FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE
leveraging feminist approaches to care at a time of crisis
20 - 21 July 2022
The Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender at The University of Adelaide
The Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
compiled workshop resources: click here
about the workshop
about the workshop
Multiple crises of care (the pandemic, climate change, systemic sexism and racism) have catapulted care and caring to the centre of politics and public life: care of our health, of others, of our environments, economy and communities. Care has been a topic of feminist thinking and debate for some time, yet significant challenges remain in translating these theories into practice. The purpose of this interdisciplinary workshop is to: 1) take this critical moment of crisis to re-position care as a productive intervention; 2) strengthen a critical exchange between social science, other disciplinary approaches to care, and community partners; 3) develop a vision for more effective ways in which feminist values of care can be translated into policies and practices.
Our objectives are to develop critical conversations and collaborations between academics and non-academic participants with the goal of: 1) interrogating the myriad meanings of care that have arisen before and during COVID and other contemporary crises rooted in imperial-colonial histories; 2) exploring the benefits and limits of feminist approaches to care in the contemporary world and advancing the conceptualisation and practice of care in diverse domains; 3) investigating why theorisations of care have so often failed in practice and developing policies and practices to address these failures through collaborative work.
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This event is hosted by the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender at The University of Adelaide, with funding support from the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. The event organizers are Megan Warin, Chris Beasley, Sophie Chao, and Prudence Black.
programme
programme
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Venue: Room G53, Napier Building, Ground floor, University of Adelaide https://www.adelaide.edu.au/campuses/north-terrace
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day one
Doors open at 9.30 am – grab a tea/coffee.
Welcome
9.45 am
Introductions
10.00 am
Keynote Address: Dr Hi'ilei Julia Hobart (University of Texas)
Chair: Megan Warin
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11.15 am - 12.30 pm
1. Roundtable: Theoretical interventions of feminist care
This theme explores the rapid expansion of the concept of care, cautioning about the ways in which it is strategically used for political gain and commercial profit. If care can have myriad multiple meanings and can be anything, does it risk losing its potential as a site of productive, political intervention? This panel brings a diverse range of theorisations of care to explore their intersections, contestations, and differences.
Chair + Discussant: Megan Warin
Speakers: Chris Beasley, Celia Roberts, JaneMaree Maher
12.30 pm – 2.00 pm
Lunch [including curatorial talk at the Art Gallery of South Australia with Elle Freak]
2.15 pm - 4.15 pm
2. Roundtable: Practices of care in the contemporary world
Care has practical application and require sensitivity to context and environment. This panel considers how ideas of care are put into practice; where and how that is theorised; where it is not, and what difference that makes for the success or failure of feminist approaches to caring.
Chair + Discussant: Pru Black
Speakers: Sophie Chao, Blanche Verlie, Jana Norman
4.15 pm - 4.45 pm
Reflections followed by social dinner (Jasmin Indian Restaurant, 31 Hindmarsh Square at 6.00 pm)
day two
9.30 am - 11.00 am
3. Roundtable: The politicisation of care during crisis
Contemporary events have raised new and critical questions of care. This session provides an opportunity to reflect and learn from current knowledge on this topic, to consider the range of intersecting inequities that have arisen across social, economic, health and global landscapes, the impacts especially on the marginalised, and the ways care is wielded for political purposes.
Chair + Discussant: Sophie Chao
Speakers: Annapurna Nori, Caroline Alcorso, Alison Pennington, Tanya Zivkovic
11.00 am - 11.30 am
Morning Tea
11.30 am - 1.00 pm
4. Roundtable: Developing new feminist approaches of care for the 21st Century
If care needs to be rethought for a new world, this session provides space to do this rethinking. We shall encourage scholars to consider how what we have learned opens up new pathways, approaches, and practical applications, and what a feminist approach to care might encompass when applied to art, youth, health and ageing.
