Founded in the mid-2010s by Carlo Leget of the University of Humanistic Studies (the only university with a graduate program of study in care ethics) and pioneering care political theorist Joan Tronto, the Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC) is a loose-knit collaboration of international care thinkers. The organization was intended as a clearing house of care scholarship. Its primary project is to sponsor an international conference every two years—at least, that was the envisioned schedule. The first conference was held in 2018 at Portland State University in Oregon, USA, with a theme of Care and Precarity. Keynote speakers were Eva Feder Kittay and Fiona Robinson. The pandemic moved the next meeting to 2021, and it was hosted online and sponsored by the University of Ottawa and Carleton University with a theme of Decentering ethics: Challenging privileges, building solidarities. Keynote speakers were Vrinda Dalmiya and Sandra Laugier.

In January of 2025, the third international CERC conference was held outside Utrecht in the Netherlands and sponsored by the University of Humanistic Studies. The theme of this year’s conference was Care Aesthetics and Repair. There has been a definite aesthetic turn in care theory over the past several years, led by James Thompson, Professor of Applied and Social Theatre at the University of Manchester, whose most recent book is Care Aesthetics: For Artful Care and Careful Art (Routledge, 2023). Thompson will edit the forthcoming Routledge book series on care aesthetics. A care aesthetic is framed as integrating political and ethical concerns in a sensitivity to the sensual, embodied, and emotive aspects of care practices. Care theory is not turning away from its political character but instead recalling the roots of care in the body.

CERC 2025 was organized by Louis van den Hengel, Associate Professor of Care Ethics & the Arts at the University of Humanistic Studies. The conference featured theorists, practitioners, and artists. Instead of keynote addresses, there were many plenary presentations and performances, which included film, dance, artistic works, and spoken word. These are the featured plenaries: “Callisthenics: Stories of Support, Aversion, and Love” by performance artists Paloma Bouhana, Henny Dörr, and Philippine Hoegen was a plenary performance piece about being untrained, unprepared, and unwilling for caregiving and receiving. “Living Off Landscape: Re-connecting with Vitality in Care” is a plenary presentation by care scholar and artist Merel Visse that framed landscape as not seeing or knowing what is seen but living and experiencing it. Visse’s presentation “aesthetically lived” care by weaving narratives of care with visual, poetic, and analytic encounters through various mediums. The plenary presentation, “Care Aesthetics,” by the aforementioned James Thompson, focused on the concept of care aesthetics and its claim that the practice of care can be understood as embodied, sensory, and craft-like – that is, for its aesthetics. Philosopher and dancer Christine Leroy offered a plenary titled “Gravity and Care” that intertwined a formal presentation on the experience of gravity, falling, and supporting/carrying the body with dance movement. Over 200 attendees were enriched by the unique interplay of disciplines demonstrating the artistic and intellectual developments in care theory.

The next CERC conference is scheduled for South Korea in June 2025. If you wish to be on the mailing list for the next CERC Conference, please send an email to Maurice Hamington at maurice4@pdx.edu

Artwork by Nancy Folbre
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