Hosted by UCSB Disability Studies Reading/Activist Group

Taken from the coda to a book about the aesthetics and politics of care, this presentation with Columbia University professor of English Rachel Adams will explore the possibilities and perils of extending human care relations to other species, the environment, and non-living matter. It isn’t hard to imagine caring for a beloved dog, a retired horse, a fluffy baby seal, or even a giant redwood. But I wonder how far outward different theoretical models of care extend, and how they are changed when the agent is a flatworm, a mushroom, slime mold, or a robot? Is care itself an anthropocentric concept that always requires imagining the other possessed of human motivations, agency, and emotional depth? And if not, what are the driving motivations involved in such caring activity? I consider a series of artistic and social experiments with extra-human care as I seek to better understand the contours of such an expansion, as well as the place of the human in care networks that include other species and non-human actors.

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