CFP: The Politics of Self-Care in an Unjust World (hybrid)

NOTE: Given the difficulties of COVID-19, racial trauma, political turmoil, changes within the FEAST steering committee, and the postponing of the original FEAST conference of 2021, we are asking for re/submissions for the FEAST 2022 conference. Due to a technical issue, the access to the original submission email account has been lost which means that all previous submissions are unrecoverable. Please only send new submissions to the new email address: [email protected]. For priority decisions, please send submissions by July 17th. However, we will be accepting rolling decisions until July 24th. We know that this is an incredible inconvenience to those who have already submitted, but we ask for your grace and confidence to resubmit to this year's conference theme: "The Politics of Self-care in an Unjust World." In the spirit of the theme, the program co-chairs thank you for your and understanding in this situation.

FEAST (Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory) is a professional organization dedicated to promoting feminist ethical perspectives on philosophy, moral and political life, and public policy that centers decolonized, intersectional, and interdisciplinary approaches. Our aim is to further the development and clarification of new understandings of ethical and political concepts and concerns, especially as they arise out of feminist concerns regarding underrepresented and marginalized women — including BIPOC, Third World, disabled, and LGBTQIA — as well as those arising from marginalized identities and marginalized issues.

For the 2022 conference, we offer the following terms as generative areas for reflection for feminist ethics, social theory, and healing practitioners:

Self-care

Self-care is a healthy, restorative, self-respecting, and affirming practice. It is primarily an intentional act of grounding, establishing safety, and building protective boundaries to grow and live a full human life. As Audre Lorde says, these are acts of political warfare. Many depictions and hashtags portray self-care as an individualist act, one that often requires the acquisition of material goods and indulgent services. This requires not only time, but money. Acts of self-care are prompted as luxuries. However, due to the inherent political nature of self-care, it is communal. It is radical. It is self-love. It is social care. Given this, what ethical boundaries should be in place when we engage in self-care practices? How should our cognitive states and epistemic framing towards self-care shift to more fully actualize the political radical nature Lorde has in mind? What sorts of ethical, political, and epistemic questions arise when we practice self-care as a mode of feminist knowledge production and distribution? How do disciplinary demarcations and boundaries direct epistemic attention to “care” in some ways and not others? What are some examples of productive self-care practices that provide means of disruption, intervention, and resistance?

Transformative Justice

Transformative Justice (TJ) is a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm and abuse. At its most basic, it seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence. TJ can be thought of as a way of “making things right,” getting in “right relation,” or creating justice together. Transformative justice responses and interventions (1) do not rely on the state (e.g. police, prisons, the criminal legal system, ICE, foster care system—though some TJ responses do rely on or incorporate social services like counseling); (2) do not reinforce or perpetuate violence such as oppressive norms or vigilantism; and most importantly, (3) actively cultivate the things we know prevent violence such as healing, accountability, resilience, and safety for all involved.

Imagine practices of self and community care that prevent violence, hold perpetrators accountable, and enable possibilities for survivors beyond mere survival. Sustainable practices that do not depend on overwork or fetishize exhaustion. This is one element of abolitionist visioning. These practices heal and care for all kinds of selves, not only individual humans but relationships and relational networks as well.

Communal Healing

How we navigate and negotiate our relations with others seems to evoke questions about healing in more than one sense of the term. As beings who live interdependently and who err, we are sometimes generous with others despite their failings and at other times we ourselves may be received with a generosity that is not deserved. How ought we to think about this sort of communal healing when relations are already fraught due to axes of dominance and oppression? For example, who is afforded “healing” and who is not? In a different vein, as feminists we are often trying to occupy spaces in which we are not welcome and to create possibilities that current regimes relentlessly work against. How can communal healing be an act of resistance to oppression? What does “communal healing” do? And when ought it to be rejected?

The FEAST program committee seeks papers that engage self-care thinking on these and other issues including:

• Overlaps and interactions between ethics, politics, and epistemology
• The materiality of caring for oneself
• Ongoing disagreements in feminist philosophy concerning “care” and “caring for others” including: Trauma-informed healing, Calling out “triggers” / Trigger-culture, Mainstreamed "self-care", the invisibility of BIPOC’s pain/fatigue, the politics of rage, anger, and stress, survivor vs. healing discourse
• Where "early" feminist ethics (i.e., care ethics) has led us and where we should go from here
• Relations (ethical/political/epistemic) among differently non-dominantly situated persons
• Epistemic hurdles, but also epistemic gateways, for thinking self-care beyond the academy (as practitioners) and beyond praxis, as on particular problems, for example: Sexual Harassment and Sexual Violence, Disability/Disabling Institutions and Practices, Colonization, Imperialism, and Globalization, Speaking for, about, and/or with
• Grappling with the ways in which vulnerability and privilege can intertwine
• Dance/Movement
• Platforms collecting racial trauma in academic spaces, i.e., #BlackintheIvory, #indigenousacademia, #whydiasbledpeopledropout
• Work/life balance
• Racial stress and workplace-related trauma
• The materiality of caring for oneself
• Economic accessibility to self-care
• (Re)conceiving conceptions of self-care
• Public/private self-care
• Performative self-care
• Caring for oneself while caring for others
• Co-optation of self-care tactics
• Disability justice and accessibility
• Self-care during a pandemic
• Self-love and boundary setting
• Institutional responsibility and responses to care
• Loneliness and social isolation
• Political activism and social justice work—tuning in and tapping out
• Self-care in non-nuclear familial structures

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

Please send your submission, in one document (as a Word or other text file), to [email protected] by July 24, 2022. In the body of the email message, please include:
1) your full paper, panel or workshop title;
2) your name;
3) your institutional affiliation; and
4) your email address.

NOTE: If you already submitted a proposal prior to July 11, 2022, PLEASE RESUBMIT TO THE NEW EMAIL ADDRESS. Thank you!

All submissions will be anonymously reviewed.

Individual Papers
Please submit an extended abstract (1000–1250 words) and preliminary bibliography for anonymous review. Your document should include: paper title, extended abstract, and bibliography, with no identifying information. The word count (max. 1250 not including bibliography) should appear on the top of the first page of your submission.

Panels
Please clearly mark your submission as a panel submission both in the body of the e-mail and on the submission itself. Your submission should include the panel title and all three extended abstracts and word counts (no more than 1250 words for each paper) in one document.  Each paper within the panel should also have a preliminary bibliography.

Workshops
Keeping the theme of our conference in mind, we are committed to adapting an Un-conference structure and interspersing a range of interpretive forms of presentations, including but not limited to: yoga sessions, mediation sessions, consciousness raising sessions, release, poetry readings, as well as more traditionally formatted workshops, roundtables, and discussions.

This conference has extensive measures in place to ensure it is accessible and welcoming for all potential participants.

For more information, contact Tempest Henning at [email protected]