Narratives of Care
Konferenz
Hybrid Symposium (Melbourne, Australia; Online)
Narratives of Care
Hybrid Symposium – 20–21 November 2025
Melbourne Australia; Online
**Please send abstracts to john.taylor@latrobe.edu.au (cc. tarryn.phillips@latrobe.edu.au)**
In recent years, care has received considerable attention both within academia and in the public sphere. On one hand, care has emerged as a contemporary buzzword and fuzzword (Cornwall 2007) within widely circulated popular discourses where it is often suffused with moral values and narrow ideals of personhood. At the same time, care, carework, and care practices represent contested sites and spaces of policy intervention, regulation, and institutional management. Yet, as has been noted, alongside such trends we may also identify systemic and pervasive cultures of carelessness, both banal and destructive, that obscure, silence, and render invisible the logics, patterns, and constructions that inform practices and narratives of care (Chatzidakas et al, 2020). While a proliferation of important recent scholarship has shed light on the pragmatics and technologies of care in diverse settings (Mol 2008, Park and Fitzgerald 2011, Seo 2020), less attention has been paid to the narratives that underpin them, or to those narratives and counter-narratives that respond to divergent ethos and ethics of care.
As Arendt (1958) noted, attention to storytelling, narrative and dialogue can be a critical tool for understanding power relationships and contested perspectives. By tracing how care is storied in public discourse, policy documents, media and artistic representations, cultural texts, archives, or everyday conversations, we uncover the logics and imaginaries that shape care practices and allow them to gain traction or lose ground. Narratives of care reveal the ethical commitments, creativity, and ideological frameworks that enable care, as well as the mediums, conventions, and genres through which care finds expression. Care can be conveyed through mythic tales, mundane descriptions, well-worn cliches, bureaucratic codes, unspoken stories, enduring truths or persistent lies, memory work, aspirational political declarations, or heroic sagas of human redemption. Narratives are not merely descriptive; they weave meaning into care events, actively configuring how care is understood, distributed, and valued (Phillips et al2024). Narratives can be reconstituted or repurposed, lost and found (McGranahan 2010, Roberts 2024). Their power is in “authorizing, founding, and setting in place ways of experiencing the world” (Cruickshank 2000: 1). Narratives legitimise practices of solidarity and responsibility, while also naturalising hierarchies and exclusions (Bell 2020, Cook and Trundle 2020, Mulligan 2014). Understanding narratives of care, therefore, provides a critical lens for exploring how care practices are enabled, resisted, or reimagined.
The Narratives of Care symposium and associated edited volume recognise the important contribution of narrative to interrogating the politics and practices of care. This interdisciplinary symposium and edited volume will bring together researchers who approach care narratives and narratives of care from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives, including: sociology; politics; anthropology; linguistics; history; Indigenous studies; literary and film studies; philosophy; religious studies; development studies; and gender, sexuality and diversity studies. We welcome paper proposals on topics that centre the role of narrative not as abstract representation, but as threaded into the enactment of care. In particular, we seek proposals that address:
• The role of moral economy in narratives of care
• The role of religion and spirituality in the construction of narratives of care
• Crafting care and methods, including dialogical narratives of cares, the incorporation of polyphonic voices, decentring authority, and voice in narratives of care.
• Non-language-based narratives of care
• The politics of storytelling and narrative in relation to care, including the politics of cruelty and cynicism as well as of care and trust
• More-than-human narratives of care
• The role of institutions, risk, and regulation in narratives of care
• Silences, omissions, and oversights in the articulation of narratives of care
• Temporality, linearity, and logic or illogic in narratives of care
Convenors:
Associate Professor Timothy Jones (t.jones@latrobe.edu.au)
Dr. Natalie Araújo (n.araujo@latrobe.edu.au)
Associate Professor Tarryn Phillips (tarryn.phillips@latrobe.edu.au
Associate Professor John Taylor (john.taylor@latrobe.edu.au)
Dr Catherine Trundle (c.trundle@latrobe.edu.au)
Submission Guidelines
Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be submitted via email to the convenors by 19 September 2025. Symposium papers should be 2000–3000 words (20-minute papers). The symposium will be convened in hybrid format online and at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Following the symposium, participants may be invited to contribute to an edited volume. Please contact the convenors with any questions.
REFERENCES
Bell, L. A. (2020). Storytelling for social justice: connecting narrative and the arts in antiracist teaching. Routledge.
Benjamin, W. (1969). The Storyteller. In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken.
Chatzidakis, A., Hakim, J., Litter, J., Rottenberg, C., & Care Collective. (2020). The care manifesto: The politics of interdependence. Verso Books.
Cornwall, A. (2007). Buzzwords and fuzzwords: deconstructing development discourse. Development in Practice, 17(4–5), 471–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614520701469302
Cook, J., & Trundle, C. (2020). Unsettled care: Temporality, subjectivity, and the uneasy ethics of care. Anthropology and Humanism, 45(2), 178–183.
Cruikshank, J. (2000). The social life of stories: Narrative and knowledge in the Yukon Territory. UBC Press.
McGranahan, C. (2010). Narrative dispossession: Tibet and the gendered logics of historical possibility. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(4), 768–797.
Mol, A. (2008) The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London, UK: Routledge.
Mulligan, J. (2014) Unmanageable Care: An Ethnography of Health Care Privatization in Puerto Rico. New York: New York University Press.
Park, J., and R. P. Fitzgerald (2011) Biotechnologies of Care. In Blackwell’s Companion to Medical Anthropology, edited by Merrill Singer, and Pamela Erickson, pp. 425–442. Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell.
Phillips, T., Araújo, N., Jones, T. W., & Taylor, J. (2024). Interrogating ‘wellbeing’ through a narrative frame. In Narratives of wellbeing (pp. 1–15). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Roberts. M. K. (2024) Care as survival and resistance for precarious lives. Feminist Anthropology 5: 284–292
Seo, B. K. (2020) Eliciting Care: Health and Power in Northern Thailand. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
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