Chair + Discussant: Chris Beasley
Speakers: Danielle Marsden, Rob Cover, Narelle Warren, Jacqueline Millner
1.00 pm - 2.30 pm
Lunch in the Botanical Gardens (weather dependent) and a talk about First Creek Wetland by landscape architect Kate Cullity, TCL (Taylor Cullity Lethlean)
2.45 pm - 4.00 pm
Brainstorming: Final thoughts and next steps (Megan, Chris, Sophie)
This session will consider workshop outcomes, next steps, and future collaborations.
4.00 pm
Close and farewell
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about the participants
about the participants
Sophie Chao
Sophie is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research centers on the intersections of ecology, capitalism, Indigeneity, health, and justice in the Pacific. Sophie's first book, In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022), explores how interspecies relations of care and kinship among Indigenous Papuan Peoples are being reconfigured by mass deforestation, industrial oil palm plantation expansion, and settler-colonial occupation. For more information, visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.
Megan Warin
Megan is a Professor of Food Studies in the School of Social Sciences and Director of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide. Her research explores the intersections of food, health, gender and place; how communities identified as 'obesogenic' and 'vulnerable' creatively respond to stigmatisation through relations of care and belonging; critical investigations of maternal nutrition, reproduction and developmental origins of health and disease; and the multiple forms of care needed when attaching epigenetic understandings of intergenerational trauma to Indigenous peoples and health.
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Chris Beasley
Chris is Emerita Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations and the founder of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender, at the University of Adelaide. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Her most recent books are Internet Dating Intimacy and Social Change (with Mary Holmes, 2021) and The Cultural Politics of Popular Film: Power, Culture and Society (with Heather Brook, 2019). Chris has published a number of works focusing on care including ‘Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity’, Feminist Theory (with Carol Bacchi, 2007).
Prudence Black
Prudence is a Research Associate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and the School of Humanities, University of Adelaide. Her main research interests include aviation and workplace cultures. She has worked on a long-term research project with Dress for Success, Sydney and Success Works, programs designed to help disadvantaged women and women affected by the criminal justice system. Her latest book, Smile, Particularly in Bad Weather: The Era of the Australian Airline Hostess (UWA Publishing, 2017) is about the gendered and industrial relations history of flight hostesses and flight attendants.
Hi'ilei Hobart
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart is an Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University, where she teaches courses on Indigenous politics, food, and Oceania. Her book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment is forthcoming this December from Duke University Press. Hi'ilei is editor of The Foodways of Hawai'i
Past and Present (Routledge, 2020) and co-author of the special issue "Radical Care" with Tamara Kneese (Social Text, 2020).
Jana Norman
Jana is an Early Career Researcher in law and environmental humanities at the University of Adelaide and a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide. Her research focuses on moving western understandings of what it means to be human away from the dualised, hierarchical thinking that supports human exceptionalism, intersectional Othering and a dynamic of instrumentalism in both human and human-earth relations. Jana is the author of Posthuman Legal Subjectivity: Reimagining the Human in the Anthropocene (Routledge 2021), winner of the SLSA Theory and History Prize and the Chris Beasley Prize for Gender and Sexuality Theory.
JaneMaree Maher
JaneMaree is Professor in the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, Sociology, and Associate Dean Graduate Research in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. JaneMaree’s research is focused in three key areas of gendered social science: paid and unpaid work, food, care and family structures, and gendered violences. In each of these areas, the gendered patterns, structures and temporalities of care are a key focus. The intensification and responsibilisation of women’s mothering in food and family violence have been central to her recent research.
Narelle Warren
Narelle is a medical anthropologist and Associate Professor in Sociology and Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. Her research takes a comparative approach to explore how structural factors shape how people experience, understand and respond to neurological conditions as they age. In this context, she is interested in how care is lived, practiced, and transformed between people and in various contexts: Malaysia, Australia, and Bangladesh.
