Our Community Gathering on Performing Care starts on May 7! Please visit this page for a full listing of events that include performances, meditations, roundtables, visits to the Hood Museum, and a film screening. In these fraught times, please join us for reflections on promiscuous care as artistic and intellectual sustenance for what lies ahead . . .
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What could we learn if we cared to learn?
—Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Care as a concept has become promiscuous, as seen in an explosion of special issues, anthologies, and conferences across the humanities and interdisciplinary fields. Through the combination of 1) an opening Teach-In, 2) weekly Critical Reflections, and 3) a closing Community Gathering, the Promiscuous Care and Performance Institute seeks to explore care and carework in the contexts of theatre and performance through the lenses of Black feminist thought, disability studies, queer theory, and transnational feminism as we understand the nascent field of critical care studies as located at the nexus of these fields. We borrow from The Care Collective's call for a “new ethics of 'promiscuous care' that would enable us to multiply the numbers of people we can care for, about and with, thus permitting us to experiment with the ways that we care.” As we explore the potential of performance to embody these ethics and capacities, we seek to honor and lift up the collective wisdom of scholars, artists, and cultural workers who have excavated the nuances and complexities of care and carework through an intersectional and transnational perspective. Their profound insights inform and guide our institute in our considerations of care, access as care, and the geopolitics of care.
As the organizers of the Institute, we're absolutely delighted to collaborate with Alexis Pauline Gumbs as the Senior Fellow as well as Institute Fellows Patrick Anderson, Joshua Chambers-Letson, and Una Chaudhuri and guest artists Josefina Baéz, Katia Tirado, and Barak adé Soleil, not to mention our amazing Dartmouth faculty and student fellows, to embark on what we anticipate will be a journey of deep learning and unlearning.
We also acknowledge that our Institute is sponsored by an endowment-rich college that has profited from the theft of land from the Abenaki people not to mention the enslavement of African people. To ignore these histories would uphold a system of carelessness; instead, we would seek to confront the ruinations of white supremacy and empire. How might that knowledge be folded into our theorizations of care?
Please explore this website if you're interested in taking this journey with us and be in touch!
with solidarity and care,
Misty De Berry, Laura Edmondson, and Analola Santana
Cited: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press, 2020), 55; The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (London: Verso, 2020), 33.
