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'Care' has been studied within various scholarly fields to critically interrogate gender's relationship to activities that sustain and support life (de la Bellacasa 2011; Mol, Posser, and Pols 2010; Murphy 2015). Within science and technology studies (STS), notions of care have focussed on institutional, often healthcare, settings (Mol 2008). While productive for expanding knowledge on these particular relations and politics, many questions remain about how daily, quotidian, and unofficial relations of care materialise (Carr 2023; Rosner 2014). How does care take shape outside or alongside institutionalised settings and channels? What can we learn about how forms of care constitute gender when they are heavily influenced—and at times disrupted—by technology? How does care intersect with social markers of difference?

The ANU is hosting a 2-day workshop that addresses such questions with the aim to foster collective and critical examinations of what gender studies calls 'the everyday’ (Sim 2015). By this we are referring to informal systems of care that are often not evident in formal systems and institutions, and their sometimes explicit exclusion of some marginalised groups. This forum supports scholars studying how technologies of care and caring for technologies shape what gender is and how it's done – both queering and querying the gendered compositions and representations of care.

 

Responses might address any of the following themes related to care, gender, and everyday technoscience:

 

Successful applicants will be expected to submit 2,000-5,000 word drafts of a work in progress that they want to develop through participation in the workshop. This draft paper will be due for submission prior to the workshop, no later than 11 October 2024. Participants will be expected to read two other papers in their session.

One of the aims of the workshop is to develop these papers for a special issue in an academic journal. However, this is not compulsory, and attendees are welcome to use the workshop to refine papers for publication elsewhere.

While there are no specific eligibility criteria, preference will be given to late-stage postgraduate students (i.e., writing up dissertation) and early career researchers (i.e., up to 5 years after PhD conferral).

 

Applications should include:

Please fill out this Google Form. Email the organisers if you have trouble with accessing the form or have further questions about the workshop: jenna.harb@anu.edu.au or tate.morgan@anu.edu.au

 

Applications due: 16 August 2024

Communication of acceptance: from late August

Submission of draft manuscripts (2,000-5,000 words): 11 October 2024

Workshop: 7-8 November 2024 at the Australian National University in Canberra

 

Carr, C. (2023). Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis. Dialogues in Human Geography, 13(2), 221-239.

de La Bellacasa, M. P. (2011). Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things. Social studies of science, 41(1), 85-106.

Mol, A. (2008). The logic of care: Health and the problem of patient choice. Routledge.

Mol, A., Moser, I., & Pols, J. (2010). Care: putting practice into theory. In Care in practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms, 7-26. transcript.

Murphy, M. (2015). Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices. Social studies of science, 45(5), 717-737.

Rosner, D. K. (2014). Making citizens, reassembling devices: On gender and the development of contemporary public sites of repair in Northern California. Public Culture, 26(1), 51-77.

Sim, L. (2015). Theorising the everyday. Australian Feminist Studies, 30(84), 109-127