Dear Colleagues,

With this email we are finally launching the Images of Care Collective. It is intended to be a space curated for, and by, anthropologists, image-makers, healthcare practitioners and anyone else with an interest for or an experience with matters of care and its entanglements with imagination, images and technologies of vision. A dialogue that can responsibly hint at an emergent future scenario of human and more-than-human care.

Moving beyond oversimplifying distinctions between researchers and practitioners as well as between visual and text-based work, we aim to bring together everyone who is eager to experiment with manifold ways in which visual approaches, methods and techniques can help reimagine and responsibly intervene in current relations of (more-than-human) care. Acknowledging the productivity of care as an “unstable concept” (Buch 2015) and united around Hal Fosters definition of visual culture as a terrain characterized by dialogues between biology, culture and politics (“how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein”) we hope to provide a platform for a collective interrogation of visual assumptions - tacit or explicit- that shape manifold ways in which we craft the stories of illness and other forms of suffering as well as of healing, caregiving, care-receiving, death and grief.

126 researchers, artists, journal editors and practitioners have responded to our first call to join the Images of Care Collective. We are in awe not only of this enormous response but also of the amazing projects run by those who have decided to subscribe to the mailing list. Following up on that first response we invite all members of the list to introduce themselves and their work on and through the list so that we can get to know each other and inaugurate what promises to be a very exciting and impactful exchange.

What follows below are the proposals on how else you can contribute to the thriving of this Collective:

Join the Collective’s Working Team

We are currently looking for website curators and media coordinators who will help us run the collective. If you would like to help us build the website (including the repository of the Collective’s members), set up and run Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram account, or if you have other ideas on how you can join our curatorial efforts, please let us know (our e-mails are below). We invite everyone regardless of their degree of expertise!

Living Archive

To kick off with the initiative, we have created a reference list of visual essays (ethnographic films and other visual formats) that engage with questions of care and related topics. The link to the list is here: https://www.zotero.org/groups/5340474/caring_visions_collective

Please help us shape this living archive by adding other related works. To add the new items, please contact the Living Archive Curator, Martina Laganà (laganamartina(at)gmail.com)!

Webinar series on Images, Ageing and Care

Join us for the monthly webinar series organized by the Images of Care Collective together with AAGE, AgeNet and VANEASA. Last week we have hosted a wonderful webinar by Inge Daniels. Please stay tuned for the next webinars in the line: with Roger Canals in February, Erica Monde in March, Esca van Blarikom in April and Jon Wagner in May. For details and dates check here .

Other news:

Gestures of Care at Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel (MEN)

The Images of Care Collective has been invited to help prepare the section on the invisibility of unpaid care work. It is now available to visitors at the Ethnography Museum of Neuchâtel (MEN), Switzerland, as a part of the temporary exhibition Cargo Cults Unlimited (on until December 31.2024). The section has been inspired by the ethnographic stories contributed by Jason Danely, Harsha Menon, Motohide Miyahara, Peggy Perkinson, Matthew Lariviere, Cristina Douglas, Mike Poltorak, Nicoletta Isaar, Sophie Wagner, Martina Laganà, Paolo Favero and Barbara Pieta. Thank you to all the contributors for sharing their work!

Forthcoming Publication

At the end of this year we will open the call for papers for the publication on the topic of visuality and care. Please stay tuned!

Looking forward to hearing from you, Barbara Pieta, Martina Laganà and Paolo Favero (Images of Care Collective)

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