Jenny Richards 80% Seminar: Against-ing Outsourced Bodies of Care – Methods for Resistance, Refusal and Inhousing

My thesis examines the problematic implications and effects of outsourced care and care work in Sweden and the UK. Developed through collaborative and collective methods of research with care workers, cultural workers and trade unionists the thesis works towards methods for refusing and resisting outsourcing and instead bringing care ‘back in-house’. Emerging from the research is the concept tool ‘against-ing’, which suggests that to respond to outsourcing is not only by resisting or refusing its exploitative logics, but to institute structural change that expands collective access to care infrastructure which would allow us to reproduce ourselves differently.

This seminar focuses on chapter 4 and 5 of the thesis. Chapter 4, draws on the collective practice of care and cultural workers within Vård och Värde (Care and Value) to analyse the problematics of univocal care produced through an outsourced care system. Chapter 5, reflects on the work of Manual Labours’ The Global Staffroom developed with Sophie hope, to investigate the lack of access to care infrastructure at work and the implications of this on the possibilities of worker organising. Polyphony unfolds through the practices these chapters are based upon as a methodology for the research and as something the thesis argues for – it allows us to understand the problematics of an outsourced care system and care at work, and is a way to reorientate what care means and how it is organised.

I will be joined by three collaborators in a brief presentation of the practices the seminar focuses on, followed by a longer reflection by the invited discussant Dr Lina Džuverović. The seminar will be introduced and moderated by: Lisa Tan - Professor of Fine Art, Konstfack; Helena Mattsson - Professor in History and Theory, KTH School of Architecture; and Dr. Janna Graham - Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London.

Discussant
Dr. Lina Džuverović is an independent curator and Course Leader for the MA Curating and Collections at Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts, London. Previously she was Lecturer in Arts Policy and Management at Birkbeck's Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies where she also co-directed BIRMAC - Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media & Culture Centre. Lina's research focuses on feminist art histories and contemporary art as a site of solidarity and community-building. She founded the Decolonial Feminist Forum at Birkbeck in 2019 and her practice-led research often takes the form of workshops, discussions and collaborative writing within this forum. Since 2019, her research has centered on explorations of gendered divisions of labour within art collectives under the umbrella project And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives - artcollectives.org
/ www.dzuverovic.org

To receive seminar materials in advance, please email me: jenny.richards@konstfack.se