Affects, Age(ing) and Care

Care is never emotionally neutral. It is threaded through with love, compassion, devotion, and solidarity, but also with grief, resentment, guilt, shame, disgust, and exhaustion. These emotions circulate unevenly between all the human and non-human participants of care arrangements: between older and younger care recipients, adult and minor family carers and friends, professional care workers, pets, robots, spaces, technologies, documents, and all
artefacts that offer comfort, trigger memory, mediate loss and require to be cared about and
cared for.
Drawing on traditions spanning the sociology of emotions, affect theory, feminist ethics of care, and life course approaches around linked lives and linked transitions, this session invites contributions that interrogate the affective texture of care relationships across the life course — their tenderness and their violence, their dynamics of reciprocity and dependency, their potential to reinforce powerful hierarchies and their chance to transform them, their intimacy and their estrangement.
The contributions may explore various forms of care, e.g. childcare or care for the elderly, informal or professional care, caring for friends or self-care, caring about objects, or caring for the world in which we live. We are particularly interested in work that refuses to romanticise or demonize care, attending instead to its ambivalences, its coercions, and the structural and emotional inequalities of gender, class, race, and disability that determine
whose feelings count and whose go unrecognised. Empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions are equally welcome.