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Past conferences:
January 2025, Care, Aesthetics, and Repair
Local organizers: Louis van den Hengel and Jake Smit (University of Humanistic Studies).
The third CERC conference brought together care ethicists and scholars; artists, designers, and makers; artistic researchers; performers and philosophers; educators; policymakers; and others to explore a fundamental question: What did it mean to care? The on-site conference featured plenary lectures, performances, artworks, a special roundtable on care ethics and care aesthetics, as well as paper presentations and artistic contributions from approximately 130 scholars and artists on the theme of “Care, Aesthetics, and Repair.” In addition to the on-site conference, two online days with presentations by more than one hundred additional scholars were held across three different time zones on January 30-31, 2025. Click here for the conference website with an overview of contributors and here for a visual impression.
May 3rd – May 7, 2021. Decentering ethics: Challenging privileges, building solidarities. Keynote speakers: Vrinda Dalmiya (University of Hawaii) and Sandra Laugier (Université Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne), as well as a Special Panel in honor of Professor Joan Tronto. University of Ottawa, Ontario (Canada).
Local organizers: Sophie Bourgault (University of Ottawa) and Fiona Robinson (Carleton University).
The Care Ethics Research Conference was held from May 3rd to May 7th, 2021. The conference moved to a fully online format, with concurrent panels using Zoom.
Care ethics first emerged as an attempt to ‘decenter’ ethics; feminist philosophers like Carol Gilligan argued that women’s moral experiences were not reflected in the dominant, masculinist approaches to ethics, which were centered on a rational, disembodied, atomistic moral subject, able to self-legislate or engage in moral calculus to determine principles of right action. Care ethics challenged this model by positing ethics as relational, contextualized, embodied and realized through practices, rather than principles. Over the past decades, many care ethics scholars have sought to further this project by considering care politically, in relation to the various intersecting hierarchies of power and privilege that inhere in the context of modernity. At this time of political and ecological crisis, there is an even more urgent demand to reflect on this project of decentering ethics and to ask what further work there is to be done. To what extent has care ethics been (un)successful in decentering ethics, challenging privilege and building solidarities? How can ethics – and care ethics in particular – address questions of race, indigeneity, class and gender? How can a care ethics approach help us to reflect on the question of privilege – of moral subjects and of moral/political theorists – while also creating spaces to build solidarities?
CERC 2020 organizing & scientific committees: Sophie Bourgault, Monique Lanoix, Stéphanie Mayer, Inge van Nistelrooij, Fiona Robinson, Joan Tronto, Merel Visse
September 27 & 28, 2018: Inaugural CERC Conference, Portland, Oregon, USA on Care Ethics and Precarity
The Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC) is a worldwide, interdisciplinary community committed to the robust exploration and advancement of care ethics. Precarity is a rich and widely contested term that can describe a variety of oppressive circumstances. The first-ever CERC conference was hosted by Portland State University. We were honored to have Eva Feder Kittay as the opening keynote speaker at the conference, and Fiona Robinson delivered the closing keynote address. Here you can read Martin Robb’s blog about his experiences during the conference.
Keynote Speaker Eva Feder Kittay
She recently retired as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University/SUNY; a Senior Fellow of the Stony Brook Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics, and an Affiliate of the Women’s Studies Program. Her book Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (Routledge, 1999) has received international attention and has been translated into Japanese and Italian.
Keynote Speaker Fiona Robinson
We were pleased that Fiona Robinson delivered the closing keynote address a the conference.
Fiona Robinson is Professor of Political Science specializing in International Relations and Political Theory and the author of The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security (Temple University Press, 2011), Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory and International Relations (Westview Press, 1999), and co-editor, with Rianne Mahon, of Feminist Ethics and Social Politics: Towards a New Global Political Economy of Care (University of British Columbia Press, 2011). Her book The Ethics of Care won the University of Southern California’s J. Ann Tickner Book Prize in 2014.
The conference chair was Professor Maurice Hamington
Care Ethics Research Consortium 