Call for Co-Curation | Deadline: January 31, 2027

How do we cultivate collective care for one another while transforming ourselves within a world marked by overlapping and intensifying crises?

Organizers: Violeta Cabello and Alevgul Sorman

In a moment marked by hyperconnectivity yet deep social, ecological, and affective disconnection, care and the quality of our relations become vital concerns. Amid the fragility of today’s world, we need connections and infrastructures of care to sustain ourselves, one another, and our more-than-human worlds, and to actively build the transformative futures we seek.

However, tensions exist between the culture of productivity and practices of care. Researchers and practitioners are often expected to address ecological crises while working within rigid institutional and governance structures that prioritize productivity over well-being, constraining the transformative capacity of relational care.

Following Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care (2017, p. 66), we too understand care as sustaining everyday life, nurturing relationships across difference and uncertainty, and repairing the harms of injustice. Foregrounding care therefore invites greater accountability to the people, places, and more-than-human relations we continually build and inhabit. It asks how we might cultivate humility, reciprocity, courage, and kindness, not as personal virtues alone, but as core relational politics of organizing within communities, research practice, institutional life, and the everyday relations through which knowledge is produced.

Care also involves engaging in difficult conversations. Embodied practices challenge romanticized notions of care that treat unequal power, conflicting expectations, and political tensions as barriers. Instead, navigating these tensions is central to what care means in practice.

We envision care as a transformative ethos that helps connect personal, collective, political, and systemic change. An ethos of care is already inspiring new transdisciplinary approaches, drawing attention to how transformation happens not only through project outcomes but also through the relational dimensions of knowledge creation, processes, and structures.

As part of the cultivation intention during the first two days of TC27, Transformative Caring brings these questions into a co-curated inquiry developed with the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3). The 1.5-day workshop will explore emerging relational practices of care in transdisciplinary research through questions such as:

• How can we cultivate situated practices of repair from within to foster ecological and collective recovery?
• What is the role of the body, our emotions, our senses, and our capacities in transformation work?
• How can we build trust amid tension, ambiguity, and political differences?
• How can we work with tensions, practices, and possibilities within organizations in a care-full manner?

An invitation to co-curate

This is not a typical call for papers, but an open process for collective inquiry.

We invite researchers, philosophers, artists, practitioners, activists, policymakers, and others interested in transformative caring to propose ideas for two-hour workshop sessions that can be developed collaboratively as part of the wider Transformative Caring inquiry.

Contributions should use creative and participatory formats, including but not limited to:

• Artistic inquiries into more-than-human and multibeing worlds: Experiencing processes of relationality with other beings.
• Embodied practices of inner and outer care: Exploring feminist politics, situated knowledges, and relational interdependence.
• Collective imagination and reconfiguring justice: Exploring marginalization and inequalities while cultivating joy, desire, solidarity, coalition-building, repair, and hope.
• Rituals and sensory attunement: Engaging the imaginative capacities of our bodies to sense, experience, and respond to changing climates.
• Conflict transformation and depolarization experiments: Creating spaces for engaging with tensions, navigating differences, and exploring possibilities for collective transformation.

The Participatory Processes and Care Group at BC3 will facilitate a collaborative process with contributors from early 2027 until the conference to collectively develop the inquiry’s narrative and workshop design. Through this process, we will refine our questions, determine the workshop formats, and decide together how to share our creations with the wider Transformations Community.

Contributions to Transformative Caring also enter the shared TC27 program during Resonance (October 13–14), extending the inquiry into collective care across the wider conference ecology.

Transformative Caring is one of seven contribution formats within TC27. For an overview of the conference program, other ways to participate, and general submission information, see the TC27 Call for Contributions.

Here’s the Transformative Caring co-creation timeline.

• January 31, 2027: Deadline for idea contributions, aligned with the general TC27 Call for Contributions.
• February–March 2027: Thematic clustering of submitted ideas by the Participatory Processes and Care group at BC3.
• April 2027 (1.5 hours): First collective session with contributors to refine ideas, questions, and the inquiry’s narrative, and establish transdisciplinary teams to co-curate sessions.
• May–August 2027: Teams co-curate their session content and facilitation.
• September 2027 (1.5 hours): Second collective session to bring the sessions together and finalize the workshop design.
• October 11–12, 2027: Transformative Caring workshop during TC27 Cultivation, followed by contributions to the shared program during the Resonance program, October 13–14.

Transformative Caring is part of TC27: Practice in Motion, October 11–14, 2027, Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain.