Care has been organized out of politics in western enlightenment traditions. Neither liberalism nor socialism in their traditional 19th and 20th-century forms have understood care as important parts of public life. Indeed, in both traditions when care is thought of at all, it is thought to properly be undertaken off the public stage, largely out of the public eye, an element of life that is alongside and often beneath the abstract principles and interest-based economic motives that are the proper province of public life. The affect, labor, necessity, and genius of care, which is wholly responsible for the maintenance of all life as well as the basis for any possible sociality which may lead to society or politics, is obscured from view – constructed as private, emotional, and apolitical. In this talk we explore care as a basis for political thought and action, particularly as a practice of worldmaking. 

About the Speaker

Deva R. Woodly is a professor of political science at Brown University. She is the author of the award-winning book Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements and The Politics of Common Sense. She has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton & the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. Her research spans from the study of social movements to race and imagination, & political understandings of economics. Her newest work is on the politics of futurity — particularly what it means to take the concept of political worldbuilding seriously in the 21st century.