November 21-23 2024

Over three days in November 2024, The Care Lab hosted their first ever Festival of Care. This included practical workshops and discussions showcasing different forms of care, each with different kinds of sensory and practical skills. 

During the festival, we explored some of the following questions: What are the often-unrecognised or invisible skills of healthcare workers? How can we design spaces that care for people? Can robots actually care for, or care about, humans?

See dedicated event page here

April 20 2023

What is the relation between poetry and care? Three writers, Christopher Seymour, Rebecca Hurst and James Thompson, discussed their work in connection to health, care, and the arts. Their conversation included readings of new and old poems exploring what it means to write of and with care; how these ‘caring’ poems came into being; and the potential of poetry as a method for reflection, connection and research.

June 21 2023

Florence Nightingale once said ‘nursing is an art’. What of other roles and professions? What does care mean in everyday life, and work – and how do we practice a craft of care?

The public launch of The Care Lab was an all-day event of practical workshops and discussions hosted by a team of artists and care professionals.

September 21 2023

How can we build approaches and craft environments of care with children in multiple contexts? What are some of the ways that we can hold young people safely and support them to develop in confidence? What is it about creative activity that enables some children to express themselves differently and in meaningful ways? What do children teach adults about the craft of care?

Ruth Churchill Dower, Lucy Turner and Jenny Harris presented a demonstration workshop for adults and seminar on children, care and the arts.

October 26 2023

What would it mean if care were understood as a practice that holds aesthetic qualities? The CARE Project is developing a theoretical framework called ‘care aesthetics’ to better articulate care as embodied (something we do), crafted (something we refine) and made up of sensory experiences (something we feel). The team, led by Prof James Thompson (University of Manchester), brings together academics and practitioners in theatre and performance, nursing, psychosocial studies and care work and explores what everyday instances of artful, crafted care consist of, whether in the work of healthcare professionals, artists, people working with communities or between individuals and their material environment.

November 22 2023

In its doing and crafting, care – like art – can be ephemeral. What might it mean then to care for collections or collect carefully? How may the idea of disappearance be archived? This conversation between professionals and academics working at the intersection of care and collections. involved Care aesthetics researcher Kate Maguire-Rosier in conversation with Ann, as well as curator of South Asia gallery, Nusrat Ahmed (Manchester Museum) and memorialisation researcher, Robert Simpson (Manchester Art Gallery).

December 7 2023

The Care Lab is collaborating with artist Jenny Harris on developing and producing ‘The Long Goodbye’. Jenny is a Manchester-based freelance drama practitioner who works with diverse communities including people living with a dementia. This project profiles her mum’s journey with Alzheimer’s. Funded by the Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice scheme, she uses photography, creative writing and video to explore her changing relationship to her mum, parenthood and care.

January 18 2024

This Grief Thing is a project that invites people to think, talk and learn about grief, created by two artists from London-based arts organisation Fevered Sleep.

We're living at a time when many people find death and grief - our own grief or other people's - almost impossible to talk about. We don't know what to say, what to do, or how to act. So we stay silent, we pretend that grief doesn't exist, or we hide it. This Grief Thing pushes against this, by opening up conversations about grief and making it visible.

February 8 2024

How can care be experienced sonically? And how can sounds help us better understand caring relationships?

This was an sevening of sound-filled explorations around care led by visual and sound artist Shawn J Stephen and musician and researcher Henry McPherson.

February 14 2024

Vocal care is a fundamental part of actor training and any performance career. It is also something that many of us who don't perform could find ourselves needing to do in our daily lives. Yet, taking care of our voice might necessitate forms of technical knowledge that many of us don't have access to.

In this session, The Care Lab presented voice practitioner Robert Price talking with Dr Sarah Weston (University of Manchester) about voice and vocal care in community contexts.

March 7 2024

What happens when we consider care a craft or artful practice?

Experience our BSL, captioned and narrated recording of the event here: https://youtu.be/V1ivB1KMfBU

This panel discussion invited artists, Claire Cunningham, Seo Hye Lee and the vacuum cleaner to reflect on the care aesthetics in the disability arts context and how it might speak to how they make work. We explored intuitive acts of care which often go unnoticed such as the ways artists interact with their materials, processes and people.

The event was chaired by curator Celina Loh (In Transit Space CIC).

9 May 2024

What does a hospital sound like? How can we listen to hospitals? What do we learn from listening to hospitals and what is the relationship between listening and care?

Together with Alex de Little and Joanna Sutton-Smith, we discussed these questions and explored the practical role of listening in helping to understand, challenge and remodel healthcare spaces.

June 13 2024

Can everything be mended? And should everything be mended? How is repair an act of resistance? 

We were joined by BREAKS & JOINS in the launch of ‘Can Everything Be Mended?’, their new essay film about repair as an act of resistance.

December 5 2024

A community forum for people in Greater Manchester involved in a food-sharing project to share insights related to the Food & Care study.

The event took place at the Carlton Club (Whalley Range, Manchester).

March 20 2025

This launch event helped bring together local care scholars to foster new avenues of collaboration.

Stay tuned for updates and future events!

April 3 2025

'The Potluck', held at Platt Fields Market Garden, was a community food-sharing showcase and a research dissemination event.

We shared findings and stories from the Food & Care case study, which featured multiple people and projects involved in food-sharing across Greater Manchester.

'The Potluck' also showcased Greater Manchester's community organising in relation to food.

An online event exploring the critical relationships between food and care in activist contexts.