Care Aesthetics and the Arts by Maguire-Rosier, Kate; Polonyi, Réka; Thompson, James;

Short description:

What would happen if we were to understand arts projects through their capacity to care? Care Aesthetics and the Arts offers an exploration of care aesthetics applied to arts projects from diverse contexts.

Long description:

What would happen if we were to understand arts projects through their capacity to care? Care Aesthetics and the Arts offers an exploration of care aesthetics applied to arts projects from diverse contexts.

This collection examines the emerging field of care aesthetics applied to a range of arts practices and projects. Divided thematically into five sections, each chapter examines a range of arts practices or projects through the lens of care aesthetics, exploring how they can be understood and critiqued through this frame. The book surveys the foundations for an artistic exploration of care, discusses arts initiatives for sustaining, repairing and holding space for everyday care, and expands conversations into the ambiguities and contradictions in both theory and practice. The volume includes contributions from diverse fields such as dance, literature, film, music, visual art, and theatre, alongside perspectives from non-conventional artistic settings such as protests, playgrounds, and hospitals, presenting a truly interdisciplinary study.

Ideal for practitioners and students alike, this collection establishes the rich and evolving field of care aesthetics within the arts.

Table of Contents:

Preface by Maurice Hamington

Introduction

Part 1

Starting points

1.     Tentative temporalities: enacting and performing care in a site-responsive arts festival designed for public hospital healthcare workers

2.     Reimagining Humanitarianism: Care Aesthetics, Relational Voice and the Global Politics of Theatre

3.     An Ode to Playgrounds: play, unruliness and care in the art of playgroundology

4.     Caring for Music, What Can We Find? Gentle methods for researching the aesthetics of care in later life settings

Artistic Interlude

Care Anaesthesia – Notes on care and love

Part 2

Retelling

5.     Look at him: A care ethics and aesthetics approach to stillbirth and late termination of pregnancy foetal abnormalities

6.     ‘Crossing the line’: The precarious care aesthetics of access in Australian dance theatre work, Off The Record

7.     This Stuff Matters: curating and caring for the histories and material culture of homelessness

Artistic Interlude

Care Index: Collaborative Movement Practices for Enacting Care

Part 3

Maintaining

8.     ‘The joy, the laughter, the chaos’: care aesthetics as foundational for communicating the work of community arts organisations

9.     What Does a Protest Sound, Feel, and Taste Like? Aesthetics of Care and the Art of Resistance

10.  The Careful Art of Mending (Public) Things: Reflections on the aesthetics of ordinary maintenance

11.  The Aesthetics of Caring for Country

Artistic Interlude

The Rhythm of Our Lives: a poetic autoethnography on navigating queer motherhood in healthcare spaces

Part 4

Negotiating

12.  Crafting Intimacy: Towards a collaborative practice of careful art in the stage and screen industries

13.  Ambient Jam: multisensory improvisation, radical relationships and ‘deep hanging out’: tracing reciprocal care with a differently disabled/abled ensemble

14.  Found Performance: Towards a Musical Methodology of Care

15.  Care aesthetic lessons from an artist’s residency in a Dutch academic research institute

Part 5

Troubling

16.  The Facing Out project: A Case Study

17.  Care Aesthetics and TimeSlips Storytelling in Dialogue: Facilitating More Equitable Sensory Artistry within a Dementia Unit

18.  It matters that you’re here

Postscript: Letter to the editors from Fred and Sophie Dixon