FRIT Graduate Conference 2026

November 6th, 2026

Northwestern University

Keynote Speaker

Jina Kim, Smith College

Author of Care at the End of the World (2025)

CALL FOR PAPERS: WHO CARES?

Taking up care in both theory and political practice is inherently complex in a moment when ideological and identitarian differences are constantly grounds for fracturing communities. To unpack these complexities, Saidiya Hartman's provocation that “care is the antidote to violence” can push us to trace the possibilities, limits, and modalities of care, as both a force for collective survival and as a pretext for harm.

Care is both the means by which we sustain our shared existence and the mechanism through which that existence is organized and disciplined. On the one hand, in his Poetics of Relation, Edouard Glissant envisions care without the danger of universalization; as a practice of honoring difference and opacity. On the other hand, if care can nurture alternative modes of being-together, it can also function as an instrument of governance, a cloak to mask exclusion, surveillance and normalization. Feminist and Marxist critiques have underscored how care labor is devalued or instrumentalized under neoliberal and capitalist regimes of social reproduction (Nancy Fraser, Joan Tronto). Can care resist the neoliberal logic, or is it inevitably shaped by it? Or can care, as Lauren Berlant or José Esteban Muñoz argue, build new worlds for collectivized survival?

Literature plays a unique role in depicting and practicing different politics of care: writers respond, propose, and resist its different sides. By rendering visible narratives around care, what might literature as a form suggest about care for others and care for oneself? How do literature, art, and cinema render visible the tensions between care, control, repair, and violence? Going beyond addressing who cares and what do we care about, how can we examine the critical contours of care in theory and (political) practice? Perhaps our task is not to simply reject care but to expose its contradictions; to ask what forms of care might open new possibilities for living otherwise? In short, how can we attend to care’s generative potential while remaining alert to its disciplinary force?

We invite papers from graduate students from diverse fields of study and disciplines (humanities, social sciences) that can provoke us to consider care and relationality in innovative and interdisciplinary ways. Topics and areas of contributions may include but are not limited to:

• queer kinship and world-making

• migrations, postcolonial, decolonial narratives of care

• mutual aid, collective action and fugitive modes of care

• disability studies approaches to care

• politics of care work

• epistemology of care

• care in wartime and postwar narratives

• spaces of care

• state care, surveillance and the biopolitics of care

• hierarchies of care

• performances of care

• environmental, animal, and posthuman approaches to care

Submission Guidelines:

• Abstract submission by July 20th, 2026 - EXTENDED TO AUGUST 17th

Abstracts should be approximately 300 words and sent to the following address nufritconference2026@gmail.com or by completing this form

Please include a short biography (100 words)

Presentations will be in English and between 15 and 20 minutes in length

• Notice of acceptance by August 20th, 2026

For any questions please contact the organizing committee at nufritconference2026@gmail.com