Caring Ferociously

In recent years, the role of care within postsecondary institutions has become an increasingly central–and contested–concern, especially in the context of pedagogy. The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the surface conversations that were already percolating in this space: what forms of care are possible, or even desirable, in the context of these institutions? What is our duty of care to our students, many of whom are experiencing an unprecedented mental health crisis? Given how unevenly distributed care work is in colleges and universities, falling disproportionately on minoritized scholars, and given how readily institutions lean on the language of care to demand additional emotional labour from already overworked teachers, it can feel tempting, even potentially radical, to refuse to care. But what if we could care deeply, in a way that does not uphold the extractive neoliberal logics of late capitalism? What if there were models for care that did not comfort or aid the powerful but rather made them deeply uncomfortable? Grounded in the material concerns of working in postsecondary institutions, this talk will examine models of care ethics rooted in resistance movements, and explore how we might care ferociously, demonically, and disruptively.

Hannah McGregor (she/they) is Associate Professor and Director of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Their research focuses on the intersections of publishing and social change, with a focus on scholarly podcasting. She cohosts Material Girls, a pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand the zeitgeist, and The SpokenWeb Podcast, a collaborative research output of the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership; she is also the co-director of the Amplify Podcast Network. Their books including A Sentimental Education (WLUP 2022), Podcast or Perish: Peer Review and Knowledge Creation for the 21st century, co-authored with Lori Beckstead and Ian M. Cook (Bloomsbury 2024), and Clever Girl, a queer feminist reevaluation of Jurassic Park (ECW 2024).