The Doyle Engaging Difference Program - Georgetown University

The authors of the recently published The Care Manifesto (2020) open their essay with the statement that “Our world is one in which carelessness reigns” (6). While care occupies a central place in the organization of societies, the practice of caring has historically and culturally been made invisible, undervalued, and relegated to women and minorities—more generally to economically vulnerable populations—within a capitalist, colonialist, and extractivist world economy. By tracing the multiple dynamics of caring along issues of gender, race, class, and ecology, Caring in Crisis (FREN 465) questions the relations of power and structures of inequality that the perspective of care reveals. This course also encourages students to sketch caring imaginaries in light of past examples, present realities, and future possibilities of expansive practices of caring. We will analyze the ways in which text and image help reflect on a large array of manifestations of care, focusing on caring relationships and their asymmetric distribution, as well as affective and material importance. We will explore these multiple aspects of caring in a variety of contexts pertaining to the French-speaking world, in particular the way they are represented in literature, cinema, and visual arts from hexagonal France, Guadeloupe, Haiti, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This course is taught by Jennifer Boum Make as a Doyle Seminar in spring 2023.