The Alternative Care Translations Workshop gathered designers, researchers, philosophers, and artists working at the intersection of care and posthumanism to explore practices, theories, and open questions around how we actually go about negotiating collaborative (or more-than-just-human) determinations of “as well as possible” (Fisher and Tronto 1990:40). Feminist care ethics was a critical lens for grounding the workshop’s activities as well as scaffolding attendants’ reflections not as a stable heuristic, but a context driven and relational tool for both doing and noticing—not necessarily in that order.
Care as a feminist practice is about attending to what, how, and when things get caring attention and come to matter and what, how, and when things don't. It entails a relational understanding and expression of subjects, labors, and temporalities. It is an embodied and ongoing practice which is necessarily particular. So, when we work to understand and express non-anthropocentric alternatives for living in worlds as well as possible, we similarly need methods, capacities, and an ethic which is relational, and non-human centered. The sympathies between a care and posthumanist agenda provide rich foundational and material points of departure for speculating alternative modes of more-than-human care.
As more researchers and designers undertake posthumanist or more-than-human projects these workshops aimed to trouble the enduringly normative ways of engaging with more-than-humans. By leveraging the expertise and emergent experience of individuals working with research artifacts, methods, and aims oriented towards decentering humans and the politics and ethics of care we explored how we might operate and conduct research differently in the face of such sticky normativity.
Participants: Ann Light, Doenja Oogjes, Holly Robins, Tammy Shel, Audrey Desjardins, Anu Reddy, Gabrielle Benabdallah, Tyler Fox, Michael Beach, Neilly Herrera Tan, Cassidy Researcher (psudonym), Armi Behzad, Shana Agid, Cally Gatehouse, Austin Toombs, Alex Taylor, and Ron Wakkary.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813508.
Publications
Key, C., Gatehouse, C., Taylor, N. (2022).
Feminist Care in the Anthropocene: Packing and Unpacking Tensions in Posthumanist HCI. In Proc. DIS'22, New York, ACM Press. *Awarded Best Paper
Feminist Care in the Anthropocene: Packing and Unpacking Tensions in Posthumanist HCI. In Proc. DIS'22, New York, ACM Press. *Awarded Best Paper
Alternative Care Translations Zine