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Care as Method, Democracy as Struggle: Reflections on the Care and Democracy Seminar Series

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The first year of the Care and Democracy series took place from October 2024 to May 2025. You can view the full speaker line-up by downloading the series program. This year, the series continues. Find important details and dates at the end of this article.

By Zona Zarić, Fellow at the CenterĚýfor Critical Democracy Studies (AUP)

“What if democracy began not with the vote, but with the act of care?” This question, deceptively simple yet deeply disruptive, lies at the heart of the Care and Democracy seminar series, launched in 2024 at the American University of Paris. If democracy is the name we give to the fragile art of cohabitation, then care is what renders that art possible. Not by erasing conflict, but by insisting that even in dissent, we are answerable to one another.

The series was conceived in collaboration with philosopher Sandra Laugier, whose long-standing work on the ethics of care, ordinary language philosophy, and democratic pragmatism provided a conceptual anchor. The series seeks to interrogate how care—understood both as an ethical imperative and as a political practice—could serve as a diagnostic and reparative force in the face of democratic disaffection.

In a time when democratic forms are increasingly emptied of substance, and when ethical vocabularies are often instrumentalized to mask structural abandonment, the Care and Democracy seminar series emerged not as a thematic exploration, but as a deliberate act of intellectual resistance. It called for a reorientation: from the procedural to the relational, from institutional abstraction to embodied vulnerability, from the liberal fiction of autonomy to the lived realities of interdependence. This framing resonated with our students, many of whom joined from across disciplines—philosophy, psychology, international law, gender studies, history—and from across geographies. Together, we examined how care ethics reveals blind spots in dominant understandings of agency, autonomy, and citizenship. If democratic theory presumes rational, independent actors, what happens when we center interdependence, vulnerability, and the messy reality of social life?

The guiding intuition was the following: that to think democracy today without care is to remain blind to the infrastructures, affects, and labors that make democratic life possible. Care was not treated here as a euphemism for kindness, nor as a feminized residue of the private sphere. Rather, it was explored as a radical practice of attention, responsibility, and response—one that destabilizes the binaries of action/thought, autonomy/dependence, and public/private upon which modern liberal democracies have long rested. This framing draws from a lineage of feminist and critical thought that refuses to isolate care in the private or sentimental realm. For decades, mainstream political theory relegated care to the private sphere. Associated with femininity, domesticity, and emotional labor, care was considered peripheral to the “serious” business of politics. But since the 1980s, feminist philosophers such as Carol Gilligan, and Joan Tronto have challenged this dichotomy, arguing that care is not the opposite of justice, but its condition. As Tronto famously wrote in Moral Boundaries (1993), “Caring is not only a practice; it is also a perspective on human life that challenges the structures of power and exclusion.”

This intellectual reorientation forms the backbone of the Care and Democracy seminar. Hosted by AUP’s Center for Critical Democracy Studies, the series is not a passive lecture sequence, it is an experimental space—transdisciplinary, intergenerational, bilingual—in which the political is reimagined from the bottom up.

The French Trajectory of Care Ethics

The intellectual architecture of the Care and Democracy series is deeply indebted to the work of Sandra Laugier, who co-organized the seminar and whose scholarship has decisively shaped the French reception of care ethics. More than twenty years ago, Laugier introduced Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) to French readers and initiated a sustained engagement with Anglo-American feminist thought. Her writings—spanning moral philosophy, ordinary language theory, and democratic pragmatism—have played a pivotal role in relocating care from the margins of moral theory to the heart of political philosophy. At a time when French philosophy often maintained a sharp division between ethics and politics, Laugier insisted on their entanglement, foregrounding care as a moral and epistemological response to the invisibilized labor of social life.

In this sense, the series does not merely follow a transatlantic trajectory; it reflects a situated, critical elaboration of care ethics in a French republican context. Laugier’s work has consistently resisted the reduction of care to sentimentality or privatized virtue, emphasizing instead its role in shaping democratic subjectivities and public responsibilities. Her insistence on "attention," understood both in the Wittgensteinian sense of language’s attunement to the ordinary, and in a feminist sense of ethical responsiveness, has offered participants in the seminar a grammar through which to think vulnerability, dependence, and resistance together. As she writes in Le souci des autres, "care is not a minor virtue but a major political problem" (Laugier 2006). To reflect on care in France today is, in no small part, to follow the intellectual paths that Laugier helped open.

