Quer-Denken - Remaking the City: How to care? - Beate Binder, Martina Klausner, Tomás Criado (HU Berlin  

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Abstract
In this Quer-Denken session we would like to inquire how the conceptual figure of care might signal different ways of engaging as anthropologists in the study or intervention of the remaking of the city. As a way to reconsider what the previous sessions might have brought, but also as a way to take the debate further, we would like to invoke the vocabulary, epistemic and political concerns around care: Can care be a mode of producing urban anthropological accounts about different forms of remaking the city? But also: Can care describe or signal particular modes in which anthropologists could, would or should engage with these particular practices? How to act as anthropologists in the face of the unknown, the ontologically fragile, the difficult to grasp, the challenging that most initiatives remaking the city bring? With what ethos, conceptual or material toolkit, and aims? Do we care by just describing, or do we need to do more than describing? What should we do? How to care, then?

Bio
Beate Binder holds a professorship for European Ethnology and Gender Studies at the Institute for European Ethnology and Center for transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University. Her main areas of research are feminist cultural anthropology; urban anthropology, anthropology of policy and law, and memory practices. She is currently PL of two research networks: Firstly, the HERA funded research group which is engaged with the history of AIDS/HIV and its related policies (EUROPACH: Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health, www.europach.eu , connected with a DFG-project on the German AIDS/HIV-movement); and secondly, the DFG-funded research group “Law – Gender – Collectivity: Processes of standardization, categorization and generating solidarity”.

Dr. Martina Klausner is a research fellow at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Currently, she is working in a research group with partners from law, gender studies, history and sociology. Her focus lies on the mobilization and implementation of anti-discrimination law. Over the last years, Martina has conducted research at the intersection of Social Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies: in the fields of mental health, psychiatry and urban care infrastructures; and the development of intelligent technologies in the medical domain. Moreover she has a high interest in collaborative (or: co-laborative) research with partners from the life sciences, legal sciences and technical sciences.

Dr. Tomás Criado is Senior Researcher at the HU Berlin’s Department of European Ethnology. He is currently working on a book project tentatively called ‘Mutual Access: Designing Careful Relations,’ unfolding different approaches to the anthropological engagement in the activist field of inclusive design: in the last years he has been studying inclusive design practices, ranging from institutional initiatives developing urban accessibility infrastructures to the collaboration in activist design collectives, as well as experimenting with pedagogical attempts at sensitising architectural professionals to design otherwise. He recently co-edited ‘Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices’ and ‘Re-learning design: Pedagogic experiments with STS in design studio courses’.