Interrupting the Care/Violence Nexus in Times of War and Peace – II

Abstract

Overcoming war demands an enormous amount of work that heavily relies on narratives and practices of care. But care and violence are not necessarily opposites. Actually, care has often been used as a means of naturalizing violence (Terry, 2017). Care is far from innocent. It has a dark side that unsettles conventional assumptions about realms such as biomedicine, humanitarianism, and peacemaking, drawing attention to asymmetrical relations in practices and sites of care (Martin, Myers, Viseu, 2015: 3). Seeking to interrupt narratives that understand care and violence as exclusive to each other, we examine instances where they operate as two sides of the same coin and are, in fact, mutually constitutive. We are interested in interrogating the violence/care nexus in contexts of war and so-called post-conflict scenarios. How do care and warfare become entangled? In what ways does care serve to make excuses for violence in war (and peace)? How to care in the midst of divergent agendas (Pérez-Bustos, et al., 2014)? What violences rely on care for their perpetration and perpetuation? What care technologies mediate violence and participate in an “ever expanding apparatus of networked warfare”? (Suchman, 2015: 8) How are practices of care a continuation of war by other means? Because peace inspires our ambitions, we also feel compelled to ask about regenerations of care towards the construction of peaceful societies. How can we, STS scholars, adhere to a politics of care that, recognizing and unraveling its links to war, makes way to imagining and enacting non-violent futures?

Chair

• Lina Beatriz Pinto Garcia, York University

Individual Presentations

• Care/full! - Diane Nelson, Duke University

• Residual Suspicions: Humanitarian Demining and the Fear of Reoccupation - Diana P Pardo Pedraza, University of California Irvine

• Ordinary Geographies of Violence and Care in “Postconflict” Colombia - Diana Ojeda, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana; Eloísa Berman, Universidad del Norte

• Melted Weapons, Poisoned Fish, and Embroidered Pañuelos: Tales of Crafts to Think with Care through Reconciliation - Natalia Quiceno Toro, Universidad de Antioquia; Isabel González Arango, Universidad de Antioquía; Tania Pérez-Bustos, National University of Colombia

Session Organizer

• Diana P Pardo Pedraza, University of California Irvine