Decentering the Autonomous Subject

At the heart of these discussions lies the question of the subject. The ethics of care, as developed by Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, Eva Kittay, and more recently MarĂ­a Puig de la Bellacasa, Fiona Robinson, Vanessa Nurock and Pascale Molinier, disrupts the Enlightenment model of the sovereign individual. In its place, it offers a vision of subjectivity as fundamentally relational, situated within webs of obligation, need, and exposure. Care ethics insists that dependency is not a temporary deviation from the norm, but a constitutive condition of human life. As Tronto writes, "All of us are sometimes in need of care, and all of us have some ability to care for others."

Such a rethinking of the subject has profound democratic implications. If citizenship is grounded in relational interdependence rather than in abstract autonomy, then the very architecture of democratic institutions must be reimagined. This was a recurring theme across the series: the need to shift from proceduralist accounts of democracy toward what we might call an attentional democracy, where responsiveness to vulnerability becomes a measure of political legitimacy.

The Ethical as Political

The opening session set the tone; Sandra Laugier and I explored the stakes of taking care seriously—not as charity, not as sentiment, but as an ethical and epistemological challenge to the liberal democratic imaginary. “Care is about attention,” Laugier noted, “and attention is political. Who gets seen? Who gets heard? Who gets neglected?”

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The following interventions came from Fabienne Brugère, philosopher and author of Le sexe de la sollicitude (2008). In her talk, Que faire de nos attachements en démocratie?, Brugère challenged the ideal of the detached citizen. “Liberalism asks us to be autonomous,” she noted, “but we live our lives through attachments to others, to places, to institutions. Rather than seeing attachments as dangerous or infantilizing, we must understand them as the fabric of democratic life.” Drawing on care theorists and Spinoza, she made a compelling case for emotional, embodied, and situated citizenship, one that refuses the fantasy of the neutral, disembodied subject.

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This thread continued in Barbara Formis’ contribution, Repair, Redo, Maintain: Performance Art and the Practice of Care. A philosopher of aesthetics and performance, Formis invited us to consider care not as a noun but as a verb, as something done, often invisibly. She presented case studies of live art that staged the repetitive, quiet, and often feminized labor of care. “To care,” she argued, “is to persist in relation. To maintain, not to master. To redo, not to replace.” In a world addicted to innovation, Formis's defense of maintenance as a political act struck a chord.

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From Ethos to Structure

If care is everywhere, why is it still structurally devalued? This question was at the heart of Valentina Moro’s closing session, Politics of Care: Feminist Approaches to Communality and Neoliberalism. Building on her work in Latin America and Southern Europe, Moro showed how neoliberal reforms in health, education, eldercare, have outsourced care work to underpaid women, often racialized and migrant. “Neoliberalism dismembers the collective,” she said. “Feminist care practices stitch it back together.” Moro’s analysis echoed a key insight from Eva Feder Kittay: that dependency is not the exception but the norm. Democratic institutions must recognize this fact not only rhetorically, but structurally through public services, social guarantees, and a revaluation of what counts as “productive” labor.

Care as Labour, as Struggle

Yet care is not only a moral horizon—it is also a site of conflict. The seminars repeatedly returned to the material dimensions of care: its extraction, its invisibilization, and its uneven distribution. Who cares, and under what conditions? Which bodies are rendered available for care work, and which are protected from it? These questions, long explored by feminist sociologists like Arlie Russell Hochschild and Silvia Federici, acquired new urgency in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed and exacerbated global care inequalities.

Patricia Paperman has also articulated this perspective with particular clarity. Reflecting on two decades of scholarship in care ethics, Paperman underscores the political force of revaluing "la myriade de gestes ayant trait au soin, Ă  la comprĂ©hension et au souci des autres" as the foundation of an alternative conception of responsibility. For her, care ethics does not merely supplement established political theory but proposes an altogether different frame—one that begins not from autonomy but from entanglement. As she puts it, "les gens vulnĂ©rables n'ont rien d'exceptionnel": what distinguishes care ethics is its insistence that dependency and fragility are not marginal facts, but central truths of the human condition, systematically disavowed by dominant political imaginaries. Sociologist and longtime advocate of care as a political category, Paperman gave a haunting talk on Thinking Care in Times of War. Speaking in the context of Gaza and Ukraine, Paperman asked: how can care survive,Ěý or be reactivated,Ěý under conditions of mass violence? Drawing on decades of research in hospitals and women’s collectives, she explored how caregiving becomes a form of resistance when official structures collapse. “Care is not just what states fail to provide,” she said. “It is what communities rebuild when states abandon them.”

