Public Lecture Emma Dowling: Being a Researcher in the 21st Century: What’s Care Got To Do With It?

As a societal care crisis intensifies, universities are arguably facing their own care crisis, in which the relationship between intrinsic motivation, ethico-political commitment and professionalism is being redrawn. In her keynote, Emma Dowling will reflect what it means to be a researcher today through the lens of a feminist critique of care: From taking experience seriously and bringing invisibilities into view, to investigating structural interdependencies across established boundaries and taking seriously the link between knowledge production and the power to act. In conclusion Dowling will discuss the practical implications of such endeavours in the present moment and under the given conditions and divisions of academic labour.

Emma Dowling is Associate Professor of Sociology and Deputy Director of Doctoral Studies in Social Science at the University of Vienna. Her research has focussed on the dynamics of crisis and change in welfare and social care systems, political economies of service work and the effects of austerity and financialisation on social reproduction. Her book The Care Crisis – What Caused It and How Can We End It? was published by Verso in 2021.