«Care, Maintenance, Decay: Ways of attending to vulnerability in a transforming world»

SEG Jahrestagung
Colloque Annuel de la SSE
Annual Meeting of the SAA

Fribourg, February 5-7, 2026

Facing the ongoing climate change, political and health crises, and societal challenges, humans react in multiple, often contradictory ways to vulnerabilities that arise. This conference aims to explore care, maintenance, and decay as relations that express and produce collective meanings around such vulnerabilities.

We will explore how the processes of social and material decay on the one hand, and care and maintenance on the other, intersect across places and times with situated cultural, political, social, and economic practices and how those shape human, material, and inter-species relationships. We encourage discussions on how care, maintenance, and decay are imbued with social, political, and cultural meanings, moral imperatives, and ethical dilemmas. Further, we welcome critical approaches that scrutinize the disruptions, power abuses, and pitfalls that these relations entail and how those link to memories, traumas, power dynamics, and social hierarchies. We also aim to pay attention to the questions of unequal access to care resources, marginalization of certain forms of knowledge and situated understandings of just and functioning care relations.