Pascale Molinier’s intervention in the next semester will be particularly important here. Drawing from psychoanalysis and clinical practice, she examines the psychic costs of “dirty care” (le sale boulot du care), the ambivalence of recognition, and the moral exhaustion of care workers. Molinier refuses the romanticization of care. For her, care is not simply a gift; it is also a site of psychic conflict, institutional violence, and political dispossession. Molinier will address the psychological cost of care and the ways institutions reproduce—or resist—gendered hierarchies.

This analysis resonates with the broader critique of neoliberalized care, in which the language of empathy and wellbeing is co-opted by corporate and state actors to depoliticize structural abandonment. When public services are hollowed out and care becomes a matter of personal resilience, we witness what Nancy Fraser calls the "crisis of care": a systemic mismatch between care needs and care capacities, with consequences that are social, psychic, and ecological.

AUP as a Democratic Laboratory

Throughout the series, AUP proved an ideal setting for this experimental pedagogy. The classroom became a site of collective reflection—but also of practice. Students not only attended the seminars but co-facilitated discussions, conducted interviews with speakers, and produced analytical responses. “It was the first time I felt philosophy was speaking directly to my experience,” noted one student majoring in Gender, Sexuality, and Society. Another student from Lebanon remarked: “These conversations gave me a language for things I’ve lived, but never named—burnout, obligation, responsibility, solidarity.”

This feedback affirms a core belief of the series: that the academy must not only critique the world, but also model the world it wants to build.

Toward a Care-Informed Democracy

Looking ahead, the 2025 programme will expand the scope of the conversation, with confirmed sessions featuring Carol Gilligan, Pascale Molinier, Stephen W. Sawyer, and Vanessa Nurock. These thinkers will explore new dimensions of care: from moral development to institutional trust, from psychoanalytic accounts of dependency to the politics of AI.

Stephen W. Sawyer, Director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies and co-organizer of the seminar, has played a foundational role in supporting and shaping the intellectual ethos of the series. A historian of political thought, Sawyer’s recent work explores how democracy emerges not only through high constitutional politics but also through the quotidian organization of social life. In his latest book Demos Rising: Democracy and the Popular Construction of Public Power in France, 1800–1850, Sawyer uncovers a rich, yet often overlooked, tradition of democratic administration in post-revolutionary France. Drawing on thinkers such as Sismondi, he highlights how the question of care—public provisioning, social maintenance, administrative responsiveness—was deeply embedded in nineteenth-century debates on sovereignty and collective agency. Against the dominant narrative that sees administration as a technocratic residue of state power, Sawyer insists on its democratic potential: the ability of ordinary citizens to shape public life through practices of care, solidarity, and institutional imagination. His contribution to the seminar, scheduled for the end of 2025, promises to open a new line of inquiry into the historical grammars of care and the forgotten democratic energies of social administration.

The stakes remain the same: to imagine forms of democratic life that do not begin with the fiction of separation, but with the reality of connection. In an era defined by climate collapse, post-pandemic fatigue, and authoritarian resurgence, the ethics and politics of care offer not a panacea, but a compass—a way of reorienting our collective capacities toward mutual obligation, shared vulnerability, and political courage. As Judith Butler recently reminded us, "We are not only precarious, we are in one another’s hands." That is both the peril and the promise of democracy. And that is why care—understood in its full philosophical, political, and affective complexity—must not remain at the margins of democratic theory. It must become its very condition. With this ambition in mind, the seminar series also seeks to inscribe itself durably within the French intellectual landscape—not as a passing initiative, but as a sustained space for theoretical innovation and civic reflection, capable of engaging with France’s long traditions of republicanism, moral philosophy, and democratic dissent.

Âą Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (Routledge, 1993).
Ěý² Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” New Left Review 100 (2016): 99–117.
ĚýÂł Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (Verso, 2020), p. 59.

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Care and Democracy 2025-26

The Care and Democracy seminar series will continue in the 2025–26 academic year, beginning in September. Our partnership with Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne remains central to the series. For the most up-to-date information, please consult the AUP events calendar and the Center for Critical Democracy Studies website as event registrations open. Expect the following speakers to join us in Fall 2025:

  • September 18, Sandra Laugier and Zona Zaric (University of Paris 1 PanthĂ©on-Sorbonne and The American University of Paris)
  • October 16, Carol Gilligan (New York University)
  • November 27, Stephen W. Sawyer (The American University of Paris)
  • December 11, Pascale Molinier (UniversitĂ© Sorbonne Paris Nord)