Caring as Method: Ethics, Design, and the Politics

Care today is a field of inquiry across many disciplines. Caring as Method is a PhD course that asks what happens when care is not only what we research, but also the very way we conduct research. Care becomes a practice of action, relation, and responsibility that reshapes how we think, build, inhabit, and understand the world.

The course explores care across bodies, built environments, infrastructures, and ecological systems. Rather than treating these as separate domains, it examines how care can function as a methodological orientation that reshapes research, practice, and knowledge production across scales.

It draws on key texts by Joan Tronto, Annemarie Mol, María Puig de la Bellacasa, and Donna Haraway, among others, and brings together international researchers across anthropology, political theory, landscape architecture, and environmental humanities.

The course brought together 26 PhD students from universities and academies across Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Greenland, creating an interdisciplinary environment for exploring care across architecture, design, anthropology, environmental studies, engineering, and the social sciences. 

The course was hosted by the Royal Danish Academy’s PhD School.