Forms of Care: Self, Other, Cosmopolis

Seminar Organizer: Mihaela Czobor-Lupp, Associate Professor of Political Science

How do we think about care and how do we practice care in today’s interconnected and conflicted world? How do our beliefs in the power of human agency to advance justice confront the limits of our modern institutions and practices of caring for ourselves and for others? What implications do these limitations have for our sense of universal justice and a cosmopolitan citizenry? Can we imagine new ways of caring and of being in the world?

Especially in the West, the modern creative impulse to materialize the desire for universal justice has been framed by a social imaginary that emphasizes the detachment of the acting self from the world, from bodily experiences, and from emotional commitments. Moreover, the modern social world of care reveals to us a complex and vexed term that is not only differently defined across cultures and societies, but that is also embedded in gendered practices of labor that are not always just, and that often involves caring as a highly technical and organized form of social control. The unfortunate result is that, instead of encountering those in need of care with an imagination and a spontaneity that answers to their uniqueness and to their specific needs, we tend to see them only as problems to be solved, as bodies to be controlled, and as populations to be organized.

The seminar is framed by the conviction that the modern aspiration for universal justice should not be given up and that the meaning of both universality and care should be problematized and critically reinvented within a different social imaginary. The operation requires taking diversity more into consideration, as well as the effects of power on the different practices of caring. Reflecting this conviction, the central questions that the seminar will ask revolve around the exploration of some of the practices of care at work in modernity. How do modern practices of care have an impact on ourselves, on others, and on the world? How do they shape and give meaning to the ways in which we govern ourselves and others, as well as to the ways in which we represent the world and act in it? How do other definitions and practices of care (non-Western, alternative in modernity or marginal to it) challenge the current ways we see ourselves, others, and the cosmopolis? How do they provide us with the opportunity to enrich the ways we think of and practice care of the self, care for others, and care for the world?

Faculty Fellows

Ken Abrams, Associate Professor of Pyschology, will be exploring forms of care provided to sex offenders as a function of culture. This work is part of his ongoing cross-cultural research on how the Czech Republic and other Western countries afford care to sexual offenders.

William North, Associate Professor of History, is interested in the different discursive means by which early and medieval Christians between the fourth and the twelfth centuries sought to form not merely governors but craftsmen (and some women) of care. He will engage with the genealogy of modern conceptions of care in at time-horizon that extends beyond the modern to explore the ways in which these forms of care can be seen as the heirs to other earlier regimes of care such as the kin group and the church.

Sandra Rousseau, Assistant Professor of French, will write an article tentatively titled: “Show You Care: France’s Memory Politics and the Algerian War” that will examine the intersection of care and memory through an analysis of commemorations of the Algerian war and their implications for the contested body politic of the French Republic.

Maria Vendetti, Assistant Professor of French at St. Olaf College, examines in her work the relationship of forms of care to memory and narrative. She will carry out a comparative study of very recent (ultracontemporain) texts published in France and the United States where connections are established between mid 20th century torture, its resurgence in the late 20th century, and the revisitation of language and tropes of torture in the 21st century, in the wake of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.