TAKING CARE: Care and/as Violence

Audra Mitchell (she/her, they/them) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Political Ecology at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. Mitchell’s work addresses multi-scale eco-political violence. It focuses on the knowledge and perspectives of marginalized communities. Mitchell’s work also challenges narratives of "the" future, striving towards possible futures in which plural communities can thrive.  
Mitchell’s forthcoming book, (Bio)plurality: Global Extinction and Indigenous Resistance, reframes extinction as an expression of intersecting forms of global violence, offering alternative modes of response rooted in the embrace of irreducible difference. Their newest research program explores how the norm of neurotypicality contributes to global ecological violence, and explores the contributions that Autistic and other neurodivergent ecologies can make to ecological futuring. As an Autistic and Dyspraxic scholar, Mitchell is committed to making spaces in the academy for disabled and multiply-marginalized scholars. 

Daniela Ortiz (she/her) is an artist and project developer. Through her work, Ortiz generates spaces of tension in which the concepts of nationality, racialization, social class and gender are explored in order to critically understand societal structures of inclusion and exclusion.  Her recent projects and research revolve around the issue of migration control, its links to colonialism and its management by European whit-states and societies. Ortiz also produced projects about the Peruvian upper class and its exploitative relationship with domestic workers. She gives talks and participates in discussions on Europe's migration control system and its ties to coloniality. In 2016, she was a participating artist in the Framer Framed group exhibition Voices outside the Echo Chamber: Questioning Myths, Facts and Framings of Migration. 
 
 

Elia Nurvista (she/her) explores a range of art mediums and focuses on the discourse on food. Through food, she analyses power, social, and economic inequality in this world. Using several mediums, Nurvista explores the social implications of the food system. In 2015 she initiated Bakudapan, a food study group. With Bakudapan, Nurvista has conducted cross references research on food within the socio-political-cultural context. She is also part of Struggles for Sovereignty, which aims to build lasting solidarity between groups in Indonesia and around the world who are engaged with struggles for the right to self-determination over the basic resources that our individual and collective bodies need. Nurvista was nominated for Visible award (2017) for socially engaged practices. She lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. 

Juno Salazar Parreñas (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She examines human-animal relations, environmental issues, and efforts to institutionalize justice. In 2018, she published Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Parreñas received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Women’s Studies from UC Santa Cruz, a Master’s of Philosophy from UvA and a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University. Parreñas is presently working on two research projects: Properties of Animal Retirement, which examines the question of when care becomes cruel via a global ethnographic comparison between animal sanctuaries and other sites holding geriatric animals The second project, Triage for Planetary Health, tracks the emergence of One Health and other transdisciplinary efforts to study human, animal, and environmental health. 

Claudia Augustat (she/her) holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and has been curating the South America collections at Weltmuseum Wien since 2004. From 2015 to 2017, she was in charge of revising the new permanent exhibition at Weltmuseum Wien. Augustat is the head of the project TAKING CARE: Ethnographic and World Culture Museums as Spaces of Care, co-funded by the European Union and initiated in October 2019. Her research focuses on collections from the Amazon and Tierra del Fuego, material culture and cultural memory, museums and colonialism, collaborative curatorship, and decolonising museum practice.