Blanche Verlie
Blanche Verlie is an uninvited settler living on Gadigal Country. Blanche is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney. Her research and practice engage with the cultural politics of ecological emotions, and experiment with how feminist practices of care might be mobilized to address the structural violences of climate crisis, injustice, and despair. You can read her book, Learning to Live with Climate Change: From Anxiety to Transformation (Routledge, 2021) for free here. For further research, resources, and multimedia, visit
Katie Barclay
Katie Barclay is Deputy Director of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender, Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions, and Head of Historical and Classical Studies, University of Adelaide. She writes widely on the history of emotions, gender and family life. She has a particular interest in love and care as an emotional ethic of everyday life, and practices of care in family life and in relation to childhood. Katie's recent books include Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (2021) and Academic Emotions: Feeling the Institution (2021).
Danielle Abbott
Danielle is the Quality and Practice Implementation Lead – for Family by Family, at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI). Family-by-Family is a peer to peer approach born out of Co-design research to help mitigate the number of children entering into crisis services in South Australia. From a reduction in child protection notifications and social isolation, to improved parenting, education and employment outcomes, the program demonstrates a powerful approach to building social capital, and lasting change for families. Although the program philosophy supports whole families (including fathers) We find that mainly women are attracted to the program design.
Rob Cover
Rob Cover is Professor of Digital Communication at RMIT University, Australia. He is Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Discovery project investigating gender- and sexually-diversity in Australian screen media, and on an ARC Linkage studying the wellbeing aspects of gender- and sexually-diverse migration. His recent books include: Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? (2016), Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self ( 2016), Flirting in the Era of #MeToo (with A Bartlett and K Clarke, 2019), Emergent Identities: New Sexualities, Gender and Relationships in a Digital Era (2019) and Fake News in Digital Cultures (with J Thompson & A Haw, 2022).
Alison Pennington
Alison Pennington is Senior Economist at the Centre for Future Work, with The Australia Institute. She conducts research on economic issues facing working people including the future of jobs, skills and training, women's work, collective bargaining, and the role of government. Alison is a regular national media commentator, with writing published on platforms including The Guardian and The New Daily. Alison has held previous roles in the Commonwealth Department of Finance, public sector unions, and public school music teaching.
Celia Roberts
Celia Roberts is a Professor in the School of Sociology, ANU. She works in feminist technoscience studies and has had a long-standing interest in theories, technologies and practices of care. She has undertaken research into telecare for older people living at home and other forms of health biosensing and, more recently, around reproduction in climate crisis. She is currently co-writing a book with Mary Lou Rasmussen, Louisa Allen and Rebecca Williamson, based on an empirical study of pregnancy, birth and the parenting of newborns during the 2019-20 bushfires and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tanya Zivkovic
Tanya Zivkovic is a social anthropologist and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide. Tanya’s research focuses on death, dying and end of life decision making; organ donation and transplantation; and food, fatness and obesity. She examines diverse cultural sensibilities, grammars, and enactments of care, and is interested in their productive potential to enable more relational and ethically responsive ways of living and dying.
Caroline Alcorso
Caroline is a founding Director of Purpose at Work, a company which advises social care sector organisations on work organisation based on empowered work teams. Previously at National Disability Services, she developed workforce policy and programs and managed national projects to build a sustainable workforce for the NDIS. Caroline has a Master of Arts from Cambridge University, England. Her PhD in Economics at the University of Sydney explored the mechanisms through which gender and ethnic background caused persistent divisions in Australia’s labour market. She is a Research Affiliate, Centre for Disability Research and Policy School of Health Studies, University of Sydney and is undertaking a Master of Sustainability.
Kate Cullity
Kate is a founding director of TCL (Taylor Cullity Lethlean) and is a nationally and internationally recognised, published and awarded landscape architect, urban designer and artist, with particular skills in the design of public realm landscapes, public and private gardens and public art. Along with a background in botany and her strong personal interest in horticulture she has been involved in the planting design of sites throughout Australia. Her PhD reflected on 25 years of TCL’s practice, as well as her interest in beauty, aesthetics and care and how these qualities can be aligned with creating and appreciating resilient cultural, social and environmental landscapes.
