Caring-with the world: Extending caring action beyond human interaction?

Debates on the concept of ‘care’ are taking center stage across an increasing number of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This is not only due to a heightened focus on the societal importance of care-related work practices for securing social cohesion and wellbeing throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition, recent developments of feminist ethics of care promise to situate grand political negotiations of how to conceive of future societies in the everyday care practices of each and every human being. Political philosopher’s Joan Tronto’s notion of a ‘caring democracy’, for instance, posits that the future of democracy is deeply dependent on humanity’s ability to advance ‘caring with’ in daily relations, by producing the trust and solidarity that make it possible for citizens to care for one another irrespective of disagreements and conflicts.
However, the Anthropocene is not only posing challenges to the survival of democracies, but of humanity at large. While technoscientific philosophers alongside pedagogical researchers attempt to further develop care ethics to trouble taken-for-granted notions of ‘nature’ as external to human caring action, psychological theorizing is struggling with integrating such thinking. The session gathers scholars that see a potential in working with the concept of ‘care’ in order to encompass human action’s internal caring relation to non-human forces, but who do so from varying theoretical and empirical points of departure.