Past Events
Explore all our past events!
Seminars
Seminar Series
Working Papers Seminar Series 2025-2026
Check out our 2025-2026 WPS series. Brought to you with generous support from Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI).
Working Papers Seminar Series 2024-2025
Check out our 2024-2025 WPS series. Brought to you with generous support from a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant.
Working Papers Seminar Series 2022-2023
Check out our 2022-2023 WPS series. Brought to you with generous support from Duke Humanities Unbounded.
All Seminars
Care and Territory
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
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
Care in Practice
Care in Practice Series
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.
All Care in Practice Events
Everyday Ecologies: Working with Soil Time
A conversation and an opportunity to get up close to the living (and dying) post-plantation soils at the Duke Campus Farm, and to think together about the limits of repair. We’ll read an article by Anna Krzywoszynska and learn practical techniques for cultivating the Piedmont’s notoriously heavy clay soils.
️ Saturday, April 25, 2026
10:00AM-12:00PM
Duke Campus Farm
Light breakfast included
Registration is free but required
Breakdown: Thinking and Making Compost Together
This session centers compost as both material process and theoretical problem, exploring decay, waste, labor, and transformation through collective compost-making and discussion.
️ Saturday, March 28, 2026
10:00AM-12:00PM
Duke Campus Farm
Light breakfast included
Registration is free but required
Cultured: Edible Experiments with More-than-Human Worlds
A conversation on the intimate, interspecies connections made possible by the everyday work of fermentation, in a workshop bringing science, critical theory, and community together. Participants will work co-create living kombucha or sauerkraut ferments to bring home.
️ Saturday, February 21, 2026
10:00AM-12:00PM
Duke Campus Farm
Light breakfast included
Registration is free but required
Care Conversations
Care Conversation Series
Care Conversations Series 2025-2026: New Books
The Care Conversations Series invites leading scholars to discuss new books that reframe care across labor, gender, race, disability, and social justice. Each event pairs the author with a Duke interlocutor for cross-disciplinary dialogue. The Fall 2025 series will take place in Bay 4, Smith Warehouse, and is co-sponsored by the Revaluing Care Lab and campus partners.
Care Conversations Series 2021-2022: Visualizing Care
Making care more visible and defamiliarizing the naturalized representations of care. Cycle of Workshops funded by Duke Humanities Unbounded from Spring 2021 to Spring 2022
Care Conversations Series 2020-2021: Care Across the Board
Between 2020 and 2021, we organized a series of public online conversations focused on care. Topics varied and we examined issues such as post-work, queer kinships, vaccine hesitancy, global labor standards
All Care Conversations
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
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.
Book Conversation with Jina B. Kim
Join us for a conversation with writer and scholar Jina Kim (Smith College) about her new book Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure in Crip-of-Color Writing (Duke University Press). Through this work, Kim reimagines care as a practice of survival, refusal, and collective world-building across disabled, queer, and racialized communities.
Talks
All Talks
Gender History in the Time of Gender Ideology
We invite you to the annual Anne Firor Scott Lecture in Women’s and Gender History!
Thursday, March 19, 2026
5:00-6:30PM
Pink Parlor, East Duke Building
Light dinner offered
Registration free but required
Durba Mitra: Seminar & Talk
Feminist historian Durba Mitra will give a talk on “Protest as Care” and present during a seminar her manuscript in progress “The Future That Was: Feminist Thought in Decolonizing World”
Nancy Folbre: Seminar & Talk
Nancy Folbre will give a seminar on her manuscript-in-progress “Accounting for Care,” as well as public talk, entitled “Valuing Care: Time, Money, and Capabilities.” Both events will be in person at the Revaluing Care Lab at the FHI in Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, C106.
Conferences
All Conferences
Fourth Global Carework Summit: “Histories and Futures of Care” (2025)
5-7 June 2025, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
Cuarto Encuentro Global de Trabajo de Cuidado: “Historias y futuros del cuidado” (2025)
Desde el 5 al 7 de junio, 2025. Universidad de Duke, Durham, Carolina del Norte
“Contesting Care” Conference (2021)
Conference organized by Duke University & University of Exeter on June 30 and July 1 2021