The conference "Imaginaries and Strategies for Good Care and Good Housing in Times of Transformation" will take place at Vienna University of Economics and Business from May 23rd to 24th 2024.
Please register for the conference here. You can find the full program here.
There is a separate registration for the practitioners workshop "Brücken schlagen - Gute Sorge und Gutes Wohnen zusammen denken".
Care and housing are key provisioning systems, intertwined and co-constitutive. They contribute to sustaining livelihoods and are foundational for human flourishing. Care, on the one hand, is not restricted to one’s own place of living, but shapes and is shaped by spatial relations in specific localities or transnational networks. Care and care work is provided in a specific built environment with different configurations of housing, depending on appropriate infrastructures, including buildings, retail, green and leisure facilities. Housing, on the other hand, is always entangled with care – not only for others, but also for one’s own habitation, the residential environment, and local communities. As it offers the material place for diverse reproductive activities, the care (work) taking place in the respective spaces is disarrayed when housing becomes unaffordable or precarious. In addition, how neighbourhoods are developed, and how other key provisioning systems (mobility, health, food, energy, etc.) are organised, decisively influences the capabilities of residents to give and receive care and to shape the respective environment by ‘doing housing’. Last but not least, the provision of care and housing are both closely entangled with specific society-nature relations that enable more or less reciprocal, just, and sustainable practices of doing care and housing. In the ongoing social-ecological, geopolitical, and digital transformations care and housing are decisive but contested terrains for shaping new arrangements of organizing livelihoods. As multiple crises escalate, it becomes increasingly harder to ensure human flourishing without exacerbating mechanisms of exclusion or transgressing planetary boundaries. Currently, diverse struggles unfold about reinforcing or changing existing forms of provisioning, (dis-)empowering actors – be it as residents, workers, care-receivers and givers, family members or migrants. It is, thus, urgent to identify pathways to develop and shape ongoing transformations in an inclusive and sustainable way. While profound change is unavoidable, collective actors in the 21st century have to explore new imaginaries as well as strategies to actualize such visions. This includes struggles over private and public spaces, about transforming private practices as well as forms of collective agency.
Registration
Please register for the conference via the registration-webpage by May 15th, 2024. There are no conference fees.
Please register for the practitioner workshop via the workshop-registration by May 1st, 2024.