2019 — Lecture

What is Care at Planetary Dimensions?

Patricia Reed

Climate Care

Care can no longer be exclusively figured at an intimate scale of interpersonal relations when it concerns the life and livability for over 7 billion humans – not to mention the necessary expansion of care to account for non-humans and the biospheric conditions that support and embed life. In this way, care is fully intertwined with epistemological projects (understood in the broadest sense possible), since we cannot adequately care without producing ‘better accounts of reality’ that guide us on how to care.

Taking up the notion of ‘care’ from the perspective of nested scales of co-existence and drawing from feminist epistemologies, this talk asserts that learning to care in this expanded way necessitates new frames of spatial, ethical, and representational reference that transform the concept of what ‘location’ or a ‘site’ even is as a way to situate ‘care’ at the scale of the unfamiliar and impersonal. The question of care today ultimately concerns learning how to practice it from smallworlds nested within a big-world continuum, where local-global relationships can, if not must, become more readily accessible to thought.