UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State University Park will serve as the site for "Care Ethics Otherwise: A Conference" on June 9-10 in the Marriott Foundation Building on Penn State's University Park Campus.

Sponsored by the Rock Ethics Institute, the conference is an initiative to help foster a deeper understanding of care ethics and care theory. The conference organizers, Hil Malatino, Sarah Clark Miller and Amy McKiernan, collaborated on the event to challenge traditional paradigms and create space for the reimagining of care ethics.

The conference is co-sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts, the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Department of Philosophy, the Humanities Institute and the Bioethics Program.

"We were invited to serve as co-editors for a special issue of Essays in Philosophy focused on care ethics,” said Amy McKiernan, assistant professor of philosophy at Dickinson College and director of Ethics Across Campus and the Curriculum. “As we reflected on where care ethics has been and how it might grow, we arrived at a call for papers asking contributors to imagine ‘Care Ethics Otherwise.’ We are looking at unconventional domains and inviting reflections on care ethics from those who are regularly othered or experience themselves as 'the other.’”

The conference features notable keynote speakers Martin Manalansan, Sami Schalk, Jina B. Kim and Jess Waggoner, who are recognized for their contributions to social justice activism, feminist disability studies and intersectionality.

Schalk, Kim and Waggoner will speak on the topic of “QueerCrip Kinship and Care in Pandemic Times" at 4:30 p.m. on June 9. The session can be viewed via Zoom.

Manalansan will speak at 12:30 p.m. on June 10. The presentation, titled “The Moral Proxemics of Care: Reflections on Pandemics Past and Present,” also can viewed on Zoom.

"Care Ethics Otherwise will serve as an important opportunity for scholars to gather and consider recent, under-explored approaches to care ethics understood as both theory and practice," said Sarah Clark Miller, associate professor of philosophy, bioethics, and women's, gender, and sexuality studies and director of graduate studies in Penn State's Department of Philosophy. "In doing so, we invite scholars to reimagine what care ethics might be. Ultimately, we hope Care Ethics Otherwise will provide a generative space in which conversations envisioning the future of care ethics can unfold."

“One important aim of the conference is to challenge the narrow sense of care as rooted in white, bourgeois, heteronormative kinship norms and relationships,” said Hil Malatino. The two-day conference will offer opportunities for critical and creative conversations with students, philosophers and practitioners involved in care work. It aims to promote ongoing discussion and collaborative engagement among its attendees.