CALL FOR PAPERS 

Mutations and Permutations of Care

Graduate Student Conference

Hybrid modality

Hosted By: Graduate students of French and Francophone World Studies

Department of French & Italian, The University of Iowa

Conference Dates: Friday, April 4 through Saturday, April 5, 2025

Location: University of Iowa campus (Iowa City, Iowa) and on Zoom

Abstracts Due: Sunday, December 15, 2024

Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) posits an “ethics of care” built on relationships and in contrast to “the formal logic of fairness” (73). Since this book’s publication, the notion of “care” has been applied to teaching, literature, visual arts, museology, film, performance studies, and environmental studies. The “care turn” seems to be the natural outgrowth and potential counterpoint of trauma studies — the “trauma turn” — as the focus shifts toward healing. We, the graduate students in French and Francophone World Studies at the University of Iowa, have developed an interest in this subject. In the spirit of care and fostering community, we encourage fellow graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in the Humanities to share their research in this hybrid, interdisciplinary conference.

In this context, we ponder the following questions: what does care look like? What about the absence of care, or un-care? How could care be incorporated into currently un-caring environments and how would care change them? Who cares and why? What are the dynamics between individual care and communal care? How has care been performed in the past and how is it performed in the present? How does the current “care turn” intersect with and diverge from the previous “trauma turn”? How can we teach care? Should we teach care?

As you consider these questions, we invite submissions for individual paper presentations (15 minutes), panel presentations (3-4 presenters), and lightning presentations (5 minutes).  All presentations will be conducted in English, although source material may derive from any language.

Please send a Word or PDF document including contact information, university affiliation, a biography (max. 150 words), along with the presentation title, format, modality, and abstract (max. 300 words) to ffwsgrads-conf@uiowa.edu by December 15, 2024. You will receive a confirmation email upon receipt of your materials. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 15, 2025. Please direct any questions to ffwsgrads-conf@uiowa.edu.

Topics include but are not limited to: 

• Intergenerational responsibility 
• Post/de/colonial approaches to care
• Intersecting Post/de/colonial studies and care studies
• Relationality
• Vulnerability
• Precarity
• Charity
• Ethics of care
• Pedagogies of care
• (Un)Care and (un)kindness in the academy
• Carefluencers
• Digital humanities
• Self-care
• Environmental care / ecopoetics
• Medical humanities 
• COVID-19 / pandemics / disease / degeneration
• Grief / loss
• Healing
• Trauma
• Gender and sexuality
• Inclusion / exclusion
• Care throughout history
• Care in literature, theatre, film, music, and/or art
• Care, art, and activism 
• Translating “care”
• Any engagement with the suggested bibliography

Suggested Bibliography

Brugère, Fabienne. L'éthique du care. Presses universitaires de France, 2011. 

Downing, Lisa. Selfish Women. Routledge, 2019.

Gefen, Alexandre. Réparer le monde: La littérature française face au XXIème siècle. Éditions Corti, 2017.

Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard UP, 1982.

———. Joining the Resistance. Polity, 2011.

Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford UP, 2006. 

Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Tamara Kneese. “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times.” Social Text, vol. 38, no. 1 (142), March 2020, pp. 1–16.

Molinier, Pascale. Le travail du care. La Dispute, 2013.

Nakano Glenn, Evelyn. Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America. Harvard UP, 2012.

Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. University of California Press, 1984. 

Paris, Myriam. Nous qui versons la vie goutte à goutte: féminismes, économie reproductive et pouvoir colonial à la Réunion. Paris: Dalloz, 2020. 

Thornber, Karen. Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care. Brill, 2020.

Tronto, Joan. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge, 1993.

Wyatt, Janan P. Wyatt and Giffy G. Ampadu. “Reclaiming Self-care: Self-care as a Social Justice Tool for Black Wellness.” Community Mental Health Journal, vol. 58, no. 2, 2022, pp. 213–221.

Image generated using OpenArt