A Greenhouse Research Talk by Ingvil Hellstand, Professor of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Stavanger.
In feminist care ethics (Gilligan 1982; Tronto 1993), vulnerability is understood as a condition of life. In recent years, questions of vulnerability have (re)surfaced with the concept of the Anthropocene, where sustainability and liveability on this planet is brought to the forefront. Inspired by what I see as a (re)turn to thinking-with care in contemporary feminist thinking (Bellacasa 2017; The Care Collective 2020; Chadwick 2022), I suggest that the concept of the Anthropocene lends itself to rethinking care from what is traditionally conceptualised as a two-way relation between a caretaker and a care-giver to messy, unpredictable interdependencies in a more-than-human-world.
Ingvil Hellstand (she/her) is Professor of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies interested in storytelling practices and knowledge production, science fiction and the posthuman. Her research revolves around science fiction as method, welfare technologies and caring futures, and posthuman ethics. For the past four years, she was part of the transdisciplinary research project Caring Futures: developing care ethics for technology-mediated care practices in which she explored the impact of care-robots and other technobodies as care-givers. Hellstrand is a founding member of the international collaborative research platform The Monster Network.