Caring as Method: Ethics, Design, and the Politics
The Royal Danish Academy, the PhD School
CARE, as a critical and post-structural methodology, offers an urgent and necessary lens for researching the human condition in relation to policy, environment, technology, and science. It moves beyond traditional associations with health to address issues of gender, equality, privacy, sustainability, conservation, and the infrastructures that shape our daily lives. This course explores care as a theoretical and methodological approach in architecture, design, and related fields, to rethink relationships, practices, and ethics across disciplines.
Care is not just concern; it is action, connection, and responsibility. It transforms how we think, build, relate, inhabit, behave, and sustain, urging us to imagine otherwise. Drawing on foundational works by Joan Tronto, María Puig de la Bellacasa, and Annemarie Mol, alongside architectural and design theorists, we will examine how care operates across scales, from intimate domestic spaces to urban infrastructures and planetary systems. The course particularly considers how care practices challenge dominant ideas of authorship, agency, expertise, and temporality in design processes.
PhD students will write a short essay and present on the theme of CARE in relation to their research. Valuable essays may be further developed into a scholarly publication, potentially as part of a book project.
This course is enriched by a dedicated Chair Session titled CARING for AGING, led by the course coordinators, at the European Architectural History Network (EAHN) Conference, to be held in Aarhus in 2026.
Course dates
20-22 May + 12 June, 2026.
ECTS
3
Application deadline:
10-04-2026