Take Care: Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Workshop

Thursday 28 August, 5.15pm-6.30pm

Room: Oculus 1.09

What does it mean to take care - of others, of ourselves, of our research, and of the worlds we inhabit? In today’s increasingly precarious academic and artistic landscapes, care is not just an ethic, but a site of deep struggle, a mode of survival, a form of solidarity, a refusal of disposability, a strategy for collective healing, and a practice of resistance. It is something we extend, receive, perform, withhold, negotiate, and sometimes can only long for. It shows up in the ways we hold space for one another, in the silences of institutional neglect, in our day-to-day rhythms of rest and refusal, and in the improvised choreographies of everyday sustenance. Care, as we see and experience it, is also shaped by context: by race, class, caste, gender, geography, and is often distributed unevenly. It is both structural and intimate; it is both personal and yet, deeply political.

This year’s Theatre and Performance Research Association’s PGR and ECR session invites you to take time and care to enter a creative, collaborative, and a critical exploration of care as it unfolds through our research, artistic and academic practices, and our everyday lives, especially within the precarious conditions that shape the institutions that hold us.

This will be a hybrid session. We will begin with a short collective creative facilitation, drawing from our own practices to initiate conversations on, and imaginations of, care as both an embodied and conceptual practice of resistance. We then move into four facilitated breakout discussions, each looking into different dimensions of care, its need, its presence and its absence in relation to our research. The breakout groups include:

● Balancing Care and Research: For those navigating the challenges of day-to-day caregiving, whether for children, parents, partners, or friends, while holding space for research, teaching and practice.

● Decolonising Care: Reimagining care beyond colonial logics of extraction and productivity, rooted instead in reciprocity and resistance.

● Ecologies of Care: Thinking through the different webs of relationality that connect us and how processes of collective imagination can articulate new pathways of care, sustainability, and resilience.

● Care: Exploring the withholding, removal, or strategic absence of care. From institutional neglect to everyday precarities - lost funding, jobs, sudden relocations, invisible labour, we ask: what does it mean to survive and resist in spaces where care is not a given, but has to be demanded, fought for, or furtively snatched?

Together, we hope to hold space for thinking, moving, and imagining differently with care. We warmly welcome PGRs and ECRs from across performance disciplines to join us.