British Art History in Practice: Roundtable on Care

This is an event for DRN members only. You can find out more about the network here.

This roundtable event intends to examine the importance of ‘care’ and ‘care-work’ as necessary practices within the institutions of British art and art history. The necessity of ‘care’ has been central to Black feminist theorising and practice. As Audre Lorde expressed in ‘A Burst of Light’, her essay on living with cancer: ‘caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare’. Care is important as anti-racist imperative and, as we learn from Lorde, necessary wherever art-historical narratives intersect with illness. How might an understanding of care change how we write histories of art and health crises, such as the AIDS crisis? How might we extend care not only towards the subjects of our histories, but our colleagues and friends in the present? How might we build lasting structures of care to challenge the demands of competition and productivity under the neoliberal university and arts industry?

Within British arts and educational institutions there is a long-overdue need for reflection, change and action. For those of us carrying out doctoral research within these sites for the production of knowledge and power, there is a renewed urgency to our work. This urgency is acutely felt when connected to questions of Britishness, race, disability and class, questions which are inherently relevant for any researcher now working in the context of a global health crisis, the renewed visibility of white supremacy and its manifestation in ‘the culture wars’. These roundtables will seek to engage with the work of researchers and artists who question British art history’s categorisations and narratives to explore the ways in which academic and arts institutions might respond to historic and contemporary injustices.

This series will provide a space for doctoral research students to explore their own subjectivities, positionalities and emotions, in order to rethink how they approach, reproduce and critique structural inequalities in their work. It will demonstrate how centring questions of access, care and pedagogy can transform British art history, its approaches and methods, its subject matter and its narratives.