Caring Democracy: Current Topics in the Political Theory of Care

The aim of the conference is to elaborate on Tronto’s invitation to rethink the very substance of democracy from the care perspective. The participants will enjoy the opportunity to discuss a variety of questions opened up by Tronto’s application of care theory to democratic theory. These include (not exclusively):

• To what extent does liberty, equality and justice depend upon caring? 
• How does the distribution of care affect the distribution of social and political power?
• How do gender norms, neoliberal rationality and marketization distort the realities of care and veil the real costs of democracy?
• How does the marketization of care relate to the idea of ‘personal responsibility’ and what are its threats?
• Are the contemporary democracies caring enough? And how could they become more caring?
• How to reopen the closed, game-like political systems to the genuine concerns of citizens?
• How can we conceptualize, from the care perspective, contemporary voters’ loss of trust in the political system and their increasing absence from politics? And how to remedy this political malaise? 
• What happens when ‘the demos’ does not care about care, i.e. if an actual democratic process does not produce the conclusions that are essential to the realization of democracy’s defining values?