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Annapurna Nori
Annapurna is public health physician and scholar who has extensive experience working in Aboriginal Primary Care. Her current PhD explores how older Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri women provide, understand and receive care across all avenues of life. Annapurna is recognised for her commitment to improving health service delivery for the Aboriginal communities she works with. She brings a strong clinical, academic, and public health perspective to her work, and has been at the forefront of working with Aboriginal communities to provide information about COVID-19 and vaccines.
Jacqueline Millner
Jacqueline is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at La Trobe University. She has published widely on contemporary Australian and international art in key anthologies, journals and catalogues of national and international galleries and museums. Her recent books include Contemporary Art and Feminism (Routledge, 2022 with Catriona Moore) and Care Ethics and Art (Routledge, 2022, co-edited with Gretchen Coombs). She has curated major multi-venue exhibitions and public programs including Curating Feminism (2014), Future Feminist Archive (2015), Femflix (2016), and received several prestigious research grants and residencies. She co-convenes the research cluster Contemporary Art and Feminism and is currently leading the research project Care: Feminism, Art, Ethics in the Age of Neoliberalism (2018-2022).
Elle Freak
Elle Freak is Associate Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Gallery of South Australia. She previously worked at the Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art. After completing a fine arts degree at the University of South Australia, Elle obtained a Masters in Curatorial and Museum Studies from the University of Adelaide. Elle has contributed to a range of exhibitions and publications on Australian art, often with the aim of bringing forward forgotten and overlooked names and histories. She recently curated the exhibition Dušan and Voitre Marek: Surrealists at sea (2021) and authored the accompanying publication. Elle is currently researching the role of Australian women artists working in the international avant-garde, between 1890 and 1940.
further resources
Chris Beasley
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Beasley, C. and C. Bacchi. (2007). ‘Envisaging a New Politics for an Ethical Future: Beyond trust, care and generosity towards an Ethic of Social Flesh’, Feminist Theory, 8(3), December: 279-298. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464700107082366
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Beasley, C. (2017). ‘Beyond Care and vocabularies of altruism?: Envisaging an alternative politics attentive to sexuality and older people’, in R. Harding, R. Fletcher and C. Beasley eds, Revaluing Care in Theory, Law & Policy: Cycles and Connections, Routledge, Oxfordshire, UK: 233-249.
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Sophie Chao
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Chao, Sophie. (2022). “Multispecies Mourning: Grieving as Resistance on the West Papuan Oil Palm Frontier.” Cultural Studies. 1–27. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09502386.2022.2052920.
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Chao, Sophie, and Dion Enari. (2021). “Decolonising Climate Change: A Call for Beyond-Human Imaginaries and Knowledge Generation.” eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics 20(2): 32–54. https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.20.2.2021.3796
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Megan Warin
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Warin, M., Keaney, J., Kowal, E., & Byrne, H. (2022). Circuits of Time: Enacting Postgenomics in Indigenous Australia. Body and Society, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1357034X211070041
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Zizzo, G., Warin, M., Zivkovic, T., & Maher, J. (2021). Productive exposures: Vulnerability as a parallel practice of care in ethnographic and community spaces.. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 32(2), 150-165. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/taja.12404
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Prudence Black
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Van den Broek, D., Black, P., & Nicki. (2021). Doing Double Time: Women, Incarceration and Employment Discrimination. Work, Employment and Society, 35(5), 968-978. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0950017021995662
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Black, P. (2019). Corrections. Cultural Studies Review, 25(2), 211-213. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i2.6900
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Blanche Verlie
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Verlie, Blanche. (2021). Learning to Live with Climate Change: Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment, Emotion and Education. London: Routledge. (read the book here - watch the book launch video here)
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Verlie, Blanche, Emily Clark, Tamara Jarrett, and Emma Supriyono. (2020). Educators’ experiences and strategies for responding to ecological distress. Australian Journal of Environmental Education 37(2), 132-146. doi:10.1017/aee.2020.34.
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Katie Barclay
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Barclay, Katie. (2019). ‘Love, Care and the Illegitimate Child in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 29, 105-25. doi: 10.1017/S0080440119000057.
