COVID-19 has put health care workers in a more than usually interesting position and the Art/Sci Salon in Toronto, Canada is ‘creatively’ addressing the old, new, and emerging stresses. From the Who Cares? events webpage (also in a February 8, 2022 notice received via email),

“Who Cares?” is a Speaker Series dedicated to fostering transdisciplinary conversations between doctors, writers, artists, and researchers on contemporary biopolitics of care and the urgent need to move towards more respectful, creative, and inclusive social practices of care in the wake of the systemic cracks made obvious by the pandemic.

About the Series

Critiques of the health care sector are certainly not new and have been put forward by workers and researchers in the medical sector and in the humanities alike. However, critique alone fails to consider the systemic issues that prevent well-meaning practitioners to make a difference. The goal of this series is to activate practical conversations between people who are already engaged in transforming the infrastructures and cultures of care but have few opportunities to speak to each other. These interdisciplinary dialogues will enable the sharing of emerging epistemologies, new material approaches and pedagogies that could take us beyond the current crisis. By engaging with the arts as research, our guests use the generative insights of poetic and artistic practices to zoom in on the crucial issues undermining holistic, dynamic and socially responsible forms of care. Furthermore, they champion transdisciplinary dialogues and multipronged approaches directed at changing the material and discursive practices of care. 

Who cares? asks the following important questions:

How do we lay the groundwork for sustainable practices of care, that is, care beyond ‘just-in-time’ interventions?

What strategies can we devise to foster genuine transdisciplinary approaches that move beyond the silo effects of specialization, address current uncritical trends towards technological delegation, and restore the centrality responsive/responsible human relations in healthcare delivery?

What practices can help ameliorate the atomizing pitfalls of turning the patient into data?

What pathways can we design to re-direct attention to long lasting care focused on a deeper understanding of the manifold relationalities between doctors, patients, communities, and the socio-environmental context?

How can the critically creative explorations of artists and writers contribute to building resilient communities of care that cultivate reciprocity, respect for the unpredictable temporalities of healing, and active listening?

How to build a capacious infrastructure of care able to address and mend the damages caused by ideologies of ultimate cure that pervade corporate approaches to healthcare funding and delivery?

The first event starts on February 14, 2022 (from the On care, beauty, and Where Things Touch webpage),

On care, beauty, and Where Things Touch

Bahar Orang (University of Toronto, Psychiatry)

Feb. 14 [2022], 10:30 am – 12-30 pm [ET]

This event will be online, please register HERE to participate. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. 

A Conversation with Bahar Orang, author of Where Things Touch, on staying attuned to the fragile intimacies of care beyond the stifling demands of institutional environments. 

This short presentation will ask questions about care that move it beyond the carceral logics of hospital settings, particularly in psychiatry. Drawing from questions raised in my first book Where Things Touch, and my work with Doctors for Defunding Police (DFDP), I hope to pose the question of how to do the work of health care differently. As the pandemic has laid bare so much violence, it becomes imperative to engage in forms of political imaginativeness that proactively ask what are the forms that care can take, and does already take, in places other than the clinic or the hospital? 

Bahar Orang is a writer and clinician scholar in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Her creative and clinical work seeks to engage with ways of imagining care beyond the carcerality that medical institutions routinely reproduce

Here’s the full programme from the Who Cares? events webpage,

Opening dialogue
February 14, 10:30-12:30 pm [ET]
On care, beauty, and Where Things Touch
Bahar Orang, University of Toronto, Psychiatry

( Online)

Keynote
Thursday March 10, 1:00-3:00 pm [ET]
Keynote and public reveal of Data meditation
Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico
independent artists, HER, She Loves Data

(Online)

Roundtables
1. Friday, March 11 – 5:00 to 7:00 pm [ET]
Beyond triage and data culture
Maria Antonia Gonzalez-Valerio, Professor of Philosophy and Literature, UNAM, Mexico City.
Sharmistha Mishra, Infectious Disease Physician and Mathematical Modeller, St Michael’s Hospital
Madhur Anand, Ecologist, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph
Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico, independent artists, HER, She Loves Data

(Online)

2. Friday, March 18 – 6:00 to 8:00 pm [ET]
Critical care and sustainable care
Suvendrini Lena, MD, Playwright and Neurologist at CAMH and Centre for Headache, Women’s College Hospital, Toronto
Adriana Ieraci, Roboticist and PhD candidate in Computer Science, Ryerson University
Lucia Gagliese – Pain Aging Lab, York University

(online)

3. Friday, March 25 – 5:00 to 7:00 pm [ET]
Building communities and technologies of care
Camille Baker, University for the Creative Arts, School of Film media and Performing Arts
Alanna Kibbe, independent artist, Toronto

(online)

Keynote Conversation
Friday, April 1, 5:00-7:00 pm [ET]
Seema Yasmin,  Director of Research and Education, Stanford Health Communication Initiative [Stanford University]
Bayo Akomolafe,  Chief Curator of The Emergence Network

(hybrid) William Doo Auditorium, 45 Willcox Street, Toronto

Exhibitions
March 24 – April 30

Alanna Kibbe – TRANSFORM: Exploring Languages of Healing. Opening March 31, 5 pm 
Canadian Language Museum, 2275 Bayview Avenue, York University Glendon Campus

(Hybrid event. Limited in person visits by appointment)

Camille Baker – INTER/her. Opening April 7, 4 pm [ET]
Ivey Library, 20 Willcox Street, New College, University of Toronto

(Hybrid event. Limited in person visits by appointment)

Closing Presentation and Interactive Session
Karolina Żyniewicz – Signs of the time, Collecting Biological Traces and Memories

Artist talk: April 8, 4:00-6:00 [ET]
Memory Collection: Apr 9, 2:00-4:00

* The format of this program and access might change with the medical situation

We wish to thank the generous support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada,  New College, the D.G. Ivey Library, and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto; the Centre for Feminist Research, Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, The Canadian Language Museum, the Departments of English and the School of Gender and Women’s Studies at York University. We also wish to thank the support of The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences

This series is co-produced in collaboration with the ArtSci Salon

Hopefully, one of those times works for you.