Jocelyn Olcott
Composting Theory: Ecological Care in Practice 2025-2026
A hands-on workshop series in collaboration with the Duke Campus Farm, “Composting Theory: Ecological Care in Practice” explores ecological care through feminist and posthumanist readings, soil practices, and collective reflection. Sessions are scheduled Saturdays from 10 am to 12 pm ET.
Care and Territory
(Bilingual session / Sesión bilingue)
Join us for the last session in our Working Papers Seminar series! This time featuring two working papers on community, care, and territory in Mexico: one tracing collective care practices across Cerro Tepepolco and the chinampas of Xochimilco, expanding care beyond the human to encompass land, water, and biological diversity, and another examining how anarcho-magonista women sustained the Mexican Revolution through emotional labor and mutual aid. Response by Holly Worthen (Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca)
️ Friday, April 24, 2026
⏰12:00-2:00 PM (EDT)
Online (Zoom – Translated captioning available)
Registration free but required
Ancestral Care
Join our second-to-last Working Papers Seminar with Evan Auguste (CUNY) and Nadège Robertson (Foundation Espoir) as we explore Lakou Tanama — healing circles rooted in African and Taino worldviews that invoke ancestral memory and communal care to support Haitian communities amid crisis, reclaiming political agency and challenging narratives that pathologize Haitian identity. Comments by Deborah Jenson (Duke University).
️ Friday, April 17, 2026
⏰12:00-1:15 PM (EDT)
Online (Zoom – Translated captioning available)
Registration free but required
Cuidados Comunitarios
(Bilingual session / Sesión bilingue)
Join us to learn about community care practices as situated responses to gender-based violence and urban precarity in León, Guanajuato, Mexico through research by Marcia Moreno Benítez (ITESO), with a response from Verónica Gago (UBA)
️ Wednesday, April 8, 2026
⏰1:25-2:40 PM (EDT)
Online (Zoom – Translated captioning available)
Registration free but required
Book Conversation with Wendy Harcourt
Join us for a conversation with scholar and RCGE Board Member Wendy Harcourt about her new open-access book Conundrums of Care: Feminist Entanglements in Critical Development Studies. Responses from fellow Board Members Arturo Escobar (UNC), Felwine Sarr (Duke University), and Suzanne Bergeron (University of Michigan).
Wednesday, April 29 / 10:00-11:00AM (EDT) / Online (Zoom – Translated captioning available) / Registration free but required
Healing Care
Join us to learn about the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of touch in Gandhi’s care for the leprous body — and what this reveals about untouchability, stigma, and caregiving — through research by Sumathi Ramaswamy (Duke University), with a response from Harris Solomon (Duke University).
️ Friday, April 3, 2026
⏰12:00-1:30PM (EDT)
Hybrid (Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, C106 / Zoom)
️ Light lunch offered
Registration free but required
Infrastructures of Wellbeing
Another webinar! Join us to learn about the link between geography, gender, and subjective well-being in Italy through research by Erica Aloè (Sapienza University of Rome), Roberta Di Stefano (Sapienza University of Rome), Marina Zannella (ISTAT), and Alessandra De Rose (Sapienza University of Rome).
️ Friday, March 27, 2026
⏰12:00-1:15PM (EDT)
Online
Registration free but required
Disreputable Care
Join us for our upcoming Working Paper Seminar with Viviana Valle Gomez (UCSB). By bringing ‘anarchowhore epistemologies’ to the forefront of feminist and labor studies, we will explore the inherently caring, anti-state, and world-making practices of sex workers.
️ Thursday, March 26, 2026
⏰11:45AM-1:15PM (EDT)
Online
Registration free but required
Care, Radically
Join us for a work-in-progress presentation by Jessie Wilkerson (University of Tennessee), examining how networks of care emerge within labor conflict in Industrial Appalachia. Drawing on labor history and archival research, Care, Radically traces care as a collective and conflictual practice.
Monday, February 19, 2026
⏰ 5:00-6:30PM
Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, C106
️ Light dinner offered
Registration free but required
The Activist Intellectual Legacy of Eileen Boris
Eileen Boris’s retirement conference looks toward the future of the history of care work.
Book Conversation with James McMaster
Join us for a conversation with writer and scholar James McMaster about his new book Racial Care: On Asian American Suffering and Survival. Through this work, McMaster examines the forms of care that Asian Americans have taken up to survive racialized suffering under neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy, showing how care can both sustain life and extract it from those who perform it. At the Care Lab, Smith Warehouse, Bay 4.
Fragile Care
The Revaluing Care in the Global Economy project hosts an in-person Working Papers Seminar on Fragile Care, bringing together research on care at its most vulnerable edges—from maternal labor under conditions of health crisis to the emergent norms shaping human–machine relations. Through feminist theory, science and technology studies, and political economy, the seminar examines how care is redefined across social and technological infrastructures. Friday, February 6, 2026 · 12:00–1:30 PM ET, in person.