Our Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference seeks to encourage critical dialogue on the Politics of Care, examining it both as a survival strategy and as a complex mechanism of power. Care can strengthen communities and promote new relational possibilities, but it can also serve as a governance tool that sustains systems of exclusion, surveillance, and inequality. Our aim is to explore care’s contradictions and potentials, enhancing our understanding and witnessing the development of new coexistence strategies. We advocate interdisciplinary methods for addressing questions of care and relationality, and our program will span different historical periods, languages, and cultures, covering topics such as queer kinship, migration, postcolonial narratives of care, mutual aid, ecological care, disability studies, and the politics of care. The conference promotes seeing our work as an essential socio-cultural practice during challenging times and emphasizes our responsibility for shaping the collective future we desire.
The conference will feature a keynote address by Dr. Jina B. Kim, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature and the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College, author of Care at the End of the World (2025), Duke University Press
Audrey Wilfong
(847) 491-5490
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