Blurring Boundaries. Rethinking Gender and Care. Augsburg, March 13-15th, 2019

At present, Western societies are undergoing multiple processes of profound change. Globalization, economization and neo-liberalism transform formerly nationally organized industrial societies into markets within a highly interdependent global economy. A transformation or dismantling of the Western welfare state can be observed. Simultaneously, a growing individualization of lifestyles and an increasing privatization of responsibilities entail an ongoing erosion of traditional (and often invisible) care networks. New employment patterns, pluralized family forms, changing gender roles, altered conceptions of maternity and paternity, changed family care net- works and the professionalization of hitherto rather privately organized care practices make it necessary to rethink care and its social organization.

Such dynamics challenge the (traditional, but still influential) gendered respectively fe-minized nature and notion of care. Today, care is not a female „labor of love" anymore, invisibly done in the private sphere of the family. Care has become a subject of struggle – not only in everyday life (when families and other care networks desperately try to meet the care receivers' existential human needs), but also in the political sphere (where solutions for the "care crisis" are urgently sought) and finally in public discourse (where shortcomings in the field of care are increasingly addressed). In sum, care can be regarded as the focal point of many (allegedly) controversial social processes whose color spectrum and gender implications shall be illuminated by the conference.

Core questions are:

• Private care arrangements between family care and new caring communities
• Professional care work between professionalization, precarity, and voluntary work
• Care between discourse and everyday practices
• Care and economy
• Care and temporality
• Care beyond humanity
• Struggling for care
• Care and Ethics
• Transforming care systems

Keynotes: Mascha Madörin, Switzerland / Fiona Robinson, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada / Gabriele Winker, Technische Universität Hamburg, Germany

Conference languages are German/English.