International Care Aesthetics Network

In February 2026, the first international gathering took place (online) for scholars, practitioners, artists and activists who see care and its aesthetic practices at the core of what they do. The event was co-organised by The Care Lab and Tom Maasen, a care aesthetics scholar and friend based in Leyden, NL.
We are in discussion about what the purpose of this network should be, and what we can do next.

The Learning Disability Art of Care

We are excited to be collaborating on a Wellcome Trust funded research project, led by Bojana Srdanovic.
People with learning disabilities continue to experience significant health inequalities and marginalisation in health research. Recognising that, in response to both their marginalisation and the demands of their creative practice, learning-disabled actors have developed resistant, critical and disability-informed care practices, the project the Learning Disability Art of Care centres actors from the theatre company Hijinx to develop a novel movement-based methodology to investigate care as an embodied practice.
The project the Learning Disability Art of care is scheduled to begin in September 2026, and will be supported by a Research Leadership Group including clinicians, actors and researchers with and without learning disabilities.

An aesthetics of solidarity

The Care Lab is part of a 3 year research project (2025-2028) led by Bicentenary Fellow and co-director Reka Polonyi.
The work will be investigating the aesthetic, embodied and relational aspects of everyday gestures of solidarity within grassroots, community organising in Europe, in response to the rise of the far right.
The term solidarity has become a powerful ‘buzzword’ in public rhetoric, yet remains under-theorised, with limited defining parameters.
The research develops a theoretical framework of solidarity that examines its everyday practices through performance and the emerging field of care aesthetics, to re-examine how ‘micro’ performances of solidarity are practiced through collective care. It calls for a timely engagement with solidarity: how it is performed, who it’s for, and the relevance of its audience.
The study establishes the relation between a politics and an aesthetics of solidarity by answering the following: in a landscape that often favours public affirmations of solidarity, what does it mean to express solidarity differently? What does everyday solidarity reveal, when experienced as a political performance in daily life?
For more information or to follow starting developments, please see Reka’s academic profiles [here] and on [Linkedin.]

Neurodivergent families’ care as collaborative artwork

Artist and researcher Sophie Dixon and her son Fred were invited by the Care Lab to design a creative project for neurodivergent families. Together, they hosted a series of playful, family-centred workshops exploring the question: What if the ways neurodivergent families care for each other every day could become collaborative artworks?
You can read more about Sophie and Fred's work together [here.]

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Our Long Goodbye

Jenny Harris is touring Our Long Goodbye to four venues in the North West. It is an exhibition of photos, films and creative writing that centres around Jenny and her Mum Vivien’s journey with Alzheimer’s. Jenny uses photography, creative writing and video to explore her changing relationship to her mum, parenthood and care.
“Mum moved into a care home, and then Covid happened, and suddenlyI couldn’t be with her. So, I started taking photos.”
This glimpse into her and her Mum’s experience hopes to open up conversations about dementia for people affected by it and consider how we care for the people we love and make art about challenging subjects.
Jenny Harris is a drama practitioner based in Manchester who works with groups of all ages and abilities using drama and storytelling to promote well-being. To find out more about her Our Long Goodbye, visit the website here.

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Ants in Your Pants

How do we care for people who are often told they have ‘too much energy’? What does it look like when people respond in ways that acknowledge and recognise the ants in their pants?
Rosheen, a Manchester-based freelance drama practitioner and community organiser, led a series of collaborative workshops that explored these questions, through the means of written testimonies and multimedia artforms.
These were exhibited at the Longsight Community Arts Centre, 2025.

The Care Aesthetics Research Project

The Care Lab is partnered with The Care Aesthetics Research Exploration (CARE) project which is a three-year, Arts & Humanities Research Council funded project, led by a team of theatre and nursing academics and practitioners at the University of Manchester and the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, in partnership with Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust, and Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust.
The project explores care as craft or as an artful practice. Moments of care, then, demonstrate embodied, sensory and practical skills – the touch of a hand, holding the other’s gaze, a modified tone of voice. These are often felt as being done ‘intuitively’ by health, social care and arts professionals, and so often become invisible when doing care work.
The project team includes James Thompson (PI), Elise Imray Papineau and Réka Polonyi (Postdoctoral Research Associates), Jenny Harris (Lead Artist), as well as:
Professor John Keady (CoI) – Professor of Older People’s Mental Health, Division of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, University of Manchester;
Dr Jackie Kindell (CoI) – Lecturer, University of Manchester and recent Head of Allied Health Professionals and Social Workers, Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust;
Caroline Weimar – homecare worker and co-researcher (London);
Dr Kerry Harman (CoI) – Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychosocial Studies, University of London, Birkbeck;
And up until last year, intern Chloe Bradwell, dementia scholar and circus artist.

Beautiful Care

What happens when you ask care workers what is beautiful about their work?
Beautiful Care is a project that works with their stories in response to this question to produce verbatim performances that are then performed by careworkers to their colleagues and their wider communities.
Beautiful Care is led by Jenny Harris, Luke Tanner and James Thompson and has resulted in two performance pieces to date - one for an audience in the Whitworth Art Gallery and one for Bolton Cares staff.
“I love my job.
I learn something new every day.
I go home with a smile on my face.
I love all the stories.”
(words collected from a care worker working at Bolton Cares.)