On June 13th-14th 2019, the binary Nordic STS Conference will be held in Tampere, Finland. Together with colleagues from the University of Gothenburg, Lisa Lindén from CSS is co-organising the session Care in STS – Objects, Transformations and Politics.
It is the largest session at the conference with slots running during both days and with a total of 18 presentations. Andy Yuille (Lancaster University) will give a talk on “Contradictory Cares in Community-led Planning”, and Lisa will give a talk on “Mobilising for Change: Patients’ groups, care and affective tensions”. Li-Wen Shih from the Graduate Institute of Humanities in Medicine at Taipei Medical University and one of CSS’s former PhD students will also be presenting. She will talk about “Matters of care in childbirth”.
Taking up recent years’ discussion on care in STS, the session will approach care as a material and political doing, and as an “affectively charged and selective mode of attention” (Martin et al. 2015: 635). In the process of cherishing some things, care also excludes others. Following up on this, in the session we will think through the possibilities and problems of care as a topic for STS research. What is gained from studying practices as care practices and what is lost? What is made present and what is made absent? When and where is it fruitful to think about science and technology as matters of care?
At the conference, there will be presentations on, just to mention a few examples, tensions between care and control in midwifery practice, caring for the home in the planning of the sustainable city, “data care” and its politics in scientific data management, everyday food practices as multiple relations of care and relations between matters of care and economic matters.
It’s going to be a great session and conference!
If you’re interested, you can find more info about the conference here: https://events.uta.fi/nordicsts2019/
