Pragya Dev, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Roorkee, India 

Binod Mishra, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Roorkee, India

Care can be understood as a situation-based variable with multitudes of meanings. With its initial theoretical footing in western feminist thought, care pervades defined epistemic boundaries; it is fundamentally relational, philosophical, and practical at the same time. We care for things, we care for people, we care for the tangible and intangible. It can be a necessity, a commodity, or even an imposition and yet the limited understanding of care relegates it as a form of dependency. This leads us to a series of structuring questions: Do we care about care itself? Is ethics of care different from caring itself? If yes, why are we not talking about it? More importantly, who decides what and how much to care about something?

This panel invites papers that explore the fictional/biographical/autobiographical accounts from Global South around social care while addressing some of the above-mentioned questions. Global South’s exposure to western ways (allopathic medicine) of cure and care co-exist with indigenous remedies and the relationship of the two is diverse and dynamic. Therefore, this panel, at length, seeks to explore and unwind the overlapping systems of social care and address the fatigue and challenges of providing social care. Some of the possible themes of this panel are (but not limited to):

• Cure to Care/Care to Cure
• Self-care amidst Social Care
• Gendering of Social Care
• Masculine Care vs Feminine Care
• Medicalisation of Care
• Autopathography
• Home as Hospital/Hospital as Home