BOOK | Care in Conflict: Artistic Reflections on Broken Worlds / Words

Edited by Elpida Karaba, Valia Papastamou, Marianna Stefanitsi, Ioanna Zouli

Published by University of Thessaly Press, 2025

ISBN: 978-960-9439-98-5

This publication seeks a rapture with the way we speak, taking language-as-care as the starting point for a reflection on what could critically resist the emergence nowadays of “care” both as a buzzword in the contemporary cultural scene and as an, often aestheticised, representation in various artistic and theoretical contexts. 

The Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices commissioned texts from Gigi Argyropoulou, Ethel Baraona Pohl and Lisa Maillard, Elke Krasny and Suzana Milevska who, in the context of this publication, strive to re-read care and its discontents and clarify antagonistic understandings and significations of care. They aim to better understand the fundamental role of care in the contradictions of social cohesion and social emancipation while addressing issues such as the Global South, care and curating, feminism, situated knowledge and affect. Informed by and based on a feminist perspective, they try to differentiate and raise consciousness on how these exact values are extracted by the globalised market to be invested in the rally of profit. As an epilogue, bell hooks’ “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” which has been included in its Greek translation (“Γλώσσα: Διδάσκοντας νέους κόσμους/Διδάσκοντας νέες λέξεις”), urges us to embrace new words as pathways to new worlds, as both a critical reflection and a heartfelt call to action, opening up possibilities for reimagining collective futures through language and care and underlying the understanding of our work as part of critical pedagogies.

The publication also includes a feminist index that operates as more than just a cataloguing or referencing system; it is a dynamic practice that brings to light otherwise peripheral or ec-centric positions, pathways, relationships, and interconnections of the partners of the Care Ecologies programme: The Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices, Mamidakis Foundation, State of Concept, Idensitat and WHW/What, how & for whom. 

As the double-faceted care (both radical and capitalized) tricks us, it is imperative to think about care ecologies, power relations and the cultural and geopolitical hegemonies as these are revealed by language and to take care of these ecologies in order to speak differently.

The publication has been realised as part of the Care Ecologies project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Program and the European Union. 

You can download the book as a pdf, here.