Across domains of socio-cultural life ranging from kinship, to education, law, magic, religion, medicine, and the preservation of cultural heritage, written artefacts – from birthday cards to journals, doctors’ notes, and prayer books – are centrally involved in a variety of practices by which humans care for others, for themselves, and for their environments. Written artefacts are often among the tools by which care is managed, administered, conveyed, or received. And they can also be themselves recipients or even agents of care, as when written artefacts are collected, stored, and preserved for later use or for the benefit of future generations. Written artefacts both shape and are shaped by care practices. What roles have they played and what roles may they play in the organisation, performance, and valuing of care across a range of historical and cultural contexts? How have the practices by which written artefacts are themselves cared for – selected, protected, and mended – been influenced by the understandings and practices of care existing across these different contexts? In whose care are written artefacts left, for whose care are they kept?

Care, as a social capacity and as the activity by which we maintain the world in which we live, has long been a focus of feminist work in a range of disciplines, from philosophy to literature, history, the social sciences, and psychology. Care takes different shapes in different social and cultural contexts and at different times and can be given and received with different dispositions and to different ends. Recurrent across contexts, however, is the fact that care practices and the understandings of care and carers that underpin them are as key to sociality and the thriving of human communities as they are to the production and reproduction of social hierarchies, divisions, and exclusions – particularly gendered and racialised ones. As feminist scholars and others who build on their work show, different ways of organising and valuing care will make all the difference between exploitative and just societies, unsustainable and sustaining communities.

Given the connection between care practices and on the one hand the (re)production of social hierarchies and on the other hand social and political change, in exploring written artefacts of care, as we may dub written artefacts that are involved in care practices or that become the object of dedicated care efforts, this lecture series opens up a new angle from which to explore social hierarchies and (in)equalities and, in the process, further aspects of written artefacts’ own social and material lives.

Reflecting the broad range of disciplines represented in the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts”, the lectures in the series combine approaches from the humanities and natural and computer sciences and present written artefacts and care practices from a variety of regional, cultural, and historical contexts.

This series comprises lectures in English and German.