Lynne Segal: The Politics of Care

In this special International Women’s Day event, come and join one of the most important feminists of our times, Lynne Segal, as she makes the case for a politics of care – for care to be at the heart of all aspects of contemporary life. Lynne will invite us to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, urging us to make it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.

The Collective’s book, the Care Manifesto, is a wonderful and inspiring call for us to put care at the heart of the state and the economy. A caring government must promote collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire, the authors state. This means the transformation of how we organise work through co-operatives, localism and nationalisation. It proposes the expansion of our understanding of kinship for a more 'promiscuous care'. It calls for caring places through the reclamation of public space, to make a more convivial city. It sets out an agenda for the environment, most urgent of all, putting care at the centre of our relationship to the natural world.

Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. Her books include Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism; Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men; and Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure. She co-wrote Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism with Sheila Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright.

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About the speaker

Lynne Segal

Lynne Segal is Emerita  Anniversary Professor, Psychosocial Studies, at Birkbeck, University of London.

Her many books include Is The Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism; Why Feminism: Gender, Psychology, Politics?; Making Trouble: Life and Politics; Out of Time: On The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing; Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy. As a member of The Care Collective, she is one of the authors of The Care Manifesto, published by Verso last year.

Chair

Dr Nela Smolovic Jones

Dr Nela Smolovic Jones is a Lecturer in Organisation Studies at The Open University's Department for People and Organisations. Her research focuses on the interface between gender and democratic practice, especially areas such as feminist solidarity building, democratic organising, equality at the workplace and institutional forms of gendered corruption.

Nela is also the founder and director of the Gendered Organisational Practice (GOP) research cluster, which sits within the REEF academic centre of excellence. The cluster provides a space in which feminists of any gender can share insights and knowledge from academic study and practice. The cluster also includes a gendered working bodies focus, which studies the intersections between material bodies and the workplace, including the difficulties experienced by workers who menstruate, who have gynaecological conditions such as endometriosis, PCOS and PMDD and who are going through the menopause.

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