An edited collection of essays: Amanda Stuart Fisher (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) and James Thompson (University of Manchester) (eds)
 
This edited collection aims to bring together a range of essays that stage an interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre and performance scholarship and research and practice in the fields of care ethics, care studies and health and social care. The book will examine the boundaries between theories of care practice and performance, re-thinking the encounter between the caregiver and cared for. Through an examination of a wide range of different care performances drawn from interdisciplinary and international settings, this book interrogates how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring, careless or careful and correlatively how care can be conceptualised as artful, aesthetic, authentic  or even ‘fake’ and ‘staged’. Through a dialogic engagement between care and performance, the book considers how the field of performance can be challenged by an examination of the difficulties of inter-human care and examines how a dialogue between performance, practitioners of care and care ethicists might foster a greater understanding of the caring encounter.
 
This call for contributions invites proposals for chapters ( 6000 words)  from academics, practitioners, artists who are working in the field of performance and theatre studies, nursing, social work, education and other disciplinary contexts who are interested in exploring the relationship between performance and care. In these proposals, we encourage authors to consider how performance and care operate together within their research and how this might offer new ways of understanding the relation between performance and care. While we are interested in a wide range of different articulations of care, we are particularly interested in essays that draw on performance to offer a renewed engagement with the field of care ethics as developed by feminist care ethicists such as Nel Noddings  (1986) Carol Gilligan (1982), Eva Kittay (1991), Joan Tronto (1993), Virginia Held (1993).
 
We welcome proposals that address a wide range of different perspectives and areas of interest and in particular are interested in essays that address some of the following questions:

• How does performance offer new ways of understanding the caring encounter?
• How do the concepts of care and justice challenge contemporary performance practice and vice versa?
• How might an aesthetics of care redefine performance or the caring encounter in a social or health setting?
• Can performance re-imagine the relationship between the carer and the cared-for?
• How might performance offer a critical perspective on the politics of care?
• To what extent can performance enhance the quality of care provided in health and social care settings?

 
Abstracts (500 words) should clearly indicate how performance and care will be positioned within the proposed essay, please also submit a short biography (100 words)
 
Please submit abstracts email to  Amanda.stuartfisher@cssd.ac.uk by 5pm 7^th April 2017.