Caregiving as Method

Caregiving as Method Series:
CARE – Friday, September 10, 2021
REPAIR – Friday, September 17, 2021
METHOD – Friday, September 24, 2021

How does domestic caregiving impact scholarly questions, orientations, and methods? What does scholarly caregiving look like? What shape does intellectual society take as it inhabits the domestic spaces of care in a pandemic? These questions animate this workshop, which brings forward theories emerging in the process of profound domestic caregiving by scholars whose architectural historical work has been enriched by their empathy and entanglement with the care of others.

We enfold a range of themes into three panels, each with brief provocations by participants followed by a discussant’s response and moderated dialogue with audience members. We begin by asking how caregiving intersects with social constructs of identity, and how these constructs shape our research questions, understandings of evidence, approaches to authorship, and the format and language of research products. We examine the visibility and invisibility of labor in history writing, considering how to develop an ethos of mentorship and collaboration in order to make intellectual production more horizontal—indeed, how to build networks and entanglement with others in our work. We turn to interrogations specific to the pandemic and an imagined post-pandemic world, thinking about how caregiving during this time has impacted or changed our scholarship and the historical understanding of our topics and subjects of interest, for example, articulating which voices we now give space to and why. Methodologically, we identify to what extent caregiving in our scholarship is a biographical enterprise and to what extent it concerns other (scholarly) subjects. We attempt to theorize how methodologies that have emerged in our own particularistic experiences sit in relation to other pressing issues in architecture or architectural history. Each panel is driven by the query of what “Caregiving as Method” as a specific intertwining would or could make possible, and what concrete or affective outcomes might be meaningful for participants and audience members during and after the session. Participants and respondents will discuss the ways in which intertwined forms of domestic and scholarly caregiving extend futurities as well as historical understanding, and have the potential to shift the values and terms of scholarly life.

This workshop includes the confirmed participants and respondents listed below, and audience members are invited to share their perspectives after each panel and in an open discussion at the end. The workshop is intended to support careers driven by forces other than generally recognized forms of achievement, while also examining the fine grain of collaboration and care that inform scholarship. It aims to drive cultural change in our discipline and support academics living under various signs of difference, who are caregiving within a variety of modes of kinship. At the same time, it makes space to consider how scholarly and domestic caregiving together find a way to extend into social worlds that restrict or oppress. We are interested in profound domestic caregiving in contexts in which it is seen as normative and others in which it is seen as non-normative. Some of the settings we are attentive to include BIPOC parents nursing or homeschooling in a pandemic, immigrants caring for elders at home or elsewhere, queer and trans communities producing care structures within or outside national law, and scholars subjugating individual interest to mutual aid.

Caregiving as Method: Care