Reimagining Care Ethics in Aging Communities: A Pop-Up Performance Lecture

Across Canada, care work is in crisis. Alongside tragedies of unmet care needs and exhausted care workers multiply, inequities of gender, race, class and immigration status are playing out, too. To respond to these issues, this lecture asks: What are the limits to women’s care? What happens when they reach their limits? 

In this presentation, Dr. Janna Klostermann, PhD, will share how her research enacts a “counter politics of care” approach centred on telling, eliciting, and tending to untold or lesser-told stories of care. Through this work, she engages her own and others’ counter stories — of reaching our limits, crossing ethical lines, and stepping back from paid or unpaid care work roles — to spark new conversations about care ethics in aging communities. 

Weaving approaches from the arts, humanities and interpretive sociology, this pop-up performance lecture will rethink gendered power relations, question dominant tropes around care, and open possibilities for more equitable, emancipatory futures.