In the “Thinking with Lauren Berlant,” workshop last week, this keynote explored the proliferation of discourses of care — including self-care, collective care, and radical care — as well as critiques of those discourses, both of which have gained additional momentum and urgency in activist and academic contexts during this time of pandemic.
Taking up Eli Clare’s notion of “grappling with cure,” this talk “grapples with care,” including its use in addressing the mental health crisis in academia and its use by activists, especially queer feminists of colour working for racial, gender, sexual, and disability justice. Drawn from a book in progress, How to Live in A Body: A Survival Guide for Troubled Times, the project emerges from collective work with a Public Feelings writing group, of which Lauren Berlant was a member, and it also “grapples” with Berlant’s critiques of sentimentality, optimism, and other forms of affective politics.
This public keynote is part of “Thinking with Lauren Berlant,” a workshop held in Banff, Alberta from May 19th to 20th, bringing together international, emerging, and established German-studies and adjacent scholars engaging with Berlantian thought from a queer-feminist perspective to discuss the legacy of Berlant’s scholarship in/on/for German studies.
The workshop and the keynotes are made possible with funding from the University of Alberta, the University of British Columbia Vancouver, the University of Maryland College Park, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Kule Institute for Advanced Study. Organized by Simone Pfleger, Hester Baer, Ervin Malakaj, and Carrie Smith.
