Conference Program

This paper investigates the “care-less university” paradigm from a feminist perspective. It argues that neo-liberal academic work is consistently built on disembodied subjects, removing bodily needs, vulnerabilities, and care responsibilities, with diverse effects along axes of gender, class, and ability.
Cuerpa in ricerca is a feminist collective that employs an embodied approach to academic research and praxis. It stems from a process of collective reflection rooted in bodily experiences and practices, in dialogue with “Western” feminist perspectives on care, social reproduction and the body (Pulcini 2020; Tronto 2015; Butler 2004; Federici 2004; Dalla Costa 1972; Del Re 2015) and decolonial feminist elaborations from the “Global South” (Segato 2023; Gago 2020; Anzaldua 1987; Lugones 2024; Bhattacharya 2017). The paper shows how university institutions tend to invisibilize the embodied dimension of academic work, especially of women and LGBTQAI+ scholars, thus affecting well-being, careers, permanence, and the possibility to establish healthy relationships with students and colleagues.
To counteract this tendency, the collective will discuss some practices of radical resistance to move from theory to praxis. We ask to rethink academia as a ‘care-full’ institution, capable of recognizing bodies as territories and territories as bodies (Cabnal 2019)– the academic body as interconnected thinking flesh. From this perspective, care emerges not as a private matter, but as an institutional responsibility and a transformative principle for an education that produces situated knowledge, citizenship, inclusion, participation, and self-determination.