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Barclay, Katie. (2021). Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Danielle Abbott
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Possibility Thinking, https://omny.fm/shows/lifes-lottery/episode-2-possibility-thinking
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Love meets Power, https://tacsi.org.au/journal/when-love-meets-power/
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Narelle Warren
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Warren N. & Addison C. (2020). 'Post-cure'. Medicine Anthropology Theory, vol. 7, no. 2:, Post-cure | Medicine Anthropology Theory (medanthrotheory.org)
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Warren N. & Sakellariou D. (2020). 'Neurodegeneration and the intersubjectivities of care'. Medical Anthropology, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 1-15; Full article: Neurodegeneration and the Intersubjectivities of Care (tandfonline.com)
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Rob Cover
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Cover, Rob (2022). Digital hostility: Contemporary crisis, disrupted belonging and self-care practices. Media International Australia. ONLINE FIRST. DOI: 10.1177/1329878X221088048.
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Cover, Rob (2021). Identity in the disrupted time of COVID-19: Performativity, crisis, mobility and ethics. Social Sciences & Humanities Open 4(1). DOI: 10.1016/j.ssaho.2021.100175.
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Hi'ilei Hobart
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Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, and Tamara Kneese. (2020). Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times. Social Text 38 (1 (142)): 1–16. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971067
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Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart. (2019). At Home on the Mauna: Ecological Violence and Fantasies of Terra Nullius on Maunakea’s Summit. Native American and Indigenous Studies 6(2), 30-50. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/755891.
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JaneMaree Maher
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Maher, J., Fitz-Gibbon, K., Meyer, S., Roberts, S., & Pfitzner, N. (2020). Mothering through and in violence: discourses of the ‘good mother’. Sociology 55(4): 659-676. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038038520967262.
Maher, J. (2009). ‘Accumulated time, accumulating value: mothers beyond the conflicting temporalities of caring and work’, Time & Society 18(2): 231-245. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0961463X08099950.
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Celia Roberts
Roberts, C., Mackenzie, A and Mort, M. 2019. Living Data: Making sense of health biosensing, Bristol: Bristol University Press.
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Roberts, C and McWade, B. 2021. Messengers of Stress: Towards a cortisol sociology. Sociology of Health and Illness 43(4): 895-909.
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Alison Pennington
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Alison Pennington and Megan Wenlock. (2021). Bargaining for pay equity: an NZ-inspired approach to gender equality in Australia, Labour and Industry, 31:3, 255-264, DOI: 10.1080/10301763.2021.1986935.
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Alison Pennington. 2020. Leaving Women Behind: The Real Cost of the COVID Recovery. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). Available here.
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Jana Norman
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Norman, Jana. (2021). ‘An engraved invitation to consider human– earth relations: thinking non-dualism through the mining-based art practice of Lee Harrop’, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 12(1) 77–99 https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2021.01.06
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Norman, Jana. (2021). ‘(Un)fixing our position: Onto-ethical celestial navigation in the Anthropocene (a 10-point guide)’ Sydney Review of Books https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/norman-unfixing-our-position/
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Tanya Zivkovic
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Nguyen, N., Zivkovic, T., de Haas, R. and Faulkner, D., 2021. Problematizing “Planning Ahead”: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Vietnamese Health and Community Workers’ Perspectives on Advance Care Directives. Qualitative Health Research, 31(12), pp.2304-2316.
Zivkovic T, Warin M, Moore V, Ward P and Jones M (2015), ‘The sweetness of care: Biographies, bodies and place’, In Careful Eating: Embodied Entanglements Between Food and Culture, EA Lavis, E J Abbots and L Attala (eds.) Ashgate: Surrey UK.
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Caroline Alcorso
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The National Workforce Capability Framework and the NDIS National Workforce Plan - inspiration and groundhog day?
Article for Pro-Bono News, online community sector newsletter.
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More Autonomy at Work: Contemporary Experiences in the Australian Disability Sector.
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compiled workshop resources: click here
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