"Who Cares?" symposium for HDRs, supervisors, and researchers

Who Cares?

The 2026 Institute for Culture and Society and SoSS Caring Futures symposium for HDR candidates, supervisors, and researchers uses the provocation of “Who Cares?” as a call to explore and examine care as the basis for forms of prefigurative politics that recognise and build already-caring worlds through our research and scholarship.

Through a range of formats and sessions, the symposium will provide a space for us to explore how care is theorised and why this matters; the realities, practices, and opportunities of care-full research; and, ways of putting care into practice to help create the communities, infrastructures, and ecologies we need.

Rather than romaticising or valorising care, we will step into its messy, gritty, awful, exhausting, wondrous, mundane, and transformative potential.

The symposium starts from the assumption that we all care, and that such care is what drives our work. However, issues such as: whether we have the capacity to care in the ways needed; whether caring labour and environmental responsibility is distributed equitably; or, whether we are working for various forms of caring worlds against institutional, social, and economic systems that often neglect or actively damage people, communities, and environments, are all open to interrogation. These questions provide a basis for us to think together to about how we can make things otherwise.

Acknowledging the forms of care for and by Country that have taken place for millennia on the unceded lands on which the symposium takes place, the event seeks to articulate practices, politics, and spaces of care that recognise the relationality and interdependence of human and more-than-human life. It aims to learn from, strengthen, and build upon the already-caring worlds in which we are already embedded.

The symposium will include an opening keynote by returning visiting scholar Professor Elisa Loncon, Mapuche Elder, linguist, politician, and First Peoples’ rights activist, discussing her forthcoming book, Azmapu: A Mapuche Philosophy of Care.

The event will be located in rooms PC-01.7.39A/PC-01.7.39B. located on the level 7 of The Western Sydney University Parramatta City Campus (169 Macquarie street, Parramatta 2150).

This event is catered, so we kindly ask that you register for in-person attendance only if you are confident you will be able to attend.

Please note that only selected keynote speeches and presentations will be available online.