Caring in Crisis

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Caring in Crisis provides a general assessment of the meaning and place of care in contemporary thought. This course is also an exploration of care in all its different manifestations, as well as its ambivalence through the prism of literature, film and visual arts from the French-speaking world. Students will investigate the complex dynamics contained in the different interpretations of care: caring about, taking care of, caregiving and care receiving. In effect, care has historically and culturally been made invisible, undervalued, and relegated to women and minorities – more generally to economically vulnerable populations – within a capitalist, colonialist and extractivist world economy. By tracing the multiple dynamics of caring along issues of gender, race, class, and ecology, this course asks about the relations of power and structures of inequality the perspective of care reveals.