowledge production: (1) thinking-with, (2) dissenting-within and (3) thinking-for. These modes of thinking and knowing enrich knowledge co-production in Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science by (i) embracing relational ontologies, (ii) relating to the ‘other than human’, (iii) cultivating caring academic cultures, (iv) taking care of non-academic research partners, (v) engaging with conflict and difference, (vi) interrogating positionalities and power relations through reflexivity, (vii) building upon marginalised knowledges via feminist standpoints and (viii) countering epistemic violence within and beyond academia. With our paper, we aim to make a specific feminist contribution to the field of Transdisciplinary Sustainability Science and emphasise its potentials to advance this field.