Across Art and Care: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Practices

July 23-24, 2026

Luke Stalley, UZH

Hanna Sipos, UNIBAS

Prof. Jeanette Pols, University of Amsterdam

This workshop explores the practice of valuation at the intersection of art and care, attending to how value is enacted through aesthetic, ethical, and affective engagements with the world in increasingly imperilled societies. Taking both care and creation as world-making interventions, it brings together anthropological debates on care, valuation, and art to explore how value emerges: from the mundane gestures of everyday life to the curation of highly formalized settings, be it arranging a living room, orchestrating a medical procedure, crafting a text, or caring for a threatened landscape.

Across the ethnographic traditions of anthropology and science and technology studies, care has become a generative concept for scholarly inquiry and interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing on Joan Tronto's relational notion of an ethics of care (1998), researchers have conceptualized care as a distinctive, situated logic for ordering material-semiotic relations in practice (Mol 2008). Others have foregrounded the critical, ambivalent, and non-innocent aspects of care as a speculative ethical-affective commitment and political field of activity consequential to making livable worlds possible (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). At the same time, anthropological engagements with art-making have emphasized its generative and agentive capacities: from Gell's (1999) theorization of artworks as 'technologies of enchantment,' to Rogers' (2022) framing of artistic work as an epistemic labor reshaping scientific and social knowledge. Such work, including Ingold's (2022) notion of 'knowing from the inside,' encourages us to attend to crafting as a material, relational, situated form of inquiry in its own right. 

Threading through attention to care and craft are questions of value. Graeber (2013) has argued that values hold different worlds together, and though burdened with economic connotations, valuation is foregrounded in the above literatures as a normative, sensory, and affective activity - a practice of making things matter. In bringing care and craft into the same frame, this workshop seeks to engage with contemporary theorizations of ethics and aesthetics that situate these not within modernist traditions of value but in the everyday practices of care (e.g. Pols 2023, Sehgal & Wilkie 2025, Saito 2022). As Strathern (2014) suggests, an aesthetic anthropology attends to creative work "in the double sense of purposive, relational activity and its object in some kind of sensory intervention in the way people respond to the world." Such an attention shifts our engagement to the sensory, to form, the power to affect and be affected, and to situated notions of everyday 'goodness' at work between the socialities and materialities that participate in crafting livable futures.

The workshop takes such notions as sensitizing concepts for ethnography inquiry - terms that attune us to how values emerge through practice. It brings these terms into dialogue through a common frame of considering how value and its politics is not only assigned but also created, maintained, and contested through embodied practices of creation. These practices raise broader political questions, concerning, for instance, matters of responsibility, legitimacy and visibility: Who and what is valued? How? To what effect? Above all, the workshop offers space to reflect on the art of care - both 'out-there' in our field encounters as well as in the methodological and theoretical sensibilities that guide what we do and what we create.

Centred on recent scholarship in the anthropology of art and care, aesthetics and ethics, the workshop invites participants to reflect on their research as a craft, and encourages a reflexive engagement with the values - the ethics and aesthetics - of ethnographic work: from the affective charge of everyday encounters (Stewart 2007), to the poetics and politics of ethnographic writing (Clifford & Marcus 1986), to the care we take in our scholarly interventions (Law 2004). Through talks, discussion, and interactive sessions, participants will engage in creative and reflective exercises. Together, we will explore how value might be approached not as an abstract category, but as a methodological sensitivity to the experiential, situated, and world-making practices that our research participates in, ethically and aesthetically.

Relevance for Students

This workshop is particularly suited to PhD students whose research engages with activities of care, maintenance, repair, creation, or design - whether in relation to health, technology, art, institutions, or the environment. Students can expect to gain insights into contemporary approaches to the ethnographic study of value through attention to care, craft and what these practices create. However, the workshop also speaks to a broader set of methodological concerns around how value is made, sensed, and contested in ethnographic practice. As such, students whose work does not explicitly address care or craft are still very welcome: the workshop is designed to support reflection on the normative, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of fieldwork, analysis, and representation - issues which are relevant across a wide range of topics and subfields. Given the emphasis on methodological reflexivity, the workshop will be especially valuable to students who have already conducted some ethnographic research or are currently working through their field materials and conceptual frameworks.

Objectives

• To bring anthropological and STS approaches to care, art, and valuation into dialogue, drawing on recent theoretical, ethnographic and collaborative work. 

• To explore anthropological sensitivities to value as a situated and embodied practice, emerging through acts of care, creation, and aesthetic engagement in diverse fields of practice.

• To reflect critically on the normative, sensory, and affective dimensions of ethnographic research, from field encounters to forms of representation.

• To develop methodological sensitivities to the ways value is enacted, maintained, and contested through research practices and relationships.

• To cultivate a reflexive practice of ethnographic craft, engaging with what it means to care for, intervene in, and represent the worlds we study.

Invited expert:

Jeanette Pols is Professor of Anthropology of Everyday Ethics at the University of Amsterdam. Trained as a philosopher and anthropologist, her current work sits at the intersection of medical anthropology and STS and focuses on the relationships between care, technology, aesthetics, and valuation in health and social life. Drawing on ethnographic research in nursing homes, long-term psychiatric care and telemedicine, she has explored how care is practiced and valued in everyday institutional settings. Her work pushes against normative definitions of good care, asking how patients, professionals, and technologies co-create meaningful forms of living together. She is widely recognized for her contributions to empirical ethics and the study of care.

Crêt-Bérard, Puidoux

Participation fee: CHF 60 

For students of the CUSO universities (Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel and Fribourg) and from the universities of Bern, Zürich, Luzern, Basel and St. Gallen, accommodation and meals are organised and covered by the CUSO doctoral program in anthropology. 

Travel expenses will be reimbursed via MyCUSO based on half-fare train ticket (2nd class) from the student's university to the place of